The bonobo was first recognised as a distinct taxon in 1928 by German anatomist Ernst Schwarz, based on a skull in the Tervuren Museum in Belgium which had previously been classified as a juvenile chimpanzee ( Pan troglodytes). The name is thought to derive from a misspelling on a shipping crate from the town of Bolobo on the Congo River near the location from which the first bonobo specimens were collected in the 1920s. The name "bonobo" first appeared in 1954, when Austrian zoologist Eduard Paul Tratz and German biologist Heinz Heck proposed it as a new and separate generic term for pygmy chimpanzees. The name "pygmy" was given by the German zoologist Ernst Schwarz in 1929, who classified the species on the basis of a previously mislabeled bonobo cranium, noting its diminutive size compared to chimpanzee skulls. 5.4 Cognitive comparisons to chimpanzeesįormerly the bonobo was known as the "pygmy chimpanzee", despite the bonobo having a similar body size to the common chimpanzee.
Bonobos typically live 40 years in captivity their lifespan in the wild is unknown, but it is almost certainly much shorter. The species is listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List and is threatened by habitat destruction and human population growth and movement, though commercial poaching is the most prominent threat. There are no concrete data on population numbers, but the estimate is between 29,500 and 50,000 individuals. Bonobos live south of the river, and thereby were separated from the ancestors of the common chimpanzee, which live north of the river. As the two species are not proficient swimmers, the formation of the Congo River 1.5–2 million years ago possibly led to the speciation of the bonobo. Because of political instability in the region and the timidity of bonobos, there has been relatively little field work done observing the species in its natural habitat.Īlong with the common chimpanzee, the bonobo is the closest extant relative to humans. The species is frugivorous and inhabits primary and secondary forests, including seasonally inundated swamp forests. The bonobo is found in a 500,000 km 2 (190,000 sq mi) area of the Congo Basin in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central Africa. The bonobo is distinguished by relatively long legs, pink lips, dark face, tail-tuft through adulthood, and parted long hair on its head. Taxonomically, the members of the chimpanzee/bonobo subtribe Panina (composed entirely by the genus Pan) are collectively termed panins. While bonobos (formerly known as the pygmy chimpanzee) are now recognized as a distinct species in their own right, they were initially thought to be a subspecies of chimpanzee ( Pan troglodytes) due to the physical similarities between the two species. The bonobo ( / b ə ˈ n oʊ b oʊ, ˈ b ɒ n ə b oʊ/ Pan paniscus), also historically called the pygmy chimpanzee and less often the dwarf or gracile chimpanzee, is an endangered great ape and one of the two species making up the genus Pan, the other being the common chimpanzee ( Pan troglodytes).
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