Lethal civil war breaks out among Uganda's chimpanzees - VIDEO

A decades-long study in Uganda's Kibale National Park has revealed a rare and lethal "civil war" within the world's largest chimpanzee community. The violent split, involving territorial patrols and deadly attacks on former allies, proves that organized warfare can erupt from shifting social dynamics alone, mirroring the complex and dark side of human behavior.

Kibale National Park in Uganda, home to the world's largest known group of wild chimpanzees, has become the site of a lethal "civil war" that has fundamentally restructured their community, News.Az reports, citing abc.net.au.

A new peer-reviewed report published in the journal Science by researchers from the University of Texas highlights a dramatic schism in the Ngogo chimpanzee population, which had been monitored continuously since 1995.

For the first two decades of research, the primates lived as a single large community of nearly 200 individuals, moving between overlapping western and central clusters. However, between 1998 and 2014, subtle "cliques" began to form, particularly among three adult males who would later become the core of a rival faction.

The first documented sign of serious trouble occurred on June 24, 2015, when members of the two clusters encountered each other near the center of their shared territory. Instead of reuniting as they had in the past, the Western chimpanzees fled while the Central chimpanzees chased them. Following this encounter, the two groups avoided each other for six weeks, a behavior never before seen by the research team.

This marked the beginning of a sharp increase in social modularity, and by 2018, the community had undergone a permanent fission. What was once the center of their shared habitat was transformed into a hostile border.

The situation escalated into organized violence and lethal aggression. Members of the Western group began conducting "territorial patrols" into Central territory, leading to at least six lethal collective attacks on adult males. By 2021, this violence expanded to include infanticide.

Researchers suggest the split may have been driven by the group's massive size, which led to heightened competition for food and reproduction, alongside weakened social ties following the deaths of several individuals in 2014. Experts noted the emotional weight of the conflict, pointing to images of males who once shared trust and reassurance through embraces later participating in the killing of their former friends.

Anthropologist Aaron Sandel and other experts, including those from the Jane Goodall Institute, suggest these findings reflect a biological proximity to humans, proving that intense intra-group conflict can arise from shifts in social dynamics alone without human-specific constructs like religion or ideology.

Although the group is still being monitored, researchers believe it is now too late for a reconciliation. The conflict remains ongoing, and the new group identities have hardened to the point where the chimpanzees now view their former community members as enemies to be eliminated.

News.Az 

By Leyla Şirinova