FEMALES IN CHARGE

By Jeffrey Kluger

If you're looking for a criminal class in the animal kingdom, look no further than the higher male primate. Gorilla males coolly murder infants fathered by other males to free up nursing mothers for breeding; orangutans will resort to rape if their mating overtures are rebuffed; rival gangs of chimpanzees may wage bloody border wars to protect their turf or enlarge their harems. And the evolutionary big brother of all these creatures, the human male, has a rap sheet that's too long to contemplate.

The latest research, however, shows that in one species of great ape, the bonobo, males engage in none of this barbarism. Bonobo society is one in which behavioral limits are set, the peace is generally kept, and transgressors are quickly punished. The reason for such order is simple: among bonobos it is the females that enforce the laws. The strategies used in the bonobo world might work in our own, according to Demonic Males (Houghton Mifflin; $24.95), a new book by anthropologist Richard Wrangham and science writer Dale Peterson.

For primatologists the bonobo did not exist at all until 1928, when researchers first noticed that the chimpanzee-like animal they had long been calling a pygmy chimp was in fact an entirely separate species. In the decades that followed, the physical differences between the newly recognized bonobo and its larger cousin were thought to be all that distinguished them. Then, in the 1970s, Japanese primatologist Takayoshi Kano began observing bonobos in the wild and noticed a key difference: in the bonobo culture, unlike the chimp or human culture, males were not the dominant gender.

"Among chimpanzees," Wrangham explains, "every female of whatever rank is subordinate to every male of whatever rank. Among bonobos males dominate only the females that rank lower than them, and females just as easily dominate lower-ranking males."

Even more striking is the way female bonobos relate to one another. While female chimps form only casual bonds, female bonobos establish lifelong relationships, spending much of their time socializing with one another and even engaging in recreational sexual activity together.

For males with an aggressive bent, such a powerful simian sisterhood spells trouble. If a sexually mature bonobo male shows a female unwanted attention, she has merely to sound a distress call to bring an avenging group of females quickly to the scene. Males that misbehave in a nonsexual setting--say, at a feeding site, where they may try to hoard a cache of fruit and prevent other troop members from approaching--are similarly intimidated or chased off. Even males that reserve their aggression solely for one another find their behavior utterly unrewarded. The whole purpose of such mano a mano combat is to secure breeding rights to females, but since bonobo females are powerful enough to resist even the strongest alpha male, the results of the contest mean nothing.

How such female-policed pacifism evolved is unclear, but the answer appears to lie in the food supply. Chimpanzees eat a rich man's diet of meat and ripe fruit, while gorillas can get by on an austere menu of leaves and stems. Bonobos are adapted to both types of food, and this confers an advantage. "Fruit and meat are not always easy to come by," Wrangham says, "so chimpanzee communities will split up to forage in parties of varying sizes. Leaves and stems, by contrast, are available across the jungle floor, so gorillas and other animals adapted to them can form more or less permanent groups, staying in one place and surviving on whatever's available." Such lifetime homesteading doesn't do much for naturally competitive males, but for females it provides the chance to form the kinds of alliances that bring them out from under the opposable male thumb.

For human beings the cultural lesson from this is obvious. Feminist groups have long argued that many of humanity's most persistent problems, from war to domestic abuse, stem from the male tendency to settle questions first by coming to blows and only later coming to terms. Nobody, or at least not many men, would advocate replacing humanity's male monopoly on power with a bonobo-like female monopoly. But the success of this lesser primate does suggest that power sharing between the sexes may make not just political sense but evolutionary sense as well.