"Bonobos were not even discovered until 1929 and you were a pioneer in studying them and putting their behavior in the public spotlight. There is a stereotype in the media of bonobos being obsessed with sex, and you even wrote that “The art of sexual reconciliation may well have reached its evolutionary peak in the bonobo.” How accurate is the popular stereotype of the bonobo?


The media are more obsessed with sex than the bonobos are. Bonobos are very casual about it.

But it is true that I am partially responsible for the obsession with bonobo sex. Arriving in this incredibly prudish country, I found that almost no one dared to talk about it. So, I went ahead and wrote several pieces, and later also a book, with details about bonobo sexual behavior without fig leaves and without the sort of euphemisms that Americans prefer (some of my colleagues would say that bonobos are “very affectionate” [when] referring to behavior that in the cinema would clearly be classified as X-rated).

So, this is another cultural difference. But let’s not get the impression that all bonobos care about is sex. They use sex to make friends, to resolve conflicts, to say hello—it’s really used for social contact the way we shake hands. "

http://blog.92y.org/index.php/weblog/item/dr_frans_de_waal/


We could learn a thing or two off them

Just got this emailed to me:

A South African farmer, close to the Roodeplaat area was puzzled at the disappearance of Sheep on his farm. After a few weeks of sheep disappearing the farmer decided to put up an electric fence. This is what he found!







The real story:

http://www.bushveld.co.za/pictures-python.htm

African Rock Python (Python sebae)

The Rock python is Africa's largest snake. The rock python eats mammals and birds.
Lays up to 100 eggs about the size of a tennis ball in antbear (Aardvark) holes, hollow tree or similar suitable place. The female coils herself around the eggs to protect them.
The snake in this picture had eaten a full grown Impala ewe and, sadly, caught itself in an electric fence.
Over four metres in length, this was a large specimen.

When the python was skinned we found a full grown Impala ewe had just been swallowed.
The python kills its prey by coiling itself around the animal and constricting it. When the animal is dead the python swallows it normally head first. Having swallowed its prey, the snake will find an abandoned burrow or hollow tree in which to hide and digest it's meal.

A view of the python's mouth. A python's bite is not venomous but would be very painful.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/Dead-man-wakes-during-autopsy/2007/09/16/1189881315555.html

A Venezuelan man who had been declared dead woke up in the morgue in excruciating pain after medical examiners began their autopsy.

Carlos Camejo, 33, was declared dead after a highway accident and taken to the morgue, where examiners began an autopsy only to realise something was amiss when he started bleeding. They quickly started to stitch up the incision on his face.

"I woke up because the pain was unbearable," Camejo said, according to a report in leading local newspaper El Universal.

His grieving wife turned up at the morgue to identify her husband's body, only to find him moved into a corridor - and alive.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/Sport/Jaques-manhood-on-the-line/2007/12/07/1196812993630.html

Phil Jaques' testicles are rarely up for discussion.

But when the 28-year-old Australian opener contracted mumps last month, his nether regions became an instant area of concern.

Not only was his manhood at stake, but potential sporting bloodlines as the prolific batsman's wife Danielle has played for the Matildas.

After being asked how his glands were by an apologetic reporter, Jaques said: "There is a chance of sterility, that is a danger and a little bit of a worry I suppose," he said.

"But all's good.

"I am really looking forward to getting back into cricket."

Such sensitivity wasn't being shown by Blues teammate Brad Haddin, he did his bit to ensure the media asked probing questions.

Apparently it has not only been Jaques's batting numbers that have swelling up.

"Ask him about his nuts, they are massive," he said to the media as he walked past to training while Jaques was being interviewed.

http://news.smh.com.au/bottle-top-lands-drunk-man-to-hospital/20071221-1ii3.html

An amateur Australian Rules football player celebrating a grand final win was rushed to hospital after accidentally swallowing a bottle cap out of a beer-filled premiership cup.

