Oversexed Bonobos Monkey Cannibalism

As hippies had Altamont, so bonobos have Salonga National Park, where scientists have witnessed the supposedly peace-loving primate hunting and eating monkey children.
The finding could transform both popular and scientific understanding of bonobos, which like chimpanzees share 98 percent of their DNA with humans. But unlike chimps, bonobos have been considered gentle and good-natured: they don't engage in inter-tribal warfare or primate cannibalism, are dominated by females rather than males, and exchange sexual acts with the casualness of humans talking about the weather.
Such easygoing promiscuity has earned bonobos a unique place in the popular imagination — "equal parts dolphin, Dalai Lama, and Warren Beatty," in the words of New Yorker writer Ian Parker. But the reputation is based on limited evidence: most observations come from a couple hundred captive bonobos, and only a few primatologists track our endangered cousin in its remote Congolese home.
One such primatologist is Gottfried Hohmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, a central figure in Parker's article and author of a study, published yesterday in Current Biology, that describes bands of bonobos tracking, killing and eating young monkeys.
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/10/free-loving-hip.html#previouspost

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