I don't know if it's part of the evo psyche arguments - but it demonstrates the way that viewing proto-human psychology through the lens of modern humans may be too much of a stretch - esp. since Freud has had such an impact on psychological thought.
As I've noted before, Freud's greatest contribution was to create a "trinty" that could offer an alternative to religious views of humans as sinners - he reframed the idea and put the gods in our heads - but it wasn't all that different from prevailing views of gender/sex - and has outlived its usefulness. when I was studying many of these issues, back in the misty mists of time - 20 years ago - I was told then Freudian theory was passé in many respects.
ANYWAY...
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tame-theory-did-bonobos/
one view of bonobos is that they domesticated themselves b/c they live where there is abundant fruit and no competition from gorillas for access to this food. Common chimps have to compete with gorillas in their habitat - which is marked from bonobos by a river. None of them swim - so that was a mostly impenetrable barrier.
Bonobos appear more juvenile in their features than common chimps, and the person who wrote about this hypothesis wonders if bonobos didn't benefit from slower maturation, which allowed time to develop better social skills within their communities. fwiw, bonobos "ask for consent" for sex from females by showing themselves or, sometimes, offering food. females can turn them down - but, for them, sex is more like a handshake - so really the point is not a human/bonobo comparison, beyond noting that's a cooperative trait, not an domineering one.
Frans de Waal, one of the leading researchers for bonobos, questions the hypothesis, however, and wonders if it didn't work the other way around - the competition from gorillas made common chimps more aggressive and faster maturing. bonobos appear to be more peaceful and more sexually open than humans - bonobos have no incest taboo for sex - and such happens - but for reproduction, at maturity, females seek out a new group to avoid incest. they make friends with the females in the group - that's important for their survival.
The interesting thing about this for humans is that we are the slowest of the primates, in terms of maturation. We're so slow, in fact, that our offspring require another nine months of development, on avg., and many more years of learning skills required for our environments...and these requirements kept increasing. The reason for the additional "gestation" is because we give birth to offspring with heads that just can make it out of the birth canal - and our heads continue to grow larger in that gestational period.
Females could very well have selected for more "domesticated" males - ones who showed less aggression and more group/community cooperation - because this sort of male would improve the chances for survival of an offspring. Males would display themselves by their skills, rather than their dominance traits.
What's also interesting, to me, is that the reason we seem to have become bipedal is to diversify our skill set - with hands. bipedalism came before bigger brains and before we evolved into homo sapiens.
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