We can’t get enough of politicians thumping their chests, soap opera stars who swing from tryst to tryst and reality shows about who’s in and who’s out.

We share more with apes than power and sex, though. Fellow-feeling and empathy are equally important, but they’re rarely mentioned as part of our biological heritage. We would much rather blame nature for what we don’t like in ourselves than credit it for what we do like. As Katharine Hepburn famously put it in The African Queen, “Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”

This opinion is still very much with us. Of the millions of pages written over the centuries about human nature, none is as bleak as those of the last three decades — and none as wrong. We hear that we have selfish genes, that human goodness is a sham and that we act morally only to impress others.

But we are born with impulses that draw us to others and the old age of these is evident from the behaviour of our primate relatives.

When a bonobo named Kuni saw a starling hit the glass of her enclosure at Twycross Zoo, she went to comfort it. Picking up the stunned bird, she gently set it on its feet and protected it against a curious juvenile.

Instead of following some hardwired pattern of behaviour, she tailored her assistance to the specific situation of an animal totally different from herself. This kind of empathy is almost unheard of in animals since it rests on the ability to imagine the circumstances of another.

The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to make us happy, but we are not in the habit of embracing our nature. When people commit genocide, we call them “animals”. But when they give to the poor, we praise them for being “humane”. We like to claim the latter behaviour for ourselves.

It is our biological destiny, some scientists say, to grab power by vanquishing others and to wage war into perpetuity. I have witnessed enough bloodshed among chimpanzees to agree that apes have a violent streak but we shouldn’t ignore our other close relative, the bonobo. Bonobos belie the notion that ours is a purely bloodthirsty lineage as it is empathy that allows them to understand each other’s needs.

When the two-year-old daughter of a bonobo named Linda whimpered at her mother with pouting lips, it meant that she wanted to be nursed. Linda’s milk had dried up but she understood and went to the fountain to suck her mouth full of water. She sat in front of her daughter and puckered her lips so that the infant could drink from them, repeating her trip to the fountain three times until her daughter was satisfied.

With both cruel and compassionate sides, we therefore stand in the world like a Janus head, our two faces looking in opposite directions. This can confuse us to the point that we sometimes oversimplify who we are. We either claim to be the “crown of creation” or depict ourselves as the only true villains.

Why not accept that we are both? These two aspects of our species correspond to those of our closest living relatives. The chimpanzee demonstrates the violent side of human nature so well that few scientists write about any other side at all. But we are also intensely social creatures who rely on one another and actually need interaction with other people to lead sane and happy lives.

The empathic bonobos regularly put themselves into someone else’s shoes. At the Georgia State University Language Research Center in Atlanta, a bonobo called Kanzi has become a celebrity, known for his fabulous understanding of spoken English. Realising that some of his fellow apes do not have the same training, he occasionally adopts the role of teacher.

He once sat next to Tamuli, a younger sister who has had minimal exposure to human speech. As the researcher addressed Tamuli, Kanzi began to act out the meanings. When she was asked to groom Kanzi, he took her hand and placed it under his chin, squeezing it between his chin and chest. In this position, Kanzi stared into Tamuli’s eyes with what people interpreted as a questioning gaze. When Kanzi repeated the action, the young female rested her fingers on his chest as if wondering what to do.

Kanzi’s sensitivity to his sister’s lack of knowledge, and his kindness in teaching her, suggest a level of empathy found, as far as we know, only in humans and apes.

If people laugh at primates in the zoo, they do so because they are unsettled by the mirror held up to them. Primates arouse a certain nervousness because they show us ourselves in a brutally honest light, reminding us, in Desmond Morris’s felicitous phrase, that we are mere “naked apes”. The beauty is that now we know more about the bonobo, we can see ourselves reflected in two complementary mirrors.

Extracted from Our Inner Ape: The Best and Worst of Human Behaviour to be published on Tuesday by Granta Books at £17.99. Copies can be ordered for £16.19 with free delivery from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585