"The Bonobo and the Atheist"

Get ready for a real winner of an article. From ABC News:

Do We Need God to be Moral? 

One of the world's leading primatologists believes his decades of research with apes answers a question that has plagued humans since the beginning of time. 

Are we moral because we believe in God, or do we believe in God because we are moral? 

Frans de Waal argues in his latest book that the answer is clearly the latter. The seeds for moral behavior preceded the emergence of our species by millions of years, and the need to codify that behavior so that all would have a clear blueprint for morality led to the creation of religion, he argues. 

Most religious leaders would argue it's the other way around: Our sense of what's moral came from God, and without God there would be no morality. 

But this is a column about science, not religion, so it's worth asking if de Waal's own research supports his provocative conclusions, documented in the newly released book, "The Bonobo and the Atheist."