8.⁠ ⁠Bonoboism - Martin Surbeck

Our guest today is Martin Surbeck. An assistant professor in evolutionary biology at Harvard University, Surbeck is one of the world’s foremost experts in primatology.He is interested in questions of social behavior in animals: competition but also cooperation, a skill and strategy often considered unique to humans. His main research object? Apes and monkeys, chimpanzees and bonobos especially, our cousins from 8 million years ago. Chimpanzees, as anyone who has ever been to the zoo knows, are experts at competing - with each other and seemingly everyone else. But what Surbeck and his team have shown is that bonobos are skilled at cooperation, too. And not just amongst their close relatives and peer groups, but across them, too. That’s better than most of us can say these days. In a New York Times article devoted to Surbeck’s study, his co-author Dr. Liran Samuni said that these bonobos are teaching us about our past. But maybe they’ve got a few things to learn us about our future as well. There’s more to these bonobos that is interesting, but we’ll get to that. Much of his research takes place at his research lab at the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the DRC, but we’re finding him in his office in Cambridge today, a few blocks away from Tim.Faculty page: https://heb.fas.harvard.edu/people/martin-surbeck'Scientists Find First Evidence That Groups of Apes Cooperate' (New York Times): https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/16/science/bonobos-cooperation-study.htmlKokolopori Bonobo Reserve: https://www.bonobo.org/programs/kokolopori-bonobo-reserve This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theclusterftheory.substack.com