A community of chimpanzees in Kibale National Park essentially functioned as a microcosm of a stable human society. They shared their space, groomed each other, and maintained alliances that forged a cooperative bond, strengthening their community. And then, in 2015, this great chimp society came crumbling down, with researchers describing it 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 Science, aren’t exactly sure what sparked the dramatic split. They know that at first it just looked like a minor social drift. But by 2018, that escalated into lethal violence. At least 28 chimps have been killed, including 19 infants. The attacks seem coordinated and targeted, often with displays of gruesome, stomach-churning violence.
The Western group was the smaller of the two, but in time gained dominance. Its population numbers grew as it systematically attacked the Central chimps. The researchers observed group assaults where multiple 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 Chimp Society Collapsed Into Something Like Civil War
It’s also not the first time something like this has been documented. Back in the 1970s, recently deceased primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall documented a similar instance of chimp societal decay at Gombe National Park, a chimp civil war that was later referred to as the “Four-Year War,” where one group of chimps systematically killed another.
While the researchers were ultimately flummoxed as to why this is happening, they do have some theories. One is the unusually large size of the Nogogo group, which comprised around 200 individual chimps. Researchers think it’s sprawling society might have stretched its members’ ability to maintain strong social connections and intensified competition within the community.
The researchers also point to the deaths of some key males in the social order, along with the rise of a new alpha leader. All of that destabilization caused the chimps to form new alliances, and over time, those loose social circles hardened into opposing factions. Without any political ideologies or religious affiliations or nationalistic identities, the hallmarks of human conflict, it’s hard to say exactly what caused this rift in the chimp community. All we know is that as their society broke down, they retreated into factions and escalated their rivalries to the point of butchery.
It’s easy to draw parallels to human society and the constant wars and violence we inflict upon each other. But doing so ignores the complexities that separate us. Humans are much more cooperative by nature, and if anything, watching chimp societies tear each other apart for reasons that are mysterious to us only proves how well we’ve managed to mostly move beyond it.
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