Human encroachment has not turned chimpanzees and bonobos into warmongers bent on violence and infanticide as many people have theorized. The behavior comes naturally, report 30 international ...

Bonobos are well known for their peaceable relations within family groups, but there’s less scientific consensus about how much tolerance they extend to individuals outside of their core groups. A ...

Chimpanzees and bonobos are often thought to reflect two different sides of human nature—the conflict-ready chimpanzee versus the peaceful bonobo—but a new study publishing April 12 in the journal ...

Zeke also hangs upside down from man-made vines, grasping them with his feet. And that’s typical, too — for a bonobo. Findley, a zoology major at Miami, is spending her summer studying bonobo behavior ...

Within-group cooperation (i.e., among closely related individuals), is to varying degrees observed among a significant number of animal species. However, peaceful encounters and cooperation between ...

For far too long, researchers believed humans were alone in their ability to engage in a sociological concept known as joint commitment. Joint commitment is the understanding that by working together ...

We don't just have sex to reproduce—new research suggests that using sex to manage social tension could be a trait that existed in the common ancestor of humans and apes six million years ago. Humans ...

This story appears in the March 2013 issue of National Geographic magazine. In a remote forest sector of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, along the north bank of the Luo River, 50 miles by dirt ...

A new look into the private lives of chimpanzees has found that the primates settle disagreements with close friends by rubbing genitals together, a behavior previously that's commonly seen in their ...

The great apes are the closest living relatives to humans. We share over ninety-eight percent of our DNA with some species of these creatures, and it’s valuable to think of ourselves as being more ...