ANOTHER WORD FOR HOPEY CRACK

She followed the bonobos, walking for miles with them day after day. She trekked deep into the Congolese rainforest and stayed there on and off between 20. And from the village, you walk one more hour to get to camp.' The next day, you hop on a motorbike and you drive for six hours to the nearest village. Or you have to charter a plane, fly about five hours from Kinshasa to the nearest town to our camp. 'You either need to rent a boat and do three weeks on a river followed by a walk to camp. 'There's no roads leading there,' says Samuni. 'So I'm always a bit on edge during those encounters from fear that something will happen.'īecause bonobos are endangered and nestled in the remote (and undeveloped, for now) Congo Basin in the Democratic Republic of Congo, they're much harder to study than chimpanzees. 'It basically turns into physical, very violent attacks, often with the clear intention to kill,' says Samuni. If the number of chimps on each side is fairly balanced, the interaction generally ends without incident.īut if one group outnumbers the other, things get dark - fast. There's never cooperation between the groups. 'If they do meet other groups, the quiet behavior completely flips,' Samuni says. One behavior she's seen frequently is groups of animals on border patrols, quietly and slowly traveling to the edges of their territories to scan for signs of other chimp groups. Liran Samuni, a behavioral ecologist at the German Primate Center in Göttingen, Germany, has studied different populations of chimps for 12 years. This paves the way for the broader groups to form social ties.Ĭhimpanzees tend to be the go-to ape for a lot of field research because of their vast and relatively accessible habitat and their close relationship to humans. Now, in a study published in the latest issue of the journal Science, two collaborators argue that wild bonobos - known for friendlier and more peaceful tendencies compared to chimpanzees - cooperate not just within their own communal group but also across other bonobo groups, with more cooperative individuals leading the charge. Over the years, some researchers - primatologists, evolutionary biologists and others - have tried to make headway by looking to chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living relatives, for insights.

ANOTHER WORD FOR HOPEY CRACK

These are difficult questions to crack open. It's markedly different from the way chimps treat strangers.Īs a species, who are we? Are humans innately hostile and violent toward people who belong to communities other than our own? Or are we inherently friendly and cooperative? A new study looks at how a community of bonobos behave when they encounter a different group of bonobos. Bonobos (pictured) and chimpanzees are our closest relatives.

Another word for hopey