A National Chimpanzee Day Reflection

Today is National Chimpanzee Day, and I find myself not celebrating so much as contemplating. After all, to look at chimpanzees—our closest living relatives—is to stare down the barrel of our most primal inheritance. But there’s a twist. We humans are not descended from chimps alone. We also share DNA with their gentler, quieter cousins: the bonobos. Same ancestral tree. Two very different branches. And it’s between those branches—between war and tenderness, between rape and rubbing, between coercion and connection—that the roots of patriarchy start to squirm.

Order of the Chimps

Let’s start with the chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). National Chimpanzee Day commemorates Dr. Jane Goodall’s first arrival at Gombe Stream National Park in 1960 —an event that would forever alter our understanding of what it means to be “human.”

What Goodall uncovered was stunning. Chimps used tools, hunted cooperatively, formed political alliances, and… killed each other. They engaged in territorial warfare, murdered rivals, and sometimes even committed group sexual assaults—what some primatologists describe, without flinching, as “gang rape.”

In chimp society, male dominance rules. Alpha males rise through strength, intimidation, and coalition-building. Females are marginal, often isolated, and subjected to violent mating strategies that—if seen in human terms—look more like systemic abuse than biology.

As Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson detail in Demonic Males, chimpanzees are capable of remarkable intelligence and cooperation—but they also serve as a mirror for the darker instincts of patriarchal control, power hoarding, and reproductive dominance.

This isn’t just occasional violence. It’s strategy. It’s structure. It’s the whole operating system.

Bonobos are swingers

Now swing a few miles across the Congo River and meet the bonobos (Pan paniscus). Same genus. Similar DNA. Different world. Bonobo society is female-centered, peaceful, and intensely erotic. Sex is used not only for reproduction, but for:

• Conflict resolution
• Social bonding
• Food-sharing negotiations
• Welcoming newcomers
• Dealing with anxiety

Bonobo females form strong coalitions, often led by older matriarchs, and they work together to keep male aggression in check. A male bonobo’s status depends largely on his mother’s rank, not his own brute force.

Frans de Waal, in Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape (1997), calls them “the only great apes that do not kill their own kind.” Think about that. Not once in the wild have we seen a bonobo commit murder.

No infanticide.
No war.
No rape.
Just a whole lot of grooming and genital rubbing.

Bonobos decouple sex from reproduction. This makes paternity uncertain, which makes male control over offspring irrelevant. And without paternity certainty, there’s no patriarchy.

It’s not utopia. But it’s a damn sight closer than anything the chimps are doing.

The Penis Incident: Bonobos Females Are Not Innocents

Pause your cuddly fantasies. Bonobo matriarchy can bite—literally. At the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the DRC, female bonobos attacked a male and bit his penis in half.

That wounded male survived—only because humans on-site performed emergency reconstructive surgery: scrotal and penile prosthetic reconstruction, urethral repair, catheterization—and sewed it back on. The first recorded plastic surgery of any kind on a bonobo. SCIRP

Imagine that: female bonobos casually savage a male’s junk, and humans swoop in to save bonobo dick with fancy flaps, sutures, catheter tubes. The layers of irony are obscene.

Bonobos vs. Chimps: Who Are We, Really?

We humans are evolutionary hybrids—part chimp, part bonobo. The capacity for both tenderness and tyranny lives in our blood. But unlike our primate cousins, we’ve built vast cultures, religions, and governments that either amplify our chimp side or try to suppress it with varying success.

The question isn’t which species we come from—it’s which part of ourselves we choose to nurture.

As Gerda Lerner argued in The Creation of Patriarchy, the systems of male dominance that now seem “natural” are actually historical inventions—emerging with agriculture, property, and inheritance. In short, patriarchy needed known fathers and controllable women.
Bonobo society simply never made that deal.

So What Are We Celebrating?

This National Chimpanzee Day, I’m not just lighting a candle for the chimps.
I’m lighting two. I recognise the ape in me, which is why I named myself Prime, as in Primate.

And maybe one more—for the fork in the road.
For the part of us that still gets to choose:

• Domination or diplomacy?
• Control or connection?
• Hierarchy or solidarity?

Because if our closest cousins have shown us anything, it’s this:

Biology gives us possibilities.
Culture decides which ones become reality.

Further Reading

• Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape – Frans de Waal & Frans Lanting (1997)
• Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence – Richard Wrangham & Dale Peterson
• Our Inner Ape – Frans de Waal
• The Creation of Patriarchy – Gerda Lerner
• The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory – Cynthia Eller (for a critical feminist lens)