Hey, I actually just finished doing research on studies focused on bonobo culture. There has been one major study. I'm going to copy and paste what I have written about this topic from a book chapter I'm working on: "A study by Gottfried Hohmann and Barbara Fruth in 2003 partially uncovered the cultural world of our other most closely related relative: the bonobo. Inspired by the “Cultures in chimpanzees” study by Whiten et al. (1999), Hohmann & Fruth wanted to know how many of the cultural variants described in chimpanzees were also present within Lomako’s bonobo population. By analyzing behavioural data between 1991 and 1998, they revealed that 14 cultural variants in chimpanzees are also present in bonobos. These include branch drag, leaf sponge, branch clasp, vegetation seat, aimed throw, and the hand clasp (Hohmann & Fruth, 2003). Although the study sample was considerably smaller than the one used by Whiten et al. (1999), this study raised the possibility that chimpanzees were more culturally complex than their sister species (Tennie, et al., 2009). However, future research will still need to be conducted to understand the cultural differences between chimpanzees and bonobos. The results of these studies will likely have deep implications for understanding the emergence of human culture."
Hmmm. I was reading in the latest issue of National Geographic that the way that bonobos and chimps socialize is very different and it seemed to me as a lay person that the way that chimps socialize is much closer to the way humans socialize than the way bonobos do. In humans, it's pretty clear that culture plays a huge role in how people are socialized and how they socialize with others from outside their culture vs. how they socialize with people from within their culture, but language seems to be a huge part of that, so I wonder, can bonobos and chimps communicate with each other? From the article I read in National Geographic it seems like they don't have much contact with each other.
Well they have no contact with each other in the wild. Bonobos are a different species because a population of Pan became genetically isolated south of the Congo River about 800,000 to 1 million years ago. However, they can communicate well with each other in artificial settings. For example the bonobo Panbanisha was raised in a human-chimp-bonobo hybrid culture. I wrote about this last year. In my mind the biggest and most significant difference between chimpanzees and bonobos socially is the fact that chimpanzees seem to be more competitive (especially when a resource is monopolizable) and bonobos appear to be more cooperative (even when a resource is monopolizable). This general tendency causes both species to excel at different tasks. It is a little more complicated than that.. but I can link a few research studies discussing this if you are interested.