US EditionStudy: Ongoing Conflict Spurs Rare Community Split in Chimps
Researchers say 24 attacks and 28 deaths followed the split, which they link to changing social ties rather than culture or ideology.
- On Thursday, researchers published a study in Science documenting that the Ngogo chimpanzee community in Uganda permanently split into Western and Central factions by 2018, followed by sustained lethal violence.
- Social bonds fractured around 2015 following leadership shifts, deaths of key individuals bridging groups, and a 2014 respiratory illness that weakened social ties, according to University of Texas primatologist Aaron Sandel.
- Coordinated raids by the Western group killed at least seven adult males and 17 infants from the Central group between 2018 and 2024, with infanticide expanding significantly after 2021.
- Sandel and colleagues concluded that shifting relational dynamics alone can drive polarization and lethal conflict, challenging the hypothesis that human warfare requires cultural markers like ethnicity or religion.
- Rare events like this occur only once every 500 years, scientists note; researchers compare the Ngogo conflict to the 1970s 'Four-Year War' in Gombe, Tanzania, documented by late primatologist Jane Goodall.
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97 Articles
Scientists Discover Chimpanzees In Uganda Have Been Entrenched In Deadly Civil War For A Decade: But Why?
chimpanzees in Uganda Field biologists in Uganda have been following and tracking the behaviors of Ngogo chimpanzees for over a decade. What they found is these chimpanzees have been engaged in the deadliest civil war ever documented among animals and it has been ongoing now for 10+ years. Their findings were published this week in the journal Science in a research paper titled ‘Lethal conflict after group fission in wild chimpanzees.’ That is a…
Researchers have noted with surprise the intense violence between two groups of chimpanzees in Uganda. What is striking is that the warring parties were formerly good friends, and there was no animosity whatsoever. The rare event is described in an extensive study in Science.
Chimpanzees split into rival gangs, carried out coordinated killings in first documen
Rare Uganda study documents a stable chimpanzee community splitting in two, followed by years of coordinated attacks that killed at least 28 animals, including adult males and infants, in what researchers say is the clearest recorded case of its kind in the wild
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