![]() Simply leafing through the book to admire the breathtaking photography and the evocative visages may be all it takes to convince a reader to buy this book. However, for the interested lay reader and the experienced primatologist alike, the text by Frans de Waal is almost as compelling as the pictures." - Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute " Bonobo is a book that is enjoyable for both the eye and the mind. "This impressive coffee-table catalogue of bonobo life is worth the purchase price for Frans Lanting's remarkable photos alone. ![]() Complemented by Frans Lanting's coffee-table-quality photographs of wild and captive bonobos, the chapters cover the discovery of the bonobo (in 1929), its habitat and how it shaped the species' behavior, and the fears for the future of wild bonobos in an unstable region." - Booklist Covering studies undertaken both in captivity and in the species' natural habitat in Zaire, de Waal's riveting account compares bonobo behavior with that of the better-known chimpanzee and with humans. Yet, as Frans de Waal explains in the elegant photo-essay Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape, this is just one way in which they diverge markedly from the other chimpanzees." - New York Times "A fascinating, delightfully successful treatment of an arresting creature." - Kirkus Reviews "In many respects the book deserves recommendation. Frans de Waal, well-known from previous books on chimpanzee, human, and other mammalian societies, ensures a sound and carefully referenced scientific background, and Frans Lanting, known to the readers of National Geographic and Life, has produced remarkable photographs." - Current Anthropology "Exciting, amusing, and beautiful." - International Journal of Primatology "This wonderful book by a preeminent primatologist does much to introduce the general reader to one of our closest relatives. Any tension within a bonobo group is normally resolved by a quick orgy, in which they all have sex with one another, in all positions and combinations. ![]() Their most striking idiosyncrasy is their readiness to use sex as a social lubricant. Reviews "The bonobos are best known as the sexy chimpanzees. Is it possible that the peaceable bonobo has retained traits of our common ancestor that we find hard to recognize in ourselves? Humans share over 98 percent of their genetic material with the bonobo and the chimpanzee. Further, the bonobo's frequent, imaginative sexual contacts, along with its low reproduction rate, belie any notion that the sole natural purpose of sex is procreation. The bonobo's relatively nonviolent behavior and the tendency for females to dominate males confront the evolutionary models derived from observing the chimpanzee's male power politics, cooperative hunting, and intergroup warfare. Focusing on social organization, de Waal compares the bonobo with its better-known relative, the chimpanzee. In the first book to combine and compare data from captivity and the field, Frans de Waal, a world-renowned primatologist, and Frans Lanting, an internationally acclaimed wildlife photographer, present the most up-to-date perspective available on the bonobo. 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 remarkable primate with the curious name is challenging established views on human evolution.
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