24 dead, 17 of them babies. That is the toll of eight years of civil war between chimpanzees that once lived in perfect harmony within Kibale National Park, Uganda. 🐒
The Ngogo group —the largest in the world with nearly 200 individuals— split into two factions in 2018, and since then the attacks between them have not stopped. Scientists identified three possible triggers: the death of several key males in 2014, a leadership change in 2015, and a respiratory epidemic in 2017 that wiped out “one of the last individuals connecting both groups”.
What most shocks researchers is not the violence itself —chimpanzees are territorial by nature— but that it is happening among those who shared decades of life together. The conclusion of the study published in Science? If this happens without religion, ethnicity, or ideology involved, group dynamics may be the deepest root of human conflict. What do you think?