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Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape. Frans de Waal and Frans Lanting. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 210 PP.
RANDALL L. SUSMAN
University at Stony Brook New York
Frans de Waal and Frans Lanting have joined their considerable talents to produce a beautiful and informative book on bonobos, the princely apes formerly known as pygmy chimpanzees. This beautifully illustrated volume is the fifth on bonobos to be published in the last ten years or so. I think it is now safe to pass the mantle of "unknown ape," "last ape," and "forgotten ape" to western and eastern lowland gorillas or perhaps even to the lower Guinean chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes troglodytes. But for this minor misnomer in the subtitle the authors do a lovely job of relating the latest information on the behavior and natural history of bonobos and, for good measure, the other great apes. They also provide the reader with the different evolutionary scenarios of ape and human evolution. Frans Lanting's photographs are, as usual, splendid and harmonize nicely with the text.
The authors do a good job of relating the highlights of captive studies and studies of wild bonobos over the past 25 years. Bonobos are different from chimpanzees in many fundamental ways, including group size and structure, feeding ecology, positional behavior, and dominance and sociosexual behavior. In many ways, the differences in the behavioral repertoires of bonobos and chimpanzees seem more disparate than their small differences in morphology and body size. The ecological differences of the two species may explain many of the behavioral differences observed in the...