Mass Protest in the Netherlands by Farmers.

Bonobos are closest to man.

They're not really Bobble. They're the same distance away from us as Chimpanzees and they deviate from each other by around 0.3% genetically*. Though they are interesting as a good example of how culture and cultural politics can often inform perceptions, even science. Bonobos are a largely matriarchal great ape, who are less aggressive than chimps and use sexual contact as a way to group bond and diffuse conflict(though it's not nearly so simple). This appealed to the counterculture "hippie" and first wave feminist generation in the 60's and 70's when great ape research was really kicking off, so much was made of these traits. They were also seen as vegatarian too, which they're not.

So the popularity of this closest to us notion springs from that background culture. If on the other hand we had the same culture as say Ancient Rome, they'd be far more interested in pushing the more aggressive, warlike, patriarchal and hierarchical Chimpanzee as "closest to us" and would relegate the Bonobos to a lesser position.

Neandertals were seen as brutish and stupid "cavemen", even their name is the only archaic human name that has made it into common parlance as a negative. This was because they were discovered and described at the cusp of truly modern science, the new Darwinism and a large overlap of old style religion, even European superiority and racism. They upended all of the above and the religious saw them as "fallen" thrown out of Eden humans and European science had to see them as different and "not us". That stuck for a long time. Well, until genetics came along and showed we carried their DNA and they were very much "indo European" in range and pale of skin, often with mousey, even red hair. So they went from this in our reconstructions:

To this in recent times:

Funny that...😁

A much more recent example of how current culture can inform perceptions in science was the discovery a couple of years ago of the burial of a woman(Altai IIRC) who was found with weapons and accessories normally found with male burials and in the literature there was debate if she was "non binary or Trans", because that's a current cultural thing. Such burials have come up before and no such hypotheses were put forward and were explained away quite differently. It's quite fascinating how such biases can be at play.

But I digress... 😁

*by comparison if you stand me, a native European beside a native Papuan, on archaic admixture alone I'll have up to 2%(or 4% by some measures) Neandertal DNA, he'll have less and they'll be different genes from a different population and he'll have up to 6% Denisovan DNA which I won't have at all. Stand a lad from the Congo beside the pair of us and he could quite understandably and reasonably conclude we're a pair of feckin' cavemen, because he'll have neither.