Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape

  • Frans de Waal &
  • Frans Lanting
University of California Press, $24.95. £16.95

The bonobo (Pan paniscus), the fourth living species of great ape along with chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, was discovered by science little more than 60 years ago, and our knowledge of this gentle animal, which lives naturally only in remote areas of Zaire, is a fraction of that of the other three species. Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape (University of California Press, $24. 5. £1695) by two Dutchmen, laboratory ethologist Frans de Waal and photographer Frans Lanting, distils the information gathered by the few workers in the field, among them the Japanese primatologists Takayoshi Kano and Suehisa Kuroda, (for a review by William McGrew see Nature 387, 142–143; 1997).