Bonobos (Pan paniscus) are a highly social great ape species that have evolved rich social and emotional capacities to enable them to navigate their complex social worlds. This includes sophisticated ways to express their inner states as well to respond to those of others, including prosocially to their needs. These capacities form a core basis of empathy, a term which broadly refers to the sharing and understanding of others’ emotional states. Although some of the more cognitively-complex forms of empathy are thought to represent evolutionarily-derived traits unique to our own species, comparative evidence from a range of animal and bird species reveals that many of the core foundations of empathy have deep evolutionary roots. This includes the capacity to share others’ states through emotional contagion and mimicry, as well as to behaviourally orientate towards others in distress in order to ameliorate their state, a phenomenon known as consolation). Given the importance of bonobos for understanding the evolution of empathy, the aim of this chapter is to review the concept of empathy, consider its evolution and discuss what we know thus far about the empathic capacities of bonobos. Evidence for empathy in bonobos will be discussed, spanning research conducted in captivity, semi-captivity and observations made in the wild. As chimpanzees are the close cousins of bonobos and extensively overlap in their socio-emotional tendencies, insights will also be drawn from chimpanzees and other species to get a richer picture of how empathy has evolved in Pan.