A massive chimpanzee community collapsed in civil war, and the details are horrific
A community of chimpanzees in Kibale National Park essentially functioned as a microcosm of a stable human society. They shared their space, nurtured each other and maintained alliances that created a bond of cooperation and strengthened their society. And then, in 2015, this great chimpanzee society collapsed in what researchers described as something akin to a gruesome and brutally violent civil war.
The Ngogo chimpanzee group split into two factions – western and central. The researchers, who published their findings in the journal Scienceare not entirely sure what triggered the dramatic split. They know that at first it just looked like a minor social operation. But in 2018 it escalated to deadly violence. At least 28 chimpanzees have been killed, including 19 infants. The attacks appear coordinated and targeted, often with displays of gruesome, gut-wrenching violence.
The western group was the smaller of the two, but eventually gained dominance. Its population grew as it systematically attacked the central chimpanzees. The researchers observed group attacks in which several males would overwhelm a single victim, often tearing infants away from their mothers before killing them.
Again, these were once animals that shared a community.
This once stable chimpanzee society collapsed into something like civil war
It is also not the first time that something similar has been documented. Back in the 1970s, the recently deceased primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall documented a similar case of chimpanzee social decay in Gombe National Park, a chimpanzee civil war later referred to as the “Four Years’ War” in which one group of chimpanzees systematically killed another.
While the researchers were ultimately uneasy about why this happens, they have some theories. One is the unusually large size of the Nogogo group, which included about 200 individual chimpanzees. Researchers believe that extended societies may have stretched members’ ability to maintain strong social connections and intensified competition within society.
The researchers also point to the death of some key men in the social order along with the emergence of a new alpha leader. All that destabilization caused the chimpanzees to form new alliances, and over time the loose social circles hardened into conflicting factions. With no political ideologies or religious affiliations or nationalistic identities, the hallmarks of human conflict, it is hard to say exactly what caused this rift in the chimpanzee community. All we know is that as their society broke down, they retreated into factions and escalated their rivalry into a slaughterhouse.
It is easy to draw parallels to human society and the constant wars and violence we inflict on each other. But to do so ignores the complexities that separate us. Humans are much more cooperative by nature, and if anything, seeing chimpanzee societies tear each other apart for reasons that are mysterious to us only proves how well we’ve mostly managed to move beyond that.