The 24-year-old from Adelaide inadvertently gulped down the serrated West End beer cap after downing the beer left in the bottom of the cup.

"They filled the premiership cup with beer and were passing it around among everybody," Royal Adelaide Hospital emergency department registrar Dr Robert Douglas told AAP.

"He felt something in his throat, and it was a beer bottle cap in his chest, stuck in his oesophagus."

Tests showed the man's blood alcohol concentration was almost 0.11.

The bottle cap initially obstructed the man's breathing, before moving further down into his chest.

Doctors were able to remove it using an endoscope, a flexible tube with a camera and retrieval instrument attached.

"This is the first one of these I've seen [personally], but we see stupid stuff all the time - it always involves young blokes, beer, girls and sport," he said.

The accident happened on September 15, but was published in the latest edition of the British Medical Journal on Friday.

---

No shortage of oddball news in 2007

http://news.smh.com.au/no-shortage-of-oddball-news-in-2007/20071231-1jm9.html

From a Greek nunnery turned into a marijuana farm by two men posing as gardeners to a South African man with a gunshot wound told by a doctor to "walk the pain off", the world was full of weird news in 2007.

A Moscow woman set fire to her ex-husband's penis as he sat naked watching television and drinking vodka. The couple divorced three years ago but continued to share a small flat.

"I was burning like a torch," the wounded ex-husband told Tvoi Den newspaper. "I don't know what I did to deserve this."

In another unusual living arrangement, a German man left his dead mother seated in her favourite armchair at their shared home for two years after her death of natural causes at age 92.

Yet not everything that smelled like a corpse was really dead in 2007. In the German town of Kaiserslautern, police broke into a darkened flat expecting to find a corpse after neighbours complained of a nasty smell seeping out into the hallway.

But instead they found a tenant with very smelly feet asleep in bed next to a pile of extremely foul-smelling laundry.

There were sadly many deaths in 2007 that were hardly noticed, such as in Zagreb, where a Croatian man who boarded a night tram and died in his seat rode through the city for more than six hours before the driver discovered he was dead.

Unusual diets made headlines in 2007 - such as: "No more crispy duck at Beijing toilets". Food stalls attached to Beijing's public toilets were banned ahead of the Olympics after complaints over toilets with poor sanitation.

Also in China, 66-year-old Jiang Musheng said 40 years of swallowing live tree frogs and rats helped him avoid intestinal pain and made him strong.

British artist Mark McGowan ate a meal of meatballs made from a dead corgi dog in a protest against animal cruelty. He said the corgi, which died from natural causes, tasted terrible.

Criminals filled odd news headlines around the world. In the United States, two Colorado men were accused of plotting to kill a man with rattlesnakes in a dispute over a $60,000 poker debt.

"It's a story out of the Wild West - there's poker, rattlesnakes and unsavoury characters," said Lance Clem, of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. "You've got a bunch of snakes becoming involved with a bunch of snakes."

In Sarajevo, two armed men disguised as Muslim women in burqas held up a bank and escaped with $40,000.

A Zimbabwe man stole a bus because he needed transport to get his driving licence.

A German bus driver threw a 20-year-old off because he said she was too sexy for his bus. "He opened the door and shouted 'Your cleavage is distracting me every time I look into my mirror and I can't concentrate on the traffic'," the woman said.

In La Paz, the winner of a Bolivian beauty contest was stripped of her title moments after her coronation when judges noticed she was wearing false hair plaits.

Climate change found its way into weird news. A Hummer owner in Russia's St. Petersburg gave activists the green light to pelt his oversized vehicle with rotten eggs and tomatoes.

A 60-year-old German man stunned lawyers during his appeal hearing on a flashing conviction by stripping off in court.

Every story needs a happy ending and Bangkok delivered for this one. A 76-year-old Malay Muslim woman from southern Thailand got on the wrong bus 25 years ago and got lost, ending up living as a beggar at the other end of the country.

But in 2007 she was finally reunited with her family.