http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Humans-Would-Be-Better-Off-If-They-Monkeyed-Around-Like-the-Muriquis-220566921.html?c=y&page=1#spider_monkeys_01_631x473.jpg

Article doesn't actually explain how humans would be better off, spoiler alert, they wouldn't be, but sprinkles feminist values throughout the article while taking subtle jabs at traditional masculinity and promoting the ideal feminist utopia.

Relevant snippets:

When Strier was first getting to know the muriquis, primatology was still largely focused on just a handful of species that had adapted to life on the ground, including baboons, or that had close evolutionary relationships with humans, such as apes. This emphasis came to shape public perception of primates as essentially aggressive. We picture chest-beating, teeth-flashing dominant male gorillas competing to mate with any female they choose. We picture, as Goodall had witnessed beginning in 1974, chimpanzees invading other territories, biting and beating other chimps to death. Primates, including possibly the most violent one of all—us—seemed to be born ruffians.

For a long time, New World monkeys were the second-class citizens of primatology. “New World primates were considered not so smart, not so interesting, and not so relevant to human evolution,” says Frans de Waal, director of the Living Links Center at Emory University’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center. “They were sidelined—totally inappropriately, as Karen has demonstrated.”

Strier’s research introduced the world to an alternative primate lifestyle. Female muriquis mate with a lot of males and males don’t often fight. Though bonobos, known for their casual sex, are often called the “hippie” primates, the muriquis in Strier’s study site are equally deserving of that reputation. They are peace-loving and tolerant. Strier also showed that the muriquis turn out to be incredibly cooperative, a characteristic that may be just as important in primate societies as vicious rivalry.

Muriquis’ cooperative behaviors are often on display when they’re eating. A few days into my visit, Strier and I watch nine males demonstrate their manners as they eat pods in a legume tree. When one monkey scoots past another on a branch, it pauses to hug its neighbor, as if to say, “Pardon, so sorry.”

Muriquis almost never fight over food with members of their own group. They will chase howler monkeys or capuchins out of fruiting trees, and they loudly protest incursions by muriquis from other parts of the forest. But males and females, young and old, behave toward members of their own group in ways that can fairly be described as considerate.

Some of the muriquis in the legume tree exchange little pats as they brush by each other. Two of them, on a short break from eating, sit haunch to haunch, one resting his hand on top of the other’s head. Before they resume picking pods, they hug.

Affectionate gestures, including full-body face-to-face embraces, are common. It’s not unusual to see five or more muriquis in a tangled furry cuddle. Strier says that some males become more popular as they age, and younger males seek the company of the elders and solicit hugs during times of tension. Squabbles are rare. “Maybe their drive for social cohesion and conformity is much stronger than their aggression,” says Strier.

They also tend to be easygoing about the other big activity that agitates almost all other primates: sex. Unlike chimpanzees and baboons, male muriquis don’t attack rivals to keep them from females, Strier says. There are no alphas in these societies, so muriqui twosomes don’t have to sneak off to evade punishment by jealous suitors. What’s more, female muriquis don’t need to form coalitions to protect infants from murderous males. Strier has called muriqui mating a “passive affair.” Males don’t chase down females or bully them into sexual submission. Instead, a male waits for an invitation from a female, who selects her partners and copulates openly. Instead of battling each other for access to females, males bond into extensive brotherhoods, and Strier suspects they have replaced fighting with “sperm competition.” In proportion to their slight frames, muriquis have oversized testicles. It may be that the male producing the most sperm has the most tickets in the reproductive raffle.

When Strier first observed these behaviors, she thought muriquis were anomalies in the primate world. But as research documented the behaviors of a broader range of primates, Strier realized there was actually a lot of variation—more than was generally acknowledged. In 1994 she wrote a paper titled “Myth of the Typical Primate” that urged her colleagues to reconsider the emphasis on aggression as a mediator of primate relationships, which “prevailed despite repeated efforts to demonstrate the limitations of such arguments.” She contended that the roots of primate social behavior, including that of people, might be more accurately reflected in the flexibility, tolerance, cooperation and affection that predominate among most primates, and that these qualities are at least as recognizably human as aggressiveness, competition and selfishness. Strier’s paper was pivotal in initiating a new way of thinking about primate behavior.

“We have this idea that competition is good,” says Robert Sussman, professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis and co-author of Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators, and Human Evolution, “that everybody is out for themselves, and that the people at the top are by nature superior. But there’s now lots of evidence that competition among primates only occurs when the environment changes because of outside influence.

For years she has collected hormone data on individual females by positioning herself to catch falling feces. She says they smell like cinnamon.

Smells like cinnamon.