Hippie monkees?

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

Ramón Rentería: Our primate instincts will help get us through war

Television can either enlighten or make you stupid.

So it was refreshing the other night to see ABC News' "Nightline" -- one of the few intellectual news programs on commercial TV -- put on a segment about a monkey species some of us didn't even know existed.

Seems that the bonobo is about the nearest monkey relative we have (unless you also count those distant cousins you see only at funerals, weddings and your grandmother's estate sale).

According to the TV segment, bonobos live deep in the Congo tropical forest in central Africa but share a lot in common with us. They express emotions, make intelligent choices, form close-knit societies, eat honey and worms (think tripitas) and even walk upright. Their genetic makeup is 98.5 percent similar to ours.

And like a lot of other wildlife these days, bonobos are in constant peril, at risk of extinction because of human poachers and other factors.

But the interesting revelation is that researchers sometimes refer to bonobos as hippie monkeys because every time they start getting aggressive toward each other, they end up making out instead. Kind of like a sexy version of Conflict Resolution 101.

If you're too young to remember, hippies smoked marijuana, wore sandals and long hair and hung out in San Francisco in the 1960s. Their universal slogan: "Make love, not war."

The reporter covering the story said bonobos also are the only known animals (besides ape-like humans) that have sex just for fun and not only for official breeding purposes. And they enjoy recreational sex with just about anybody in the group, sort of like they do in Hollywood or Hugh Hefner's mansion.

So, we were observing all these really complex apes doing their thing on national television, the censors blocking out what they could, just in case the grandchildren were still awake. Any fifth-grader with an imagination or an Internet-ready phone could have figured out this one.

And even though this was serious but not live television, you wondered if the segment anchor, producers and all the technical people suppressed a lot of laughter behind the scenes.

If you dig a little deeper, you'll learn that bonobos are tons more peaceful than chimpanzees. And that indigenous people of Africa have told stories for generations about how bonobos have more human characteristics than we imagine. The lore is that in the distant past bonobos not only told people what was edible in the forest but shared a brotherhood with humans.

Scientists have studied bonobos in the wild and in captivity since the mid-1970s. Maybe apes solved the peace riddle long ago.

Next time your wife or girlfriend wants to pick a fight or argue about your relatives just back off, turn off "CSI New York" and say with a straight face:

"Oye changa, let's pretend we're primate hippies."

http://www.elpasotimes.com/entertainment/ci_11969529

[mkg265 2]

I was going to bed then saw "Hippie Monkeys" I had to click.

These monkeys really know the joy of make-up sex.

But don't dolphins have sex for fun too? Too tired to google...

[Niels Bohr 72]

If bonobo are the nearest, what happened to rhesus monkies? Why is rhesus monkies are all over biology books and not bonobo? I should ask ABC.

Edited March 23, 2009 by Niels Bohr

[Nagishkaw 510]

Hippies. Sheesh!

[Saddle Bronc 124]

If bonobo are the nearest, what happened to rhesus monkies? Why is rhesus monkies are all over biology books and not bonobo? I should ask ABC.

Probably because rhesus are:

• smaller
• "easier" to catch (need to go into forest to find bonobo, where you may find people in Indian cities willing to catch and handover a rhesus--a narrow-necked bottle with some groundnuts in it can trap them....)

Edited March 23, 2009 by CherryXS

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

Hippies. Sheesh!