Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr71lkzv49po

by neversaydie • 3 months ago

439 277 3 months ago

bbc.com

codevark• 3 months ago

They've been watching us and what we do to each other.

crazydoggers2• 3 months ago

We both do it because chimps and humans shared a common ancestor only 8 million years ago.

tuveson• 3 months ago

No bonobo wars though

dyauspitr3• 3 months ago

8 million years is a drop on the geological time scale, but on a species scale that’s an eternity. We went from Neanderthals and Denisovans to sapiens in a fraction of that time.

bena• 3 months ago

That's a bit conceited.

Animals have inner lives as well. They have their own thoughts and feelings. And sometimes those feelings are anger and their thought is to kick the shit out of those assholes over there.

Fuck man, my cats occasionally scrap with each other. I know it's not anything they've learned from the people in my house because we don't go full Wrestlemania on each other.

loganc2342• 3 months ago

If anyone is interested in going more in-depth on this, there's a four episode documentary series on Netflix called Chimp Empire [1]. I just saw it last week and it's fascinating stuff. You get to know the individual chimps in-depth (they all have names) and get to see conflicts in this "civil war" unfold. Plus I learned a lot about social and "political" dynamics among chimps.

[1] https://www.netflix.com/title/81311783

culi4• 3 months ago

For those of us who are unlikely to make time to watch a 4-part documentary, are there any particular lessons about social/political dynamics that you learned that stuck out to you or felt particularly prescient?

theultdev• 3 months ago

I'm on the other end. Finally some content to watch before bed.

Love quiet documentary type things in that scenario.

Bonus if there's a lot of episodes.

codersfocus• 3 months ago

There's a post that says illness killed some important leaders (who were friends) on both sides of the camp. Once these leaders died, the two groups realized they didn't have anything in common with each other so they're fighting.

stuxnet79• 3 months ago

For those of us who are unlikely to make time to watch a 4-part documentary, are there any particular lessons about social/political dynamics that you learned that stuck out to you or felt particularly prescient?

I watched the entire 4-part documentary and loved it. In general the series gives you a raw look into the a-b-c's of primate politics. Chimps just like us and the rest of our ape cousins are preoccupied with hierarchy, status and accumulation of resources which guides every single action they take from birth until death.

What is different about Chimp Empire is that it is presented in a much more compelling way relative to the standard (dry) academic literature or popular science texts (i.e. Chimpanzee Politics by Frans De Waal).

Even after finishing the documentary I've found myself connecting events in the series with current geopolitcal issues. One event in the show that stuck out to me was a battle between two rival camps over a single fruit tree. Gaining control over that tree was a critical factor in determining the survival of the two rival groups. To us, post neolithic age and industrial revolution, it's an amusing watch. But to chimps, a single fruit tree in their territory is everything. It is life and death. While there's a difference in scale, the same underlying motivations - in my mind - currently explain what is going in the middle east and eastern europe.

Also, the documentary is great case study in how, loneliness and introversion can be absolutely lethal in the wild. The politics in each Chimp community can get quite toxic but participation isn't really optional. You either play the game or quite literally die.

If you really want a good intellectual exercise, I recommend watching Chimp Empire in its entirety and then The Expanse right after. Try to tell me they are not the same show :P

lotsofpulp• 3 months ago

There are far too many documentaries that omit or slant information for documentaries as a category to be considered informational. Especially ones on Netflix.

perfmode2• 3 months ago

Loved this series. It was tragic. The cycle of violence, trauma, isolation, male performance.

pavel_lishin2• 3 months ago

I haven't seen Chimp Empire, but it reminds me of the story of the Baboons where the alpha males died, and the entire society changed: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/teacher...

(It also features a very amusing photo at the top that makes it look like the subject is the biologist Robert Sapolsky.)

coliveira• 3 months ago

This is reality TV with animals. Like any reality TV show, the events and reactions are manipulated. I wouldn't put any credibility on this.

murm• 3 months ago

There's also the 1,5h documentary Rise of the Warrior Apes which is sort of a "prequel" to Chimp Empire. It was filmed over a period of 20 years in the same location and documents how the researches originally came upon this unusual chimpanzee tribe. The production values are not nearly as polished as in Chimp Empire but in my opinion it was still an interesting watch if you find this kind of stuff fascinating. The researchers themselves talk a lot in this.

delichon5• 3 months ago

I hope nobody decides to violate the prime directive and take sides in the chimp war.

