Posted on 04/10/2026 11:42:37 AM PDT by Angelino97
A scenic Ugandan jungle has become a bloody battlefield as two rival chimpanzee clans wage what could be the first recorded primate “civil war.” The ongoing simian conflict was detailed in a study published April 9 in the journal Science.
“Chimps from one group began attacking and killing those from the other group and that turned into an escalated period of lethal violence,” study author Aaron Sandel, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, told Livescience...
Comprised of over 200 members, the ape clan appeared fairly tight-knit aside from a few “clusters” and subgroups that existed within the troop.
However, between 1998 and 2014, a noticeable rift sprang up as disparate cliques formed, including a gang of three males.
By 2015, the formerly cohesive community had split into two clans that lived and reproduced separately with the aforementioned trio presiding over one of them.
It’s yet unclear what caused the schism. Researchers postulated that several adult males who acted as ambassadors between different factions died, leading to strained relations and a “change in the male dominance hierarchy.”...
By 2018, ties had fractured completely and, like with every group from the Mongols to the Mexican cartels, these splinter factions began vying for primacy.
They even occupied separate territories, similar to gangs presiding over turf...
“What followed was a series of lethal attacks by the western group on members of the central group,” the researchers wrote. “These raids resulted in multiple killings of adult males and, beginning in 2021, expanded to frequent infanticide, averaging several deaths per year.”
The dead young were often eaten, per the study...
Chimps typically beat each other to death and tear at flesh with their teeth.
Chimps who had been pals in the halcyon days turned on each other after the split.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
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Thought this was about South Chicago.
“Chimps from one group began attacking and killing those from the other group and that turned into an escalated period of lethal violence,” study author Aaron Sandel, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin, told Livescience... A very unusual story.
So tribalism is genetic?
Hold on I saw this movie...
Battle for the Planet of the Apes.
probably an overpopulation war over limited resources, and humans were instrumental in the population surge
if you block out the natural predators it is natural for the group to engage in civil war so that the survivors can prosper within a plentiful environment that would not exist is the population grew too fast
One group touched the monolith.
Or 2001: A Space Odyssey
I have no data on the ages of this chimps, but I’m going to refer to them as “teens”.
And I was remembering those Spring Break videos a while back.
THat is clearly an ingrained behavior trait of simians.
Beat me to it
Oooh oooh oooh, aaah aaah aaah...
I watched a documentary on HBO about chimpanzees doing this exact thing. Not new by any means. Good try UT but sol.
Shocking
Must be climate change 🤪
One of them was Lancelot Link .
They really are like us
(Chuckle) That’s cold, man. Cold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasakela_chimpanzee_community
Another important observation occurred a few days earlier, on 30 October 1960. On that day Goodall observed the community's chimpanzees eating meat, dispelling the notion that chimpanzees are vegetarians.[7] A third observation by Goodall in the early 1960s was that male chimpanzees perform a "rain dance," charging, calling, slapping the ground and trees and dragging branches in the rain.[8][9] In the early 1970s the chimpanzees of the community were observed to engage in ongoing coordinated attacks against the chimpanzees of the neighbouring Kahama Chimpanzee Community, ultimately wiping it out.[10][11] According to historian Ian Morris, this "Four Year War" represented the first time scientists had observed chimpanzees "deliberately seek out, attack and leave for dead" chimps from another community, and it has been described as "the first record of lasting 'warfare' among [non-human] primates."[10][12]
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