Pat-a-Pan: Chimp-Bonobo Myth Debunked

Everyone has been told that chimps are aggressive
and bonobos are cooperative. It’s not true.

Many have heard TV documentaries and popular science shows telling us that we humans tend to be bullies like the patriarchal chimpanzees, who fight and scream at each other. We should imitate the kinder, gentler, matriarchal bonobos, the story continues: they share, they socialize, and they cooperate. Having evolved from these closest living relatives, they say, we should tune into our ‘inner bonobo’ instead of the acting out the chimp side of our nature.

This tale has just unraveled.

Bonobos and chimpanzees were not that different in the first place. They are both members of the genus Pan, in the order Primates. Chimps tend to be more robust on average, and bonobos more gracile; otherwise, differences in skin coloration are slight. They were only subdivided into separate species in 1929. The Ape Initiative website gives a typical evolutionary spiel:

Although they are two distinct species, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) share a close genetic relationship. Both bonobos and chimpanzees are more closely related to humans than either of them are to the other two species of great apes: orangutans and gorillas. In addition, they both live in highly social, multi-male, multi-female groups – called troops. Chimpanzees and bonobos use complex communicative signals from a variety of modalities – just like we do! As the closest living relatives to humans, bonobos and chimpanzees can help us better understand the evolutionary origins of our own behavior and language.

On December 4, Live Science posted an eyewitness account of an “alpha chimp” stealing an eagle’s dinner, reinforcing the usual narrative about male aggression and patriarchal privilege.

Other chimps tried to steal the carcass and begged Imba to share for around an hour. He gave some to a female chimp and consumed most of the bushbuck himself. After discarding the carcass, other chimps then went and helped themselves to the remains. Eventually, only the skull was left.

Of course, a Live Science post would not be complete without explaining what this means for human evolution:

Because chimps are one of our closest living relatives, they offer us a window into the lives of our last common ancestor, which lived around 6 to 8 million years ago, and the evolution of human behavior, Baker said.

Scavenging could have led to increasingly complex social behavior in early humans “like evolutionary stepping stones, passive to confrontational scavenging, to cooperative hunting,” he said.

Coulda-woulda-shoulda is not science. Did Baker see this happening over 6 to 8 million years? Of course not.

The Unraveling

How about some observational science? Now to the news for me, thee, and the chimpanzee:

The story was all wet.

Group-specific expressions of co-feeding tolerance in bonobos and chimpanzees preclude dichotomous species generalizations (van Leeuwen at al., iScience, 15 Dec 2023 issue). Sorry, storytellers; an observational study just unraveled the narrative about kind, gentle bonobos and mean-ol’ chimps. There’s more diversity within the groups than between them.

Bonobos are typically portrayed as more socially tolerant than chimpanzees, yet the current evidence supporting such a species-level categorization is equivocal.

Did you get that so far? The authors don’t even think they should necessarily be divided into two species. Did they find bonobos to be more socially tolerant?

Here, we used validated group-level co-feeding assays to systematically test expressions of social tolerance in sixteen groups of zoo- and sanctuary-housed bonobos and chimpanzees. We found that co-feeding tolerance substantially overlaps between the species, thus precluding categorical inference at the species level. Instead, marked differences were observed between groups, with some bonobo communities exhibiting higher social tolerance than chimpanzee communities, and vice versa.

They just said that some chimpanzee groups are more socially tolerant than some bonobo groups. Keep reading:

Moreover, considerable intergroup variation was found within species living in the same environment, which attests to Pan’s behavioral flexibility.

Now it’s time to dismantle the patriarchy part of the myth:

Lastly, chimpanzees showed more tolerance in male-skewed communities, whereas bonobos responded less pronounced to sex-ratio variation.

So what’s the bottom line?

We conclude that the pervasive dichotomy between the tolerant bonobo and the belligerent chimpanzee requires quantitative nuance, and that accurate phylogenetic tracing of (human) social behavior warrants estimations of intraspecific group variation.

Just as bonobos and chimpanzees should be reclassified as one species with intraspecific variability within and between groups, so also humans are one “race” with a great deal of variability within and between ethnic groups. No chimpanzees are closer to humans than others, and no humans are closer to chimpanzees than others.

No part of the myth, therefore supports the human evolution story. You could take any two groups of humans and find similarities and differences. Some human cultures will be more prone to violence than others, and some more peace-loving, no matter whether men or women predominate. Evolutionists have been using this chimp-bonobo myth for too long. It has nothing to do with evolution.

Apes are animals; humans are souls created within animal-like bodies suitable for fulfilling God’s purposes for people. Linnaeus classified us in the same order Primates as apes, but humans are a breed apart, unlike anything in the animal kingdom, as we all well know. Apes don’t compose symphonies or build spacecraft. We use semantic language and think in abstract symbols and languages. To inhabit the same planet, we need the similarities to eat, breathe and reproduce; the differences are stark and fundamental. Pat a Pan; hug a Homo sapiens.

Speaking of Pan, did you know the meaning of “pat-a-pan” in the Christmas song by that name? It’s an onomatopoeic word suggesting the sound a drummer makes on his drum, and “tu-re-lu-re-lu” mimics the sound a flute player makes. “Patapan” (or “Pat-a-pan”) is a French Christmas carol in Burgundian dialect, later adapted into English. It was written by Bernard de La Monnoye (1641–1728) and first published in Noël bourguignons in 1720.

The lyrics go like this (with “gay” meaning happy, merry and cheerful in the old meaning of the word). They remind us that God took on human form in order to redeem people (not apes), because only people have moral responsibility for their sins. Only people will live forever. Only people needed a Savior; that is why Christ came. Let this be a Christmas wish for all our readers.