Not many people know that we have another close relative besides the chimpanzee.
Like chimpanzees, bonobos share 98.7% of our DNA. Chimpanzees and bonobos look very similar. But if you look closely, you’ll see that bonobos are a little smaller, with pink lips, black faces, and a very attractive hairstyle with long black hair neatly parted in the middle. The first two toes of bonobos have a little bit of webbing. While chimpanzees
have low, loud voices, bonobos are very high pitched.
Think of the last time you were at a football stadium that seated 50,000 or even 100,000 people. If you could convince all the bonobos in the world to come to the game, you could not come close to filling it. Bonobos are the rarest and most endangered of all the great apes. The extinction of our closest living relative in our own lifetime is a real possibility.
The best estimates of the number of bonobos left in the wild are somewhere between 5,000–50,000 – all of them live in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). With their whole population in a single country, bonobos still share all the problems of population fragmentation, habitat loss, and victimization due to the bushmeat trade practice with their African cousins. Many bonobo infants are sold as pets.