To the extent that they have good memory, they live in a world of finite resources, and their behavior was shaped by the forces of game theory as applied to tribes, this is more or less inevitable. You can read that as defeatism or just math. We can't overcome the force of game theory, but we can make it work for us by making our transactions increasingly transparent and repeatable, so that cooperation is more successful than defection.

perfmode2• 3 months ago

That’s one way to look at it. It’s fairly common to view nature this way. I wonder where it comes from.

I remember the time, in some film I watched, researchers intervened to save penguins trapped in a crater. A holy moment that was.

mrloop• 3 months ago

BBC Dynasties https://youtu.be/2Co_hmLenD8

the_af7• 3 months ago

To the extent that they have good memory, they live in a world of finite resources, and their behavior was shaped by the forces of game theory as applied to tribes, this is more or less inevitable. You can read that as defeatism or just math. We can't overcome the force of game theory, but we can make it work for us by making our transactions increasingly transparent and repeatable, so that cooperation is more successful than defection.

Note that the conclusions of the paper, while acknowledging the problem of access to resources, are different. They also do not conclude that this is "more or less inevitable":

The lethal aggression that followed the fission at Ngogo informs models of intergroup conflict. All observed attacks were initiated by the numerically smaller Western group, contradicting simple imbalance-of-power models that predict an advantage for larger groups. Persistent offensive success by Western males suggests that cohesion supported by enduring relationships can outweigh numeric disadvantage. Our observations are also relevant for predictions from parochial altruism. Because cohesion among the Western cluster preceded overt hostility, external threats may be unnecessary to foster cooperation. Cohesion among members of the wider Ngogo group, however, may have weakened when external threats from adjacent groups decreased after territorial expansion in 2009.

and

This study encourages a reevaluation of current models of human collective violence. If chimpanzee groups can polarize, split, and engage in lethal aggression without human-type cultural markers, then relational dynamics may play a larger causal role in human conflict than often assumed. Cultural traits remain essential for large-scale cooperation, but many conflicts may originate in the breakdown of interpersonal relationships rather than in entrenched ethnic or ideological divisions. It is tempting to attribute polarization and war that occur in humans today to ethnic, religious, or political divisions. Focusing entirely on these cultural factors, however, overlooks social processes that shape human behavior—processes also present in one of our closest animal relatives. In some cases, it may be in the small, daily acts of reconciliation and reunion between individuals that we find opportunities for peace.

Which sounds kinda hopeful!

My own observations is that the preconditions for the split that led to open warfare between the two Chimp groups was:

1. The nonviolent (illness) death of a few key individuals that linked both groups, and...

2. The complete stop of interbreeding. Once the two groups stopped interbreeding, the split was finalized and they became truly hostile.

Stretching this a bit, it makes me think of those (usually white supremacists) who claim "multiculturalism" is to blame for all the world's problems, and if only every ethnic or religious group stayed in their lane and didn't mix with the other, we could all live in peace. But it seems to me the lesson from this paper is that this (isolating us in separate groups) would make the split complete enough that we would decisively start butchering each other.

andrekandre2• 3 months ago

  > But it seems to me the lesson from this paper is that this (isolating us in separate groups) would make the split complete enough that we would decisively start butchering each other.

of course, and historically we can see that from the past 300 years leading up to ww1 and ww2; every empire was in it for themselves and very nationalistic, mercantilism ruled the day, and lots of crazy theories such as phrenology and eugenics started to appear leading to all kinds of atrocities...

jasonwatkinspdx• 3 months ago

I'd suggest reading some David Graeber. Viewing everything through the lens of game theory, as if it was some physical law, is very much off the mark.

shimman2• 3 months ago

Great comment. Dawn of Everything changed a lot how I viewed early humanity.

hparadiz• 3 months ago

Prime directive doesn't apply because they are part of our home planet. Our actions or in-actions can improve or worsen their living conditions. Their natural world is gone anyway. We've changed it already.

throwaway274482• 3 months ago

We can't overcome the force of game theory

Game theory isn't a force. It's just one way of modeling behavior through one sense of rationality, and it rarely maps neatly onto actual human behavior.

delichon5• 3 months ago

It may be easier to think of evolution as the force, and game theory strongly influencing the fitness test. Those who play the games of mating and predator/prey more optimally reproduce more. We descend from billions of generations of the winners.

neom2• 3 months ago

Here is the paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz4944 - it's interesting.

I noticed there was a respiratory epidemic that killed 25 chimps naturally quickly, one would imagine that would have quite a societal destabilizing impact?

