At a juncture in history during which women are seeking equality with men, science arrives with a belated gift to the feminist movement. Male-biased evolutionary scenarios--Man the Hunter, Man the Toolmaker and so on--are being challenged by the discovery that females play a central, perhaps even dominant, role in the social life of one of our nearest relatives. In the past two decades many strands of knowledge have come together concerning a relatively unknown ape with an unorthodox repertoire of behavior: the bonobo. The bonobo is one of the last large mammals to be found by science. The creature was discovered in in a Belgian colonial museum, far from its lush African habitat. A German anato-mist, Ernst Schwarz, was scrutinizing a skull that had been ascribed to a juvenile chimpanzee because of its small size, when he realized that it belonged to an adult.

There are behavioural differences, on average, between the sexes — few would dispute that. Where the debate rages is over how much these differences are the result of social pressures versus being rooted in our biology the answer often is that there is a complex interaction between the two. For example, when differences are observed between girls and boys, such as in preferences for play , one possibility is that this is partly or wholly because of the contrasting ways that girls and boys are influenced by their peers, parents and other adults because of the ideas they have about how the sexes ought to behave.

Primate sexual behavior ; Sociosexual behavior in primates. It is influenced by biological and ecological constraints, mating systems, and social dynamics. Primate sexuality is an extremely diverse and complex topic, and notwithstanding many decades of research since the pioneering work of Carpenter in , we still do not have a unified understanding of the complexity of sexual behavior and the factors that influence sexual behavior in our closest relatives Dixson Here the topic will be presented and illustrated with well-known examples, primarily addressing ecology and mating strategies but also the systematics of primate sexuality. The entry will first explore the sexuality of solitary prosimians, then pair bonding and polyandrous callitrichids , then the sexuality of uni-male and multi-male catharrines, ending with apes.