Adult bonobos are youthful in play and share food easily. Certain aspects of their behaviour and cognition seem to be developmentally delayed forms of those same traits in the closely related chimpanzee.
To test this hypothesis, Victoria Wobber of Harvard University and her colleagues studied groups of chimpanzees and bonobos of varying ages in the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The team shows that whereas chimpanzees (pictured above, right) become less willing to share food as they approach adulthood, bonobos (left) maintain relaxed, juvenile levels of food sharing. Bonobos are also slower to acquire social inhibition. The bonobos' delayed behavioural development correlates with aspects of their cranial morphology, which has also retained juvenile traits. This suggests that these species share a common mechanism responsible for changes in behavioural and brain development.
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Evolutionary anthropology: Baby-like bonobos. Nature 463, 591 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/463591c
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/463591c