Aboutplants• 3 months ago

My initial instinct is that they were just reestablishing social order among the group after such a dramatic event.

Edit : I just read the paper and the discussion does a good job at laying out the entire landscape that contributed to the disruption. Pretty fascinating but also totally explainable due to the circumstances explained, which in and of itself is wildly fascinating!

the_af7• 3 months ago

I think some of the individuals who died were key in linking the two groups (they were "the glue" that prevented disruptive aggression), and after they were gone, the split cemented and later turned into aggression.

jandrese2• 3 months ago

Sudden power vacuums are often filled by the most opportunistic individuals in human culture. People who are frequently more concerned with personal gain over the collective well-being of the group. It's why assassinating heads of state usually just makes the situation worse.

culi4• 3 months ago

Just like in human analyses of geopolitical situations, the explanations that rely on broad abstractions of human nature or resource competition and paint a teleological narrative always end up breaking down when you do a deep dive into the history and specific circumstances. When you get into the nitty gritty of every unique geopolitical situation it's actually much more difficult to pull out a generalizable lesson imo. At some point we have to accept that we can't cross the same river twice

harimau777• 3 months ago

I wonder if chimps are sophisticated enough to believe in omens? Perhaps they saw the sudden deaths are some sort of sign that the established structure was weak or immoral.

neom2• 3 months ago

I could imagine if you where friends with someone and a bunch of their friends suddenly and mysteriously died, personally, I wouldn't kill that friend, but I might call the cops.

znort_• 3 months ago

a respiratory epidemic that killed 25 chimps naturally quickly, one would imagine that would have quite a societal destabilizing impact?

there were several seemingly destabilizing factors, sort of a perfect storm, each contributing to further disconnect and polarization.

the group grew too large (and displaced other groups), but then ended competing for the best food among themselves, and having trouble socializing and bonding in such a large group.

subgroups forming, first fluid but eventually creating a split

loss of older alpha males exacerbating competition between males

loss of the few individuals that still maintained some relationship with the other group (the last one doing so actually died in that epidemic while the split was already well underway)

it is indeed an amazing read. my take away is that the root cause was mainly the group becoming too large, this affected socialization and cohesion, and thus the group was unable to cope with everything that came after.

seizethecheese2• 3 months ago

Makes me wonder if civil war is more common for larger countries. Reminds me of the phenomenon where Latin American countries pretty much all broke up after independence from Spain.

fred_is_fred• 3 months ago

Makes me wonder if a respirator epidemic that killed people could also have a destabilizing impact on human society. I guess we may never know.

elcapitan• 3 months ago

So which side is fighting for our values?

culi4• 3 months ago

The Western Ngogo are clearly trying to spread the values of democracy and equality to the backwards Central Ngogo society that also happens to also have resources important to the Western Ngogo

Central Ngogo has complained that every time it's tried to democratically elect a leader, that leader had been overthrown by Western Ngogo—creating an environment that is hostile to anyone other than WN having a so-called "democracy". CN has also criticized WN as ultimately just being "oligarchy with extra steps" and creating an empire that requires the subjugation of CN.

mchaver• 3 months ago

I am siding with the group that opens bananas from the bottom.

pavel_lishin2• 3 months ago

Which side is the bottom?

gostsamo• 3 months ago

negotiations on petrol rights still ongoing.

Nevermark3• 3 months ago

That depends on which side of "our values" you are talking about.

Are you orange team or green team?

dyauspitr3• 3 months ago

This got me thinking. Do chimpanzees try and mate with pre pubescent young or is that somehow nature gated?

alehlopeh• 3 months ago

Apparently Bonobos regularly have sexual relations with infants.

shevy-java• 3 months ago

I always wondered when Planet of the Apes would begin. We can see it now:

a) Chimpanzees going to war. b) Humans ending humans.

Both is presently in the making, if one looks at the geopolitical scale and looks at damage caused by drones; a) is probably not yet full scale. Chimpanzees may be better diplomats than humans.

hmokiguess• 3 months ago

That's absolutely bananas!

OgsyedIE• 3 months ago

The primatologist Richard Wrangam once advanced the theory that tribe vs. tribe conspecific homicides - what he called coalitionary killing - are an evolved trait that was selected for in primates by some kind of pro-homicide selection pressures in the ancestral environment (where homicide reliably grants an advantage to the expected relative gene frequency of the perpetrator's genes).

