Fighting, bonobo style

Females ganging up to fuck-up and shut down the I’m-bigger-than-you bullies of the world: some recent science news about bonobos once again demonstrates how it’s possible to stand up to the swinging dicks and would-be autocrats. And a second study, this time of Early Neolithic people of Central Europe, demonstrates how humans once—and, I could argue, given evidence from other archaeological sites and eras, very possibly for vast chunks of our history—behaved far more like the equality-minded bonobos than their (and our) more hierarchical, might-is-right cousins, the chimps.

Homo sapiens, that is, humans, share 99.7% of our DNA with Pan paniscus, or bonobos. We also, of course, share 99.7% of our DNA with Pan troglodytes, that is, chimps. But they are not the same 99.7%. Humans and bonobos share a set of genes that chimps do not: genes linked to the detection of social cues via scent. Which might go some way towards explaining the difference between a) bonobo and chimp approach to conflict resolution (communal action1 vs might-is-right) and b) why, although today humans seem more like chimps in our territorial wars and capitalist rapaciousness, we have been—and so therefore very possibly could be again—much more like bonobos.

Here’s the abstract of a recent Nature article (it’s open access; no excuse not to read it):

In mammals, female dominance over males is a rare phenomenon. However, recent findings indicate that even in species with sexual dimorphism biased towards males,2 females sometimes occupy high status. Here we test three main hypotheses explaining intersexual power relationships, namely the self-reinforcing effects of winning and losing conflicts, the strength of mate competition, and female coalition formation. We test these for bonobos (Pan paniscus), one of our closest living relatives, where females have high status relative to males despite male-biased size dimorphism. We compiled demographic and behavioral data of 30 years and 6 wild living communities. Our results only support predictions of the female coalition hypothesis. We found that females target males in 85% of their coalitions and that females occupy higher ranks compared to males when they form more frequent coalitions.

Basic lesson? Band together. Fight the bullies. It works. And we know it’s possible it can work for people, too, not only because I’ve, y’know, said so before,3 but also because of another relatively recent study, this time of Early Neolithic.

According to a press release from the University of Vienna, an international team of researchers, led by Pere Gelabert and Ron Pinhasi of the University of Vienna and David Reich of Harvard University, has produced the most complete set of Early Neolithic genetic data from Central Europe to date. The results of this study, just published in Nature Human Behaviour, (sadly not open access) reveal that the culture responsible for the expansion of agriculture in Central Europe 8,000 years ago showed no signs of population stratification.

As Pinhasi explains, “we report for the first time that families at the study sites of Nitra in Slovakia and Polgár-Ferenci-hát in Hungary do not differ in terms of the foods they consumed, the grave goods they were buried with, or their origins. This suggests that the people living in these Neolithic sites were not stratified on the basis of family or biological sex, and we do not detect signs of inequality, understood as differential access to resources or space“.

This is a pretty big deal because there is still a large subset of cultural talking-heads who believe that it was the advent of agriculture and therefore production of surplus that led to an inevitable change from more egalitarian hunter-gatherer communities to hierarchical, I-control-the-resources-and-therefore-you societies.4 But nothing about human behaviour is inevitable; biology is not destiny. But even if it were, we can now point to some evidence that this particular behaviour is not, in fact, part of our DNA. 5

To me the lesson is really clear: human are not destined for the kind of might-is-right, men dominate women, capitalism-is-culture most of the world has today. There’s a better way. There’s always been a better way. All we have to do is be brave and stand together. Seriously. Band together, stand together, fight together—and I mean fight; sometimes we need more than harsh words; sometimes we have to be ready to physically fuck-up and even kill the bullies of the world.

We used to do it. The bonobos still do it. So to paraphrase a paraphrase of Robbie Burns: Are you a bonobo or are you a chimp? It’s probably time to decide.

In, ah, many senses of the word. Group sex, communal sex, queer sex, sex toys… Bonobos really understand how healthy sex is, what enormous delight it provides, and how well it promotes interpersonal bonding. If I believed in reincarnation I’d want to come back as a bonobo. ︎That is, when most males are much bigger and stronger than most females. ︎And not just in this wider sense. There is a lot of data—so very, very much—about the power of women, individually, severally, and collectively, to get out from under the threat and domination of men. If you want to know more about this from a one-on-one self-defence perspective, read Always , being reissued in June. ︎Though of course it’s not the first time this has been shown. It’s just that it takes a long time and a lot of repetition to bash bad information from our heads and replace it with something more accurate. Especially when the truth clashes with the dominant paradigms of patriarchy and predatory capitalism, not to mention nationalism. People in power don’t like to feel uncomfortable. Oh, well. ︎I can’t emphasise enough how much I disagree with the biology-is-destiny crew. Just to be clear. ︎