Deep in the Congo Basin, Harvard PhD candidate and Pan Lab member Lily Fornof looks at how motherhood shapes the social lives of wild bonobos, one of humanity's closest genetic relatives, spending months at a time living alongside the primates at the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve. In bonobo society, males stay in the group they were born into, while females leave, which means most bonobo mothers raise their kids as single moms, surrounded by other females they're not related to. Through grooming, closeness, and friendships with unrelated females, the mothers build networks that shape their children's lives, from who they play with as infants to whom their sons mate with years later as adults. By studying bonobos, Fornof provides a glimpse of a unique and ancient way of approaching motherhood.