I haven't kept up with biology for years and don't know what the current consensus on the topic is but it's interesting to consider if some environments naturally promote the unlucky inhabitants to harm each other.

londons_explore2• 3 months ago

It seems obvious to me - it's the combination of two ideas:

1. When competing for resources, killing your neighbour frees up resources, which you can take. Most species of animal and even plants do this to some extent.

2. By collaborating in a group, you can achieve more than individuals acting alone. This is the idea behind teams, companies, countries, etc.

Combine the two ideas, and you get war.

Sharlin2• 3 months ago

It's definitely not obvious, given that many, many gregarious species may certainly have inter-group clashes and skirmishes at territory boundaries but no full-scale war. Animals in general avoid violence between conspecifics, for the obvious reason that it's rarely worth the risk of being hurt unless you're very sure you're going to win. Dying for your group is something you almost never see outside eusocial species. Never mind dying in your prime reproductive age!

bluegatty5• 3 months ago

Yes, but war is worse for all parties generally.

Lions murdering prey to eat is a stable equilibrium.

Primates fighting each other is not.

Murdering for acquisition of a resource is short term advantage.

We are strongly, strongly evolutionary oriented away from 'murder' - it's the original sin. It's not something we even argue over. Murder = Bad. No disagreement across cultures. Murder = social cheating. No disagreement there either.

Or put another way - the 'self' can gain advantage with murder, but the group and species probably will pay for it long term.

I wonder if there are just things that species really have to learn over and over, particularly things like 'active deconfliction' etc..

the_af7• 3 months ago

When competing for resources, killing your neighbour frees up resources, which you can take

I don't think it's that straightforward. War is usually extremely wasteful for all involved, even the victor. Plus it puts the whole group at risk, if it spirals out of control.

dontlikeyoueith• 3 months ago

When competing for resources, killing your neighbour frees up resources, which you can take. Most species of animal and even plants do this to some extent.

If anything, I'd say plants do it more. Everything in the garden is trying to kill everything else.

JohnMakin• 3 months ago

orangutans deal with similar and are notorious for being peaceful

hetman• 3 months ago

Except in this instance the conflict erupted after the population size was reduced due to disease so it's not entirely clear this was caused by the scarcity of resources. Nor is it clear what selective advantage mutually destructive wars would have assuming plenty of resources. The researchers posit group relational dynamics being the primary factor.

konschubert6• 3 months ago

Important to remember that we as humans no longer compete for resources.

We have more than enough resources to go around for 10 billion people.

The limiting factor is in intelligence and dexterity. In other words, we get richer when we are more.

jvanderbot• 3 months ago

There's a simple energy argument for both predation and war. It is energetically cheaper to take than to build. If you can take with low risk, there is no (energetic) reason to not do so.

Collaboration is the exception. That collaboration is everywhere in many forms is a testament to the power of natural selection.

sjducb• 3 months ago

Normally there are more than 2 actors, which changes the reward structure.

X spends resources to kill Y. This benefits X because X doesn’t have to compete with Y anymore.

However Z also gets the benefits because they don’t have to compete with Y either. In addition Z hasn’t spent any resources to eliminate Y so Z wins. The stable equilibrium is 100% strategy Z.

Most animals will use violence in self defence, or when fighting over a specific resource. They don’t kill to remove competition.

Chimps and humans are an exception to this. Likely it’s because the coalitional nature of human and chimp violence reduces the cost of inflicting the violence to near zero, and the costs are spread across the group, so it’s worth doing.

JumpCrisscross3• 3 months ago

I’m trying to find the source, but I remember a primatologist claiming that humans and chimpanzees are the only two species that embark on genocide. Not being satisfied with simply defeating the enemy, but actively hunting them down to ensure they can’t harm you again. In other words, precluding retreat. (Which creates its own game-theoretical backlash: never retreat.)

nradov• 3 months ago

Evidence is limited but orcas might also do that to great white sharks. The orcas seem to sometimes work together to exterminate sharks from an area in a way that goes beyond just hunting them for food.

dlcarrier2• 3 months ago

It's really common.

In species where a prominent male has a harem of multiple females. This usually involves killing not only rival males, but all of their offspring too. Here's a Wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide_(zoology)

In species which keep territories, animals will kill rivals of the same species, but because it's not targeted it's not genocidal, unless the species eusocial, in which case it can result in massive genocidal wars, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=War_in_ants

everdrive• 3 months ago

Back in the old days people were much more unabashed about such things. What's the purpose of your very small collection of city states? Obviously to expand, and smash any neighboring states. If you succeed, kill all the men and take their women as slaves. This was much of civilization for a long time.

