Bonobos, starring in and as themselves |
Of the three most intelligent great apes, the one that revels in its own brilliance is quite obsessed with the other two. Perhaps language and the capacity for higher-order thinking are to blame. They have made human beings narrative-making creatures, and the lives of others are treated as mere metaphors to understand Homo sapiens’ own past and present. Take the poor bonobo. Since it was classified as a species separate from the........