Bonobos are harder still to find in their native habitat and even harder to study. Because they live in an area with a long history of political unrest and violence, for decades it was impossible for primatologists to observe them in any sustained way. It’s only within the last quarter century or so, thanks to fieldworkers in Congo and others, including Parish, who study them under human care in zoos, that anyone got a handle on who and what they are. There was no bonobo gene sequencing until 2012, at which point we learned that bonobos are more closely related to humans than they are to
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