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<\/p>\n
On that June day, Sandel was observing a large number of chimpanzees from the Western cluster while they were in their territory. At one point, they heard other chimpanzees nearby, presumably from the larger Central cluster.<\/p>\n
The Western chimpanzees quieted all of a sudden. “They started touching each other in this reassurance, like they were really nervous,” Sandel said. “And to me, this seemed like they were acting as if they were hearing outsider chimps.”<\/p>\n
Instead of reuniting and intermingling like they normally would, the Western chimpanzees fled and the Central chimpanzees chased them.<\/p>\n
“Nothing really like that had ever been observed before \u2014 and then they avoided each other for six weeks,” Sandel said. “So this was very clear, like on the ground, something big has just happened.”<\/p>\n
Over the next few years, polarization increased, and by 2018 the clusters were essentially completely separate groups. Then the killing started.<\/p>\n
The victim of the first observed lethal attack was an adolescent male from the Central cluster that the researchers had named Errol. Sandel had watched him grow up.<\/p>\n
“I’m just trying to observe as objectively as possible and really just document everything,” he said. “In some respects, I feel like a war correspondent. I’m trying to understand this really rare behavior. \u2026 Like what’s causing this?”<\/p>\n
Over the next seven years, the Western group killed at least six other adults and 17 infants from the Central cluster. The fighting continues to this day. Why the Ngogo group split and why its members turned on each other is still unclear. In the paper, Sandel and his co-authors suggest several factors that may have contributed: the size of the group, competition for food and male-to-male competition. The natural deaths of five adult males and one adult female in 2014, before the intergroup divisions took root, may have weakened social networks.<\/p>\n\n<\/aside>\n“I think it’s clear from this study and from other studies of chimps and other animals that you can get these kinds of conflicts without a lot of things that we think about as being the source of conflict in humans,” said Michael Wilson, a primatologist at the University of Minnesota, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Lions don’t have religion and political parties or ideologies. Neither do wolves or ants for that matter.”<\/p>\n
Neither do chimpanzees, the authors of the new study note.<\/p>\n
To Sandel, that’s a reason for optimism.<\/p>\n
“If in chimpanzees, we can see this conflict and lethal violence occur in the absence of all these aspects of human behavior that we often attribute to civil war, then I wonder to what extent are the interpersonal relationships and behaviors actually more important than we realize in humans,” he said.<\/p>\n
Perhaps, he added, strengthening our social bonds and letting old grudges die can help prevent larger violence.<\/p>\n
“Like with the chimps: If you act like a stranger, you become a stranger,” Sandel said. “I want to avoid that in my own life.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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