In the chapter THE APE THAT DOMESTICATED ITSELF I go into the theory that bonobos are neotenised chimpanzees - i.e. they have retained juvenile traits - and that this involved selection against the levels of aggression we normally associate with more demonic chimpanzee society. The suggestion is, that in terms of neoteny, we humans are bonobos writ large. In this article in New Scientist Ewen Callaway covers similar ground, reporting on similar arguments from a research associate of Richard Wrangham and Brian Hare, Victoria Wobber, from Harvard. Callaway also cites the research of Mehmet Somel, now at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, which claimed that certain genes tend to be activated in the human brain at a later stage of development than they do in the brains of chimps and rhesus monkeys.
For those interested in taking this further, Somel's paper in PNAS is open access and a pdf can be downloaded from here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2659716/pdfzpq5743.pdf
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