The species's most striking achievement is not tool use or warfare but sensitivity to others.
In bonobo society, females form alliances to intimidate males, sexual behavior (in virtually every partner combination) replaces aggression and serves many social functions, and unrelated groups mingle instead of fighting. The bonobo, least known of the great apes, is a female-centered, egalitarian species that has been dubbed the "make-love-not-war" primate by specialists. This article was co-authored by Christina Hvilsom from the Copenhagen Zoo.This remarkable primate with the curious name is challenging established views on human evolution.
Our future efforts will be directed towards filling those gaps and thereby aiding the global conservation of our closest relatives.
Chimpanzee and bonobo full#
Our newly generated dataset has allowed us to develop a genetic tool we can use to assign the geographical origin of chimpanzees confiscated by conservation authorities, and thus combat the illegal trade of chimpanzees.īut the full potential of these methods are limited by the resolution of the underlying sample of genetic data we have from both species, that is, how well we sampled each geographical area.ĭespite our present efforts, there are still large knowledge gaps in unexplored regions of the distributional ranges of bonobos and chimpanzees. From our collective experience in chimpanzee and bonobo genetics, we can help guide global chimpanzee conservation efforts to fight this trade. Many chimpanzees fall victim to illegal trafficking each year. We can better protect chimps if we can identify where they’re from. So it is more important than ever to for scientific collaboration to understand and protect these crucial species before they disappear. Sadly, many projections indicate that both chimpanzees and bonobos may go extinct this century. Studies have also revealed in humans a number of introgressed Neanderthal genes – that is, genetic material from one species is integrated in the genome of another – which could affect our physical appearance, as well as our susceptibility to disease. In the past ten years, leading research on the evolutionary past of modern humans, as well as our close, extinct relations – the Neanderthal and Denisovan – have shown the impact of interbreeding in our own evolutionary history. Put simply, if we want to understand how species evolved and diverged from one another, we must understand how genes move between different lineages. Gene flow between diverging species has emerged as an important aspect in the evolution of species. The genetic relationship between chimpanzees and bonobos shows striking parallels to the evolutionary history of modern humans. Goran Tomasevic/Reuters Gene flow in evolution Our next step will be to explore whether the genetic material received from bonobos has had any selective advantage in the evolution of chimpanzees.īonobos are unique to Congo. This leads us to believe that the gene mixing between bonobos and chimpanzees occurred during two different episodes – the first one, 500,000 years ago and the second one 200,000 years ago.
But only now has science been able to provide robust evidence of natural occurrences in the wild.īased on 75 complete genomes of chimpanzees and bonobos, we found that central and eastern chimpanzees share significantly more genetic material with bonobos than other chimpanzee subspecies do. We have observed from captive populations that it is still possible for the two apes to mate today, even after more than a million years as separate species. We now know that hundreds of thousands of years ago, chimpanzees and bonobos were able to mate and produce offspring, leaving a genetic mark on the animals that live in the wild today. The geographic range of bonobos ( pan paniscus) and chimpanzees.īut, as our study reveals, there is evidence of ancient genetic mixing across species boundaries.
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