A pity that google couldn’t show that to me when I went searching. Still, I loves my etymology!

It turns out that “jocko” originated as merely a mispronunciation of the original local African word for “chimpanzee”. It seems to have gone like this: “Encheko” or “Nshiego” to “Engeco” or “Nchego” to “Enjocko” to “Jocko” This is a citation from the Old English Dictionary:

“Jocko. Also Jacko. [a. F. jocko, erroneously made by Buffon out of engeco, properly ncheko, the native name of the chimpanzee in the Gaboon country, West Africa.]”

“Their local name for the Chimpanzee is Enche-eko, as near as it can be anglicised, from which the common term Jocko probably comes. [1861 P. B. DU CHAILLU Equat. Africa xx. 359 In the Gaboon country the Chimpanzee is called Nshiego, in the interior it is known as the Ncheko. Ibid. 362 The Chimpanzee is called Engeco by Battel, 1625;..Enjocko, Jocko, by Buffon, 1766; Inchego, by Bowdich, 1819; Enche-eco, by Savage, in 1847; Ntchego, by Franquet, in 1852; Nchego, by Aubry Lecomte, 1854-57; most of which are variations again of the Camma name, which, according to our English mode of spelling, should be, as I have given it, Nshiego..the negro name for the true Chimpanzee.] 1863 HUXLEY Man’s Place Nat. i. 14 Thus it was that Andrew Battell’s ‘Engeco’ became metamorphosed into ‘Jocko’, and, in the latter shape, was spread all over the world, in consequence of the extensive popularity of Buffon’s works.”

I’d like to know the etymology of that usage.

A nice look into not only the bonobo itself but the evolution of field biology and early systematics.

Whenever I come across this subject I always ponder why the bonobo are more gracile and wonder if it’s related to some reason for their carrying juvenile traits into maturity, in a way that dogs have apparently done in their evolution from their ancestral wolves to become our interspecies ally, and as was found in that well known example from a Siberian fox farm, when foxes were chosen for tameness, or lack of aggression or innate submissiveness, which made them “tamer” in an attempt to select for manageability by those raising and breeding them for their fur. I have to wonder if a similar experiment in a primate wouldn’t have similar results.

No I don’t. Because an interesting point can be made here about people’s subjective reactions to an animal they are unfamiliar with.

The blog mentions “the near human-like appearance of the bonobo” and the odd way people reacted to that. Well, sure, I suppose, it’s sort of humanlike. But like the other apes it is, very clearly, an ape. A lot of people might look at those photos and think – like many sasquatch eyewitnesses – that what they are seeing is unsettlingly human-looking. My first look at a facial closeup of an orangutan had me thinking: that is a PERSON! But of course I was a little kid then, unfamiliar with the orangutan, and there’s no way I would think that now.

Many skeptics think that eyewitness descriptions of the sasquatch vary wildly, and use their thinking to discount the anecdotal evidence. The point I’m trying to make is: that reaction is always subjective. Some people see a hominoid and go, that’s an ape. Some see it and think: that looks so human I’m uncomfortable calling it an ape. But they can be seeing the exact same animal.

(I saw a reconstruction of an Australopithecus afarensis toddler on the cover of National Geographic a few years back. The cover shouted, in big letters, First Child. Looked like an orangutan to me.)