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Origins Program at
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What's in a Name?
"Bonobo" is most likely a misspelling of the word Bolobo, a small village in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the lone country inhabited by these gracile great apes. Another common name for the creature is "pygmy chimpanzee." This term too is somewhat of a misnomer, as the bonobo’s average size is equal to or even larger than that of one chimp subspecies, the eastern or long-haired chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii).
Takayoshi Kano, a leading bonobo field biologist, instead prefers the name elia (plural bilia), an indigenous African name for the animal. The Congolese apparently never use the term bonobo, and communication between local inhabitants and scientists is pivotal to conservation efforts.
The bonobo’s more appropriate scientific name, Pan paniscus, comes from the ancient Greek deity, Pan, a creature with a goat’s body, a person’s torso, and horns. Pan was a very playful deity—much like the bonobo—and was known for dancing to the sounds of his flute, frolicking in fields, and flirtatiously chasing nymphs through the forest.
ZooGoer 30(5) 2001. Copyright 2001 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.
How did a boy raised by wolves lend his name to a primate from Madagascar? The word “lemur” derives from the Latin word, lemures—meaning specters or spirits of the dead—and was given to these prosimians on account of the animals’ ghostly faces and nocturnal habits. The evolution of this Latin word has its own haunted history. According to ancient mythology, the city of Rome was founded by twin brothers Romulus and Remus, who had been suckled by a she-wolf as babies.
Arguing over who should rule the new city, Romulus murdered Remus and named the city after himself. But the ghost of the fallen brother haunted Rome from then on. Every May, citizens of Rome would hold a festival—first called Remuria, but later corrupted to Lemuria—to expiate the ghost of Remus and other ancestral spirits. From this tradition grew the word lemures, one of several Latin words—including larva, the shell of a ghost—used to refer to various forms of phantom.
“Lemuria” also is the name of a mythological sunken super-continent, akin to Atlantis, once believed to lie in the Indian Ocean—coincidentally near the real lemur’s native home.
—Alex Hawes and Sue Zwicker
ZooGoer 30(4) 2001. Copyright 2001. Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.
