OTOH,
I suspect that 50,000 years ago everyone was porking
everyone else, sorta Bonobo style...we have become
"civilized" and while "sex" is blatant and pervasive in
the media, we mostly subscribe to the morals of
the past couple hundred years.
from the Wik:
Sexual social behavior
Sexual intercourse plays a major role in Bonobo society, being used as a
greeting, a means of
conflict resolution and
post-conflict reconciliation, and as
favors traded by the females in exchange for food. Bonobos are the only non-human apes to have been observed engaging in
all of the following sexual activities: face-to-face
genital sex (most frequently
female-female, then
male-female and
male-male),
tongue kissing, and
oral sex.
[1] In scientific literature, the female-female sex is often referred to as
GG rubbing or
genital-genital rubbing, while male-male sex is sometimes referred to as
penis fencing.
Sexual activity happens within the immediate family as well as outside it, and often involves adults and children. Bonobos do not form permanent relationships with individual partners. They also do not seem to discriminate in their sexual behavior by gender or age, with the possible exception of sexual intercourse between mothers and their adult sons; some observers believe these pairings are taboo. When Bonobos come upon a new food source or feeding ground, the increased excitement will usually lead to communal sexual activity, presumably decreasing tension and allowing for peaceful feeding.
[4]
Bonobo females also engage in female-female genital sex to socially bond with each other, thus forming a female nucleus of bonobo society. While Bonobo society is nonviolent and egalitarian, friendships among females organize their offspring who maintain lifelong loyalty to their mothers. In this way, females often have more influence in group decisions. Adolescent females often leave their troop of birth to join another troop. Sexual bonding with other females establishes the new females as members of the group. This troop migration mixes the bonobo gene pools.
Bonobo reproductive rates are not any higher than that of the Common Chimpanzee. Female Bonobos carry and nurse their young for five years and can give birth every five to six years. Compared to Common Chimpanzees, Bonobo females resume the genital swelling cycle much sooner after giving birth, allowing them to rejoin the sexual activities of their society. Also, Bonobo females who are either sterile or too young to reproduce engage in sexual activity.
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Other social behavior
Females are much smaller than males but can be considered to have a higher social status. Aggressive encounters between males and females are rare, and males are tolerant of infants and juveniles. The male's status reflects the status of his mother, and the son-mother bond often stays strong and continues throughout life. While social hierarchies do exist, rank does not play as prominent a role as it does in other primate societies.
Bonobos are active from dawn to dusk and live in a
fusion-fission pattern: a tribe of about a hundred will split into small groups during the day while looking for food, and then come back together to sleep. They sleep on trees in nests they construct. Unlike Common Chimpanzees, who have been known to hunt monkeys, Bonobos are primarily
frugivores, although they do eat
insects and have been observed occasionally catching small
mammals such as
squirrels.
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Closeness to humanity
Bonobos passed the
mirror-recognition test for self-awareness in 1994. They communicate through primarily vocal means, although the meanings of their vocalizations are not currently known; however, we do understand their facial expressions
[3] and some of their natural hand gestures, such as their invitation to play. Two Bonobos,
Kanzi and
Panbanisha have been taught a vocabulary of about 400 words which they can type using a special keyboard of
lexigrams (geometric symbols), and can respond to spoken sentences. Some, such as
bioethicist Peter Singer, argue that these results qualify them for the "rights to survival and life"
rights that humans theoretically accord to all persons.
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