Meet the bonobos, the rare and marvelous “make love not war” great apes who swing through the trees as well as with each other.

I loved the zebras, the cheetahs, the fruit flies, the octopi and the rest. But The Nature of Sex “climaxed” with a species I’d never heard of before, “bonobos,” which the narrator also called by their Latin/scientific name Pan paniscus. I knew “Pan” as classical Greek mythology’s horned and horny god of the wild, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. But when the bonobos started swinging onto my screen, well… what can I say? Today, I’ve got a whole book’s worth of stuff to say, but back then, I couldn’t utter a word. Imagine looking into an evolutionary funhouse mirror and seeing a side of yourself you’ve never seen before, shocking yet deeply familiar.

“Who are these vibrant, joyful creatures that look so much like me, only hairier?” I wondered. “And what’s with all the sex?” They weren’t just going at it for procreation. They were engaging in sex for recreation and interpersonal communication, very much like humans, but without the pretense, hypocrisy and shame. I got very excited, but no, I still didn’t want to have sex with them. I wanted to have sex like them (at least occasionally), in that playful yet deeply meaningful way of theirs I started calling the Bonobo Way.

But would it keep our sex life out of the dreaded sinkhole? Only time would tell.

Both bonobos and common chimps are as close to humans as foxes are to dogs. I don’t know about you, but that’s closer than I feel to some of my human relatives.

I squinted through the big window, a portal to another world, trying to get a better view of the primal love scene before us. All I could see was a mass of wriggling fur and finger-like toes until my eyes focused in on one male and two females kissing, ear-tonguing and giving each other enthusiastic oral sex, punctuated with occasional somersaults, smacks and nibbles on fruit and leaves. Sometimes they interacted as a threesome. Other times, two would cavort together, while the third played with herself, alternating between fingering and using a red rubber ball as a kind of sex toy, rubbing and bouncing it vigorously against her large pink vulva.

Studies are one thing, but then there’s just the way bonobos make you feel. They’re so “almost-human” on so many levels that science doesn’t even know how to test yet. Just look into any bonobo’s big brown eyes, and you may well feel like you’re connecting with a living version of the Missing Link.

Interestingly, bonobo percussionists prefer a tempo of 280 beats per minute, the syllabic rate at which most humans speak.