The Bonobos

The closes you can get to being human without being human!

A project of Dimitri Madimin (concept) and Hotel(design).

Visual research based on future ideas to genetically modify a Homo Sapien and a Pan Paniscus for cosmetic reason.

About the Bonobo:


Scientific classification
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Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Primates
Family: Hominidae
Genus: Pan
Species: P.paniscus
Binomial name: Pan paniscus
Schwarz, 1929
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Female Bonobo masturbating


What is a Bonobo?

The Bonobo (Pan paniscus), until recently usually called the Pygmy Chimpanzee (and less often the Dwarf or Gracile Chimpanzee),is one of the two species comprising the chimpanzee genus, Pan. The other species in genus Pan is Pan troglodytes, or the Common Chimpanzee. Both species are chimpanzees and the term 'chimpanzee' can be used either to refer to the larger of the two species, Pan troglodytes, or to both species together. To avoid confusion, this article follows the growing trend to use "chimpanzee" to refer only to both members of the genus.

German anatomist Ernst Schwarz is credited with having discovered the Bonobo in 1928, based on his analysis of a skull in the Tervuren museum in Belgium that had been thought to have belonged to a juvenile chimpanzee. Schwarz published his findings in 1929. In 1933, American anatomist Harold Coolidge offered a more detailed description of the Bonobo, and elevated it to species status. The species is distinguished by an upright gait, a matriarchal culture, and the prominent role of sexual activity in their society.

Watch this nice BBC documentary.

This primate is mainly frugivorous, but supplements its diet with plants and sometimes small vertebrates (such as flying squirrels and infant duikers and invertebrates.

The name Bonobo appears in 1954, when Edward Tratz and Heinz Heck proposed it as a new and separate generic term for pygmy chimpanzees. Although the term has been variously reported as being a word for 'chimpanzee' or 'ancestor' in a native language, no specific language has been named. Another suggestion is that the name is a misspelling of the name of the town of Bolobo on the Congo River, which has been associated with the collection of chimps in the 1920s.

Taxonomy

The scientific name for the Bonobo is Pan paniscus. Initial genetic studies have characterised their DNA as more than 98% identical to that of Homo sapiens.More recent studies have shown that chimps are more closely related to humans than to gorillas.The most recent genetic analyses of chimpanzee and human genetic similarity come from whole genome comparisons and have shown that the differences between the two are more complex both in extent and character than the historical 98% figure suggests. In the seminal Nature paper reporting on initial genome comparisons, researchers identified thirty-five million single-nucleotide changes, five million insertion/deletion events, and a number of chromosomal rearrangements which constituted the genetic differences between chimps and humans, covering ~5% of both genomes. While many of these analyses have been performed on the Common Chimpanzee rather than the Bonobo, the differences between the two chimp species are unlikely to be substantial enough to affect the Pan-Homo comparative data significantly.

But there is still controversy. Scientists such as Morris Goodman of Wayne State University in Detroit argue that the Bonobo and Common Chimpanzee are so closely related to humans, their genus name should also be classified with the Human genus Homo: Homo paniscus, Homo sylvestris, or Homo arboreus. An alternative philosophy suggests that the term Homo sapiens is actually the misnomer, and that humanity should be reclassified as Pan sapiens. In either case, a name change of the genus is problematic because it complicates the taxonomy of other species closely related to humans, including Australopithecus.

Recent DNA evidence suggests the Bonobo and Common Chimpanzee species effectively separated from each other less than one million years ago. The chimpanzee line split from the last common ancestor with the Human approximately four to six million years ago. Because no species other than Homo sapiens has survived from the human line of that branching, both Pan species are the closest living relatives of humans.

Bonobos (National Geographic)



Physical characteristics

The Bonobo is more gracile (slight in form) than the Common Chimpanzee. Its head is smaller than that of the Common Chimpanzee, but has a higher forehead. It has a black face with pink lips, small ears, wide nostrils, and long hair on its head. Females have slightly more prominent breasts in contrast to the flat breasts of other female apes, though not as prominent as those of humans. The Bonobo also has a slim upper body, narrow shoulders, thin neck, and long legs compared with the Common Chimpanzee. The Bonobo walks upright about 25% of the time during ground locomotion. These characteristics, and its posture, gives the Bonobo a more human-like appearance than that of the Common Chimpanzee (see: bipedal bonobos). Moreover, the Bonobo has highly individuated facial features, as humans do, so that one individual can look significantly different from another, adapted for visual recognition in social interaction.

The Battle of the Sexes ( The Bonobos)

to be continued...