Scientific America reports: Time and again humans have domesticated wild animals, producing tame individuals with softer appearances and more docile temperaments, such as dogs and guinea pigs. But a new study suggests that one of our primate cousins—the African ape known as the bonobo—did something similar without human involvement. It domesticated itself.
Anthropologist Brian Hare of Duke University’s Institute for Brain Sciences noticed that the bonobo looks like a domestic version of its closest living relative, the chimpanzee. The bonobo is less aggressive than the chimp, with a smaller skull and shorter canine teeth. And it spends more time playing and having sex. These traits are very similar to those that separate domestic animals from their wild ancestors. They are all part of a constellation of characteristics known as the domestication syndrome.
The similarities between bonobos and domesticated species dawned on Hare during a large departmental dinner, where he listened to Harvard University anthropologist Richard Wrangham hold forth on bonobos. “He was talking about how bonobos are an evolutionary puzzle,” Hare recalls. “‘They have all these weird traits relative to chimps and we have no idea how to explain them,'” Wrangham had noted. “I said, ‘Oh that’s like the silver foxes!’ Richard turned around and said, ‘What silver foxes?'”
The foxes that Hare mentioned were the legacy of Russian geneticist Dmitri Belyaev. In the 1950s Belyaev started raising wild silver foxes in captivity and breeding those that were least aggressive toward their human handlers. Within just 20 generations, he had created the fox equivalent of our domestic pooches. Instead of snarling when humans approached, they wagged their tails. At the same time, their ears became floppier, tails curlier and skulls smaller.
Belyaev’s experiments showed that if you select for nicer animals, the other parts of the domestication syndrome follow suit. Hare thinks that a similar process happened in bonobos, albeit without human intervention.
Three cheers for civilization. I can’t wait until bonobos make the final leap and invent nuclear weapons.
(I wish anthropocentric scientists would quit projecting their fantasies on non-human animals.)
I have observed these delightful apes for hours at “Apenheul” in the Netherlands. There are almost certainly factors of the environment in which they live plus their “hunting for fish” habits which account for their lesser aggressiveness. “Domestication” has nothing to do with it I think. Frans de Waal, who probably knows a lot more about apes than this Brian Hare, has never claimed “domestication” for bonobos.
And, Mr. Hare, now that you are at it, why don’t you call orangutangs the most “domesticated” ape of all. They are the world’s greatest couch-potatoes!