This is a guest post from Vanessa Woods, author of the new book, Bonobo Handshake. Vanessa is a Research Scientist in Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University and studies the cognition of chimpanzees and bonobos in Congo. Here is the latest from Martin Subeck - who I met a few years ago at Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary in Congo. The first thing about Martin is he's an excellent scientist working with Gottfried Hohmann, who is one of the best. The second thing is, that like Max the bonobo, Martin is really really ridiculously goodlooking. Anyway, I digress. Martin saw something totally cool - bonobos cannibalizing an infant - cool because it's the first time something like this happened. So I was blogging about it on my other blog, bonobo handshake, and I got messages like:
Dave H. said...
Why do you "wonder if the infant was killed by a high ranking male"? In chimpanzees it has always been the adult females that killed and ate their groupmates' offspring. The male chimps have only been seen killing juveniles from other groups. And it would make no sense for a high ranking male to kill what may very well have been his offspring. Anyway, from the New ...