Epa0952• 3 months ago

Tja, IAMNAH, but my impression is that there is much more diversity to history than that. Not all groups attempted to expand, and among those who did there are many who swallowed up close by groups without violence (rather through 'cultural victory' so to say). It might even be the norm historically.

Culonavirus• 3 months ago

primatologist

sometimes I feel like that at work

xg15• 3 months ago

Given how easily we can separate people into "ingroups" and "outgroups" and always fall into the same behavioral patterns regarding them, even if the actual markers for the ingroups and outgroups are completely arbitrary, it really seems likely this is biological and not just cultural.

trollbridge• 3 months ago

Don't ant colonies also go to war? I've seen that happen before and it's quite interesting - I read a theory somewhere that part of the purpose of this was to prevent overpopulation, so in the long run _both_ ant colonies do better since they don't "cooperate" and end up overpopulating.

Xiaoher-C• 3 months ago

Worth adding some nuance to the Wrangham framing here — he's not wrong exactly, but de Waal spent decades documenting the flip side: chimps reconcile, console each other, maintain coalitions in ways that don't fit the "demonic males" narrative cleanly. Both are true, and which one you see probably depends a lot on which population you're studying and under what conditions.

Ngogo (which I think this is) is in a fragment under real agricultural pressure. I'd be cautious about drawing evolutionary-psychology conclusions from a group that may be responding to a dramatically compressed territory rather than some baseline ancestral program. Same chimps in intact forest might look quite different.

griffzhowl2• 3 months ago

Good points, but it any case, it's true that chimps in general treat group members very differently to outsiders isn't it? Those behaviours that de Waal mentions seem probably directed towards group members. Are there any documented chimp populations where chimps aren't violently aggressive towards members of other groups?

I remember reading, not sure if it's from de Waal, about chimp "raiding parties", where groups of young males will get excited and loudly vocalise as they gather together and head towards a neighboring territory, but when they get close they all go very silent, and will attack individuals from a neighboring troop if they sufficiently outnumber them. They tend to target the face and genitals when attacking other chimps, a different behaviour to when they're hunting monkeys, for example. I think Wrangham mentions that some chimps will hold the targeted individuals' limbs while others attack.

Aside from the brutality, these behaviours seem too cogently goal-directed and sophisticated to just be responses to environmental pressures. There's some deeper reasons involved, imo, even if the severity of the violence is exacerbated by resource and territorial pressures.

kjkjadksj• 3 months ago

For whatever reason, bonobos living under similar environmental constraints don’t do this. This suggests to me that the behavior is strongly controlled by genetics. Makes one wonder about the warmongers in our own species if they harbor some warmonger gene.

Andrex• 3 months ago

I mean, kill everyone else and you can be sure your genes are the only one propagating. Makes sense to me.

However there must have been some opposite instinct that prevented monkeys from just wiping themselves out. I hope so, for our sake.

dboreham• 3 months ago

an evolved trait

This is obviously not correct. There's no way to encode "you must hate and kill the tribe next door" into DNA. Clearly this behavior is emergent in the population. Perhaps what's an evolved trait is "have neurons with some mixture of properties, and response to hormones that tends to produce angry homicidal assholes in the presence of competition for resources".

semiinfinitely• 3 months ago

we can send them some of that vim donation money

mike_hearn2• 3 months ago

If chimpanzees - one of the species closest to humans genetically - could do so without human constructs of religion, ethnicity and political beliefs, then "relational dynamics may play a larger causal role in human conflict than often assumed", they added.

That's a weird thing to say. Studies of primitive tribes showed decades ago that they only seem to fight each other for a handful of reasons. Religion, ethnicity and political beliefs aren't among them. Fighting over resources, women and blood feuds are.

Supposedly academic anthropology had difficulties accepting these findings, especially the Yamomamö studies by Chagnon where he documented them going to war to steal each other's women, as it contradicted the popular idea of the noble savage.

throwi790• 3 months ago

No religion other than Christianity and Islam fought for a man made religion. They haven't slowed down after wiping out thousands of cultures and tribes

bit-anarchist2• 3 months ago

That's a pretty strong statement. You know the saying: strong statements require equally strong evidence.

tsimionescu• 3 months ago

Unless you think that Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, Daoism, or the many millions of polytheistic cults are not man made religions, then you are completely wrong. Wars and atrocities have been fought using every religion and ideology in history as a pretext.

jandrese2• 3 months ago

It makes sense. Convincing someone to go kill other people so they can take their stuff and rape their women isn't that hard. The personal benefit is front and center, it aligns easily with human nature.

