What Bonobos Teach Us About Female Power and Cooperation - Harvard Magazine

June: Hello and welcome to Kindred Minds — I'm June, a primatologist who has spent her career falling more and more in love with our closest relatives, and sharing their stories with anyone who'll listen. Today's episode is a good one — we've got drumming chimpanzees, a brand new monkey species with orange lips and a froglike roar, and a deep dive into the remarkable social world of bonobos. A huge thank you to our sponsors: Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows; Ago Consulting — pronounced "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consulting from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a portfolio of companies across the silicon industry. Their support makes this show possible. So — how alike are we, really, to the other primates? Today, I think you're going to be surprised. Let's get into it. June: Alright, let's start with something that genuinely stopped me in my tracks when I first read about it. Researchers studying wild chimpanzees in the forests of West and East Africa have been documenting something that looks, sounds, and functions a lot like music. Chimpanzees drum. And I don't mean they randomly bang on things — I mean they seek out specific trees, trees with large, buttressed roots that resonate when struck, and they beat out rhythmic patterns with their hands and feet. This behavior has been observed and documented across multiple chimpanzee communities, and a study published in the journal Current Biology took a careful, quantitative look at what's actually happening. What the researchers found is genuinely striking: different chimpanzee communities have different drumming styles. Some communities tend to produce evenly spaced beats. Others cluster their beats together at the start of a sequence and then space out. These are not random variations — they are consistent within communities and distinct between them, which is exactly what you'd expect if drumming style were culturally transmitted, learned from others rather than hardwired from birth. And here's the part I keep coming back to: chimpanzees use this drumming to communicate across long distances through dense forest. A drumming chimp can be heard for over a kilometer. The patterns seem to carry information — researchers believe they can signal identity, location, even something about the drummer's intentions. So you have rhythm, you have individual style, you have cultural variation, and you have communication. Now, I'm not saying chimpanzees are composing symphonies. But I am saying that the roots of rhythm — the capacity to produce and vary patterned beats that carry meaning — appear to run very deep in our family tree. When you tap your foot to a song, or drum on a steering wheel, or feel your pulse quicken at the beat of a drum circle, you are doing something that connects you to a lineage that stretches back millions of years. That is not a metaphor. That is evolutionary heritage, alive in your hands and theirs. June: Now I want to talk about the biology underneath all of this, because I think it's one of the most profound and underappreciated facts in all of science. Human beings and chimpanzees share somewhere between 98 and 99 percent of their D N A. You've probably heard that number before, but I want you to really sit with what it means. Your genome — the full instruction manual for building and running a human body — differs from a chimpanzee's instruction manual by roughly one to two percent. One to two percent. That gap contains the differences in our larynx, our bipedalism, the specific wiring of our prefrontal cortex. But the other 98-plus percent? That is shared. The same genes that build your heart are building a chimpanzee's heart. The same developmental pathways that shaped your hands shaped theirs. The same neurochemicals — dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin — are flowing through chimpanzee brains right now, doing roughly the same jobs they do in ours. And it's not just chimpanzees. Bonobos share a similarly staggering percentage of our D N A — bonobos and chimpanzees are actually our two closest living relatives, equally distant from us, and together they form a kind of mirror that reflects what our common ancestor might have looked like six million years ago. Even more distantly related primates — gorillas, orangutans, gibbons — share enormous stretches of our genetic code. The primate order is not a loose collection of animals that happen to look vaguely similar. It is a deeply interconnected family, all running variations of the same ancient biological recipe. And this matters beyond the beautiful fact of it. It matters because it means that what we see in primate cognition — the drumming, the problem-solving, the social bonds — isn't coincidence. It's shared inheritance. When a chimpanzee develops a cultural tradition, they are doing it with a brain built from largely the same D N A blueprint as ours. The capacity for culture didn't appear from nowhere in humans. It has deep, shared roots. June: And now — oh, I have been saving this one. Because sometimes a story comes along that is just pure joy, and this is one of those. Scientists have discovered a brand new species of monkey in the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and I need you to know: this monkey has bright orange lips. Like, vivid, unmistakable, almost theatrical orange lips. And if that weren't enough, it has a call that researchers describe as froglike — a deep, resonant roar that sounds nothing like what you'd expect from a primate. This species, reported in Scientific American and described by scientists as "remarkable," belongs to a group called the lesula — and its discovery is a genuine reminder that our planet still holds secrets we haven't named yet. The Congo Basin is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, a vast and ancient forest that is also one of the least explored by scientists. That a primate — not a microbe, not an insect, but a warm-blooded, social, complex mammal — could remain undescribed by science until now tells you something important about both the richness of life on this planet and how much we still have to learn. For me, this discovery carries a kind of urgency alongside the wonder. Every time a new primate species is found, it's also a reminder of what we stand to lose. The Congo Basin faces enormous pressure from deforestation, mining, and habitat fragmentation. This orange-lipped monkey, barely known to science, is already living in a landscape under threat. But here's what I hold onto: the fact that researchers are out there, in those forests, making these discoveries, publishing them, bringing them to our attention — that matters. Conservation begins with knowledge. It begins with knowing that something is there, that it is singular, that it has orange lips and sounds like a frog and belongs to a world that we are also part of. We can't protect what we haven't seen. And now we've seen it. June: So today we drummed with chimpanzees, we explored the staggering genetic kinship that runs through every primate on this planet, and we met a brand new monkey with orange lips deep in the Congo rainforest — a reminder that the family of life is still revealing itself to us. Intelligence, feeling, culture, rhythm — these are not human inventions. They are inheritances, shaped over millions of years, shared across a lineage that includes us and so many of our remarkable relatives. We are not alone in our inner lives. We never were. This has been Kindred Minds, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If this episode made you think, made you smile, or made you want to learn more, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would love it — that's truly how this community grows. And all the links and sources from today's stories are in the show notes. Stay curious, stay connected, and I'll see you next time.