A comparison of bonobo and chimpanzee tool use: evidence for a female bias in the Pan lineage

By T. Gruber, Zanna Clay, K. Zuberbühler. 2010

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Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, are the most sophisticated tool-users among all nonhuman primates. From an evolutionary perspective, it is therefore puzzling that the tool use behaviour of their closest living primate relative, the bonobo, Pan paniscus, has been described as particularly poor. However, only a small number of bonobo groups have been studied in the wild and only over comparably short periods. Here, we show that captive bonobos and chimpanzees are equally diverse tool-users in most contexts. Our observations illustrate that tool use in bonobos can be highly complex and no different from what has been described for chimpanzees. The only major difference in the chimpanzee and bonobo data was that bonobos of all age–sex classes used tools in a play context, a possible manifestation of their neotenous nature. We also found that female bonobos displayed a larger range of tool use behaviours than males, a pattern previously described for chimpanzees but not for other great apes. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the female-biased tool use evolved prior to the split between bonobos and chimpanzees.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Genetics, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/409b81dd2c168ca91d7479d16f0f6178551daf51

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Genetics

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

The self-domestication hypothesis: evolution of bonobo psychology is due to selection against aggression (2012, background): “Bonobos developed these abilities more slowly and never reached the level of competence observed in adult chimpanzees on tasks examining their spatial memory, their use of tools and their understanding of causality (similar to the findings of Gruber et al. 2010).”