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What a civil war among our closest relatives tells us about human conflict.
Warfare is often understood as a contest between visibly distinct groups. But history shows that the worst conflicts can occur within such groups. Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong oversaw the killing of millions of their own people. The executioners spoke the same languages, ate the same foods and practiced the same religions as their victims. Yet the bloodlust was unrivaled.
This isn’t uniquely human. A new study in Science describes a vicious civil war among our nearest evolutionary relatives: chimpanzees. A community of nearly 200 apes that had lived together, groomed together and raised offspring together slowly fractured into two rival groups. Then one group began killing the other.
The study, led by Aaron Sandel at the University of Texas, draws on 30 years of data from the Ngogo chimpanzee community in Uganda’s Kibale National Park. Ngogo was the largest known group of wild chimpanzees and was the subject of the popular 2023 Netflix docu-series “Chimp Empire.” For two decades, researchers tracked the social networks, movements and family relationships of every ape. The picture that emerged was of a single community with internal clusters, akin to neighborhoods in a city. For years, the chimpanzees had loose subgroups, but individuals moved between them.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal
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Rob Henderson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.