Convincing someone to go kill other people so you can get their stuff is a lot harder. You have to get creative with the reasons, and even then you had better be giving those fighters their cut unless you've really managed to get them fully committed to whatever excuse to made up. It helps a lot if there is some kind of wedge issue you can exploit, which is where religion and ethnicity come in handy.

inferniac• 3 months ago

yeah but some people still think "imagine" is profound and real

lelanthran• 3 months ago

But... this isn't exactly news, is it?

We've known for decades that chimpanzees go to war, and during that war will happily slaughter each other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

the_af7• 3 months ago

That's a weird thing to say. Studies of primitive tribes showed decades ago that they only seem to fight each other for a handful of reasons. Religion, ethnicity and political beliefs aren't among them. Fighting over resources, women and blood feuds are.

Why is it weird? Religion, ethnicity and political beliefs are argued all the time, even here on HN, as the reason for why shit happens.

Also, what is a "blood feud" in the primates? Chimps seeking revenge for the murder of another Chimp? Why was the first Chimp killed then? I think "blood feud" is a good start, but why? The paper sort of explores possible reasons.

Supposedly academic anthropology had difficulties accepting these findings, especially the Yamomamö studies by Chagnon where he documented them going to war to steal each other's women, as it contradicted the popular idea of the noble savage.

I don't know what you mean, the "noble savage" is a discredited racist trope. Chagnon is worth considering but surely you're aware of the academic criticism of his work and methods? It wasn't because of the "noble savage", that would be a lazy dismissal of the criticism. He didn't have the final word on the topic.

card_zero3• 3 months ago

It's probably all about genes: my genes say I have to kill you now because you aren't spreading my genes. This might be a component of human ethnic violence, but not a strong one, since we can think thoughts, such as that would be a shitty thing to do.

asterix99• 3 months ago

The book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan is a revelation in how close human behaviour is to those of chimps.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61662.Shadows_of_Forgott...

grg0• 3 months ago

Damn, they've been polarized by social media too? Zuckerberg's greed knows no limits.

yeison• 3 months ago

Sandel said he first noticed them polarising in June 2015.

croisillon• 3 months ago

i remember seeing the chimpanzee descend that escalator in 2015, back then everyone thought it was hilarious!

ZeidJ• 3 months ago

Any founders out there using AI to solve this? ;)

sho_hn• 3 months ago

Google tried, but no apes were impressed with nano-scale bananas.

enochthered• 3 months ago

The apes were so angry about it they claude the researchers eyes out.

laughing_man2• 3 months ago

This doesn't surprise me. We've known for decades that chimpanzees groups make war on other chimpanzee groups. Eight years is a long time, though.

the_af7• 3 months ago

I think the novelty here is that this was the same group which underwent a schism of sorts, and over the course of relatively few years became two completely separate groups antagonistic to each other.

edit: I'm rate-limited, so here's my answer to your comment of:

I remember watching a nature documentary many years ago with exactly that scenario. The original group killed all the splitters.

Yeah, you're right. You probably remember this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

It does seem like a very similar scenario, so now I'm confused.

laughing_man2• 3 months ago

I remember watching a nature documentary many years ago with exactly that scenario. The original group killed all the splitters.

clutter55561• 3 months ago

Say that we, primates, have evolved some sort of social structure that values and depends on ‘us’, and antagonises ‘others’.

That would explain that sort of behaviour as well as our human shenanigans (country/religion/“race”/politics/football team/etc).

Perhaps some groups are biased towards ‘us’ (i.e. more accepting), and other groups are biased towards ‘other’ (i.e. more hostile).

The death of a few key individuals can absolutely remove all the commonality between two groups. Seems to have happened with those chimpanzees, and happens all the time in human groups.

It is sad though that this is happening, on top of all the shit that is going on.

nutjob2• 3 months ago

If chimpanzees - one of the species closest to humans genetically

People seem to talk a lot about chimpanzees and their closeness to humans, and comparative behavior, but a lot less is said about the other closest species, the bonobo monkey.

Their society is very peaceful and things like infanticide, a popular pastime in chimpanzee society, is absent among bonobos.

The most notable trait of bonobos is that everyone has sex with every one else, constantly, (almost) regardless of relation, gender or age.

