Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
their handshake, their massage, and their noon martini. Sometimes, it allows them to defuse social
tension, minimize violence, and resolve conflicts over resources, the females rubbing one another's
clitorises and the males penis-fencing—hardly solutions our leaders would try.
Whereas gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans have clear places in the popular imagination,
bonobos are latecomers. Their resemblance to chimps and their home far from the coast, within
one of the Congo's most daunting landscapes, have prolonged our ignorance. Chimpanzees first ap-
peared in Western literature in the sixteenth century, orangutans in the seventeenth, and the gorilla's
name dates back to a Carthaginian who, in 500 BC, traveled Africa's West Coast and returned with
the skins of “wild men” that the locals called
gorillae
. Though records since the 1880s show apes at
the heart of the Congo basin, bonobos were not recognized as a distinct species until the twentieth
century. Yale primatologist Robert Yerkes owned a bonobo named Prince Chim in the mid-1920s
but thought he was a chimpanzee, albeit an extraordinary one. He wrote: “In all my experience as
a student of animal behavior I have never met an animal the equal of Prince Chim in approach to
physical perfection, alertness, adaptability, and agreeableness of disposition. . . . Doubtless there are
geniuses even among the anthro-poid apes.”
Bonobos were not identified as distinct from chimpanzees until the late 1920s. Harvard zo-
ologist Harold J. Coolidge Jr. wrote that he visited Tervuren, Belgium, in 1928, after a long uni-
versity expedition to collect gorilla specimens in the Belgian Congo. “I shall never forget, late one
afternoon in Tervuren, casually picking up from a storage tray what clearly looked like a juven-
ile chimp's skull from south of the Congo and finding, to my amazement, that the epiphyses were
totally fused.” This meant that, despite its size, the skull was that of an adult. He found four more
similar skulls among those of the chimpanzees and planned to write a scientific paper on the subject,
describing a new type of chimpanzee. However, two weeks later, the German anatomist Ernst Sch-
warz visited, and Henri Schouteden, the director of Tervuren's Royal Museum for Central Africa,
showed him the skulls that had interested Coolidge. “In a flash Schwarz grabbed a pencil and paper,
measured one small skull, wrote up a brief description, and named a new pygmy chimpanzee race:
Pan satyrus paniscus
,” recalled Coolidge. “He asked Schouteden to have his brief account printed
without delay in the
Revue Zoologique
of the Congo Museum. I had been taxonomically scooped.”
But reasonably enough, Schwarz had his own account: he'd been studying primates, he wrote, and
had come to Tervuren specifically to examine the skulls, a recent shipment from the Congo.
Despite not receiving credit for being the first to identify the bonobo, in 1933 Coolidge pub-
lished the paper that would establish it not as a subspecies of the chimpanzee,
Pan troglodytes
,
but as a separate species,
Pan paniscus
. Having remarked the similarities in the torso-to-limb pro-
portions of bonobos and humans, he wrote that the species, still known as the pygmy chimpanzee
despite being marginally smaller than most chimpanzees, “may approach more closely to the com-
mon ancestor of chimpanzees and man than does any living chimpanzee hitherto discovered and
described.”
In 1954, German scientists Eduard Tratz and Heinz Heck proposed that, because of its marked
differences from the chimpanzee, the pygmy chimpanzee should be classified under a different
genus. They suggested
Bonobo paniscus
, as they believed
bonobo
to be the Congolese name for the
species. Though the word
bonobo
wasn't found historically among the Bantu dialects, it may have
been a misspelling on a crate shipped from Bolobo, a town on the Congo River from which bonobos
were sent.
