Esake, photographed at the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2019, was rescued from a hunter who killed her mom.
Credit: Ley Uwera for NPR. Source.
Baby bonobos are so cute! Wouldn't you just love to hold one and give it a loving cuddle, and protect and care for it? And not just because it looks so human with forward-looking eyes, but because it looks so vulnerable! Just adorable! No?
But why that response rather than treating it as a threat who'll take your food and give nothing back, or even as potential food?
The answer is because we share a great deal in common with bonobos, having evolved from a common ancestor.
Just in case there a still a few Creationists left who believe that the TOE is a theory in crisis that is about to be abandoned by science, or are still under the impression that humans were given their morals by a god, and didn't evolve them as their cultures evolved, here is an article in Psychology Today by Temma Ehrenfeld, which explains how we appear to have inherited at least some of our basic morality, the kinder, nicer side, from a common ancestor with the bonobo.
Temma Ehrenfeld is an editor and journalist who writes on health and psychology. Her article is based on an article in NPR by Jon Hamilton and on the work of Tokuyama, N., Toda, K., Poiret, ML. et al. (2021), published in Scientific Reports, in which the authors described how female bonobos will adopt infants from a different social group, unlike their close relatives, the common chimpanzee, which will often kill an infant from a outside group. In other words, bonobos are altruistic, or, in human terms, kind and compassionate.
Bonobos willingly share their food with strangers and value cooperation among members of their group.
Credit: Ley Uwera for NPR. Source.
Bonobos and chimpanzees share 98.7 percent of their DNA with us and even more with each other. Human beings, who split from the bonobo and chimp lines about 5 million years ago, apparently have traits common to both species.Like other social animals, we are much stronger as a mutually interdependent group of individuals and interdependence leads naturally to altruism. However, for most mutually interdependent social species like dogs, dolphins and rats the group is often protected against strangers, even of the same species but bonobos are an exception in that they will often put care for the stranger above that of care for members of their own group. In an experiment with a cream-topped plate of fruit, if a stranger is also present, bonobos will usually share with the stranger first, then invite their neighbours to join in.
But bonobos and chimps are like the two siblings in your family who seemed destined (or determined?) to be as different from each other as possible.
Chimps are muscular, cunning, and competitive, led by alpha males who brutally attack rivals. I would argue that they are the model for today’s “toxic workplaces.”
Bonobos, more slender, are cooperative, and led by women. At Lola ya Bonobo, an enclave in the Congo, Semendua rules, though she’s not as big as many of the males. If any male challenged her, all the females would rally around her to chase him away (Hamilton, 2021).
Bonobos are generous, too: When scientists give a bonobo an alluring plate of bananas or apples, topped with cream, she’ll use a special key to let in a friend in an adjacent room, offering to share. Bonobos will even help another bonobo get food that they won’t enjoy themselves (Hamilton, 2021).
In the abstract to their 2021 open access paper, Tokuyama, N., Toda, K., Poiret, ML. et al. say:
AbstractOf course, the root of this compassionate behaviour is empathy - the ability to imagine oneself in the position of another. Many other animals have been shown to exhibit empathetic behaviour, especially after a conflict. While rarely intervening in a fight, several other species, including humans, will try to console and comfort the victims. Female bottle-nosed dolphins, for example, will swim alongside another female who has been attacked, showing support and solidarity with her. Similar behaviour has been seen in elephants, wolves, ravens, and voles as well as gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos.
Adoption, the act of taking another individual’s offspring and treating it as one’s own, is rare but widely observed in various mammal species and may increase the survival of adoptees. Adoption may also benefit adoptive mothers, for example they might care for close kin to gain indirect fitness or to learn caregiving behaviours. Here, we report two cases of a wild bonobo adopting an infant from a different social group, the first report of cross-group adoption in great apes. In one case, the adoptive mother was already a mother of two dependent offspring. In the other case, the adoptive mother was an old parous female whose own offspring had already emigrated into a different social group. The adoptive mothers provided various maternal care to the adoptees, such as carrying, grooming, nursing, and sharing food. No aggression was observed by group members towards the out-group adoptees. In both cases, adoptees had no maternal kin-relationship with their adoptive mothers. Both adoptive mothers already had experience of rearing their own offspring. Instead, these cases of adoption may have been driven by other evolutionary adaptive traits of bonobos, such as their strong attraction to infants and high tolerance towards immatures and out-group individuals.
Tokuyama, Nahoko; Toda, Kazuya; Poiret, Marie-Laure; Iyokango, Bahanande; Bakaa, Batuafe; Ishizuka, Shintaro
Two wild female bonobos adopted infants from a different social group at Wamba
Scientific Reports 11, 4967 (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-83667-2
Copyright: © 2021 The authors. Published by Springer Nature Ltd.
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
And, not surprisingly in religions designed to appeal to our basic instincts and understanding of right and wrong, most major religions include an invocation to do unto others as you would like them to do to you in a similar situation. For example, in Islam, the Qur'an says, "And do good unto your parents, and near of kin, and unto orphans, and the needy, and the neighbour from among your own people, and the neighbour who is a stranger, and the friend by your side, and the wayfarer…". In Hindu, it is said, "The guest is equivalent to God." and in Judaeo-Christianity, we have the invocation in (Deuteronomy 10:19) to "Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." (Deuteronomy 10:19) and in the parable of the Good Samaritan, the example of caring for the person fallen on misfortune.
From this study of bonobos, it is clear that religions follow basic human empathy-based morality rather than being the inspiration for it. Religions seek to reinforce the basic human behaviour that we inherited from a common ancestor from at least 5 million years ago, and created gods in our own image.
References
- Hamilton, J., (March 2021) Some Generous Apes May Help Explain The Evolution Of Human Kindness, Goats and Soda, NPR.
- Wilke C. (March 2021) Two bonobos adopted infants outside their group, marking a first for great apes. Science News.
- Tokuyama N, Toda K, Poiret M-L, Iyokango B, Bakaa B, Ishizuka S. (March 2021) Two wild female bonobos adopted infants from a different social group at Wamba. Scientific Reports.
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