You'd think humans could learn much from such a peaceful species, but most people don't even know they exist.

Reason077• 3 months ago

”Chimpanzees are “very territorial", and have "hostile interactions with those from other groups"”

So just like humans, then.

hn_acc1• 3 months ago

So wait - after a respiratory virus, let's call it SARS-C, that killed > 10% (25/200 = 12.5%) of their population, they split into two major groups that are now at each other's throats, when before they had a generally-ok alliance / relationship?

Where have I seen this before.. Think.. Think..

mckirk• 3 months ago

I mean, it's understandable; having to endure a lockdown _with_ Doordash was really rough on our civilization.

rustystump• 3 months ago

Ya, imagine not being able to pay for the doordash because your job was nonessential. Real rough indeed being hungry.

bad_username• 3 months ago

No, the outright political warfare in the US you are alluding to began much earlier than 2020. Things were getting quite ulhealthy already back in 2015/2016, probably even earlier. The "black swan" for this deep division was (I believe) not the epidemic, but the proliferation of the smartphone and social media, and the earlier transitioning of traditional news to infotainment format.

emilsedgh• 3 months ago

I'd attribute it to 2008 financial collapse, and in general, the pressure put on the middle class that began a decade earlier.

And I genuinely believe blaming things on social media and news is just a diversion so we wouldn't look at the main issue.

globalnode• 3 months ago

fascinating. so if humans are more like chimpanzees than not, then we are a group based animal that distrusts/fears other groups unless some strong leaders are able to bridge the gap? its an over simplification but then you have to ask, what defines a group? language? location? appearance? religion? wrt politicians, their job should be (amongst other things), bridging gaps between groups, instead of what we see going on in the world now.

beloch• 3 months ago

"The third factor was the deaths of 25 chimpanzees, including four adult males and 10 adult females, as a result of a respiratory epidemic, in 2017, a year before the final separation. One of the adult males who died was "among the last individuals to connect the groups", the research paper said."

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There's a theory that humans (and likely chimps as well) have a cognitive upper limit to the number of stable relationships they can maintain (i.e. Dunbar's number[1]). Also, there is the idea that most people have nowhere near that many relationships, but some people are super connectors. They know everyone in the community and tie it together, even if the average member of the community doesn't know most other people in it.

It almost sounds like, before the conflict, the tribe was at or a little beyond their "Dunbar's number"[1] and then several of their super-connectors died. Suddenly the community, despite its losses, was too big and not connected enough to remain stable. Minor conflicts arose, individuals started choosing sides, and there wasn't anyone with connections to both sides able to bridge the gap and calm things down.

I'm not a sociologist/anthropologist/etc., so I'm probably woefully misinformed and spewing nonsense here. I'd love to hear what someone up to date on this stuff thinks actually happened.

_______________________

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

ingen0s• 3 months ago

I wonder if there is a spill over effect to other species/ ecosystems

Quarrelsome• 3 months ago

I thought the general premise is that humans can't form social groups bigger than around ~200. Which scans for me personally, its a struggle to maintain so many relationships. At which point group dynamics break down and factions begin to form. We have mental tech to try to minimise these issues, like nationalism or identity politics. We back these through cultural expression like dress, language, writing, the printing press, radio or the internet today.

Personally I feel like the effects of counter-culture are understated in humanity because I think it might drive a lot of human behaviour and its a natural outcome when a grouping grows beyond people's ability to maintain it. Counter-culture also offers a solid explanation for human insanity such as anti-vax which imho makes much more sense couched as:

"I hate that guy and that guy is keen on getting vaccinated, so fuck vaccinations, they're awful".

I would imagine one could find similar outcomes as this study of chimps, in human groupings too, albeit such experimentation would be unethical. Which is why I imagine it will eventually become a reality show someday: Lets play 400 friends or 200 enemies! Day 4: lets reduce the available food by 50% and see what happens... etc, etc.

cbdevidal• 3 months ago

We really got Planet of the Apes before GTA VI

wisty• 3 months ago

Anyone read Goliath's Curse? The author (Kemp) is extremely opposed to the more Pinker-ish idea that humans in their natural consition led lives that were nasty, short, and brutal; dismissing this sort of thing as overblown.

Kemp had the very anarchist friendly theory that it's states (Goliaths) and / or the conditions that lead to them that lead to violence.

