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Bonobo match-making: Mum knows best

We've all heard the jokes and the cliches about pushy mothers eager to recommend their sons as potential partners for eligible women. But newly released research into the behaviour of bonobos across Africa has found that the mothers are so concerned about their son's sex lives they will virtually drag them over to potential partners. And apparently there are solid evolutionary reasons for this. Martin Surbeck is from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and the lead researcher on this new study.

(Pic: A juvenile male bonobo with his mum in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Credit AFP)

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3 minutes