His evidence is most convincing when it's looking at the paleolithic, as h sapiens made its way out of Africa ... but maybe this is not a natural state as they had not yet reached any population limits so migration was always an alternative to conflict?

jonahbenton• 3 months ago

Am reading Sapiens now, missed it the first time around. Incredible book. The point it makes isn't the killing among chimps being surprising. It is not relative non killing among humans- current day events notwithstanding. Contra the BBC, various human storytelling manifestations- religion/culture/etc- make large scale coordinated peaceful actions possible.

vivzkestrel• 3 months ago

"give a man a chimpanzee and he ll put it in a cage and feed bananas for 8 years and give a chimpanzee a man and he ll go to civil war for 8 years"

zdc1• 3 months ago

Just like kids on a playground; only more brutal. Thank you, ancient chimp brain.

eucryphia• 3 months ago

Can we bet on this yet?

rurban• 3 months ago

What they don't tell here, but a german researcher told yesterday on radio, was that the initial conflict arose in the 90ies, when one large group of Ngogo chimpanzees raided a nearby group and killed all males. Thus they came later to that insanely large number of 200 members, which a decade later lead to this conflict with the two groups already seperated. Similar to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War observed by Jane Godall.

Also missing is the Killer Ape theory of the sixties which led to the research that chimpanzees have much higher lethal conflict numbers than humans.

Also, this Ngogo group is highly researched, and many many films where made about them.

dontcontactme• 3 months ago

I don’t consider myself politically correct but this headline is outright racist

fguerraz• 3 months ago

I find it interesting that the BBC published this at a time they are already under heavy criticism for their coverage of the war in the Middle East (where they didn’t blink at Trump’s genocidal threats and published an article claiming that Iranians wanted to be nuked).

Now we’re saying that war is just natural. It must be a coincidence.

dirasieb• 3 months ago

do they wear red and blue?

frakrx2• 3 months ago

Funny how many people presume collective conflicts and violence are uniquely a human thing. Chimpanzees, lions, and wolves are some of the species where this kind of behavior is best known and documented.

broken-kebab• 3 months ago

I blame social networks!

timcobb2• 3 months ago

Commenting on the study in Science, he wrote: "Humans must learn from studying the group-based behaviour of other species, both in war and at peace, while remembering that their evolutionary past does not determine their future."

Why not? On what timescale? Rosy amorphous statements like this are borderline triggering for me these days-- why conclude a piece like this with some sort of unsubstantiated wishful thinking Disney ending? We see what we see, and it's been, oh what, a million years since chimps and humans diverged, and humans are melodramatic and vicious as ever. Why, on top of that, are we so hard into drinking our own Kool-Aid?

slfnflctd• 3 months ago

Agreed. I came to the conclusion years ago that we are going to keep having the same problems until we engineer our way out of them by altering our biology-- either genetically or with implanted augmentation devices (or both).

I have yet to see a convincing counter argument to this hypothesis.

timcobb2• 3 months ago

Agreed, hard to imagine a different outcome with the same starting parameters.

quietsegfault• 3 months ago

Can I get involved like an arms dealer and influence the course of chimpanzee history?

atentaten• 3 months ago

If chimpanzees - one of the species closest to humans genetically - could do so without human constructs of religion, ethnicity and political beliefs, then "relational dynamics may play a larger causal role in human conflict than often assumed", they added.

Aren't religion, ethnicity and political beliefs strong factors in human relational dynamics?

Infinint• 3 months ago

We tend to get a lot of things backwards when considering the hows and whys of behavior. The underlying nature is diffuse and chaotic, hard to describe or point at. These superficial differences are built on top of or used to leverage our inclinations and so provide perfect looking reasons.

netcan• 3 months ago

True.

That said... the term "underlying nature" may be part of that backwardsness.

We intuitively model human behavior as underlying beliefs and stuff leading to a rationale, leading to behavior. But really, it's often the other way.

There is an underlying behavior, behavioral pattern or whatnot. The rationale, beliefs and suchlike are overlying.

We do know these things exist, but tend to think of them as pathlogies and abhorations... like motivated reasoning. But, conscious reasoning following an intuitively reached conclusion is probably the standard model for human reasoning.

andrewflnr• 3 months ago

Factors in. Not identical to. They might not have phrased that very well, but the point is that you don't need any relationship much more complex than personal acquaintance to fuel this kind of violence.

poulpy1232• 3 months ago

Not only strong factors but some of the main human relational dynamics. Of the three only ethnicity goes a bit being pure relational

classified• 3 months ago

I don't suppose they would respond to mediation?

Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers

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