While it might be convenient to attribute human conflict to religion, culture, or resources, the reality that chimpanzees go to war seems to suggest more fundamental reasons.
Sometimes we are prone to believe that humans have an innate capacity for violence beyond other creatures on this Earth, that there is something uniquely dark in our hearts, but the natural world frequently reminds us that we are not alone. Not surprisingly, our closest cousins in the animal kingdom, chimpanzees, a species with whom we share between 96% and 98.8% of our DNA, often serve to illustrate that many of our darker impulses originated before humans were humans in the first place. This extends even to the art of war, where the world was stunned earlier this month to learn that chimpanzees at Uganda’s Kibale National Park have been engaged in a bloody conflict for tribal supremacy for more than a decade and counting. The Kibale National Park had been home to one of the largest unified groups of chimpanzees in the world, some 200 of them living in relative harmony for more than twenty years after the Western and Central groups initially merged, but on June 24, 2015, something dramatically changed. Aaron Sandel, co-director of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project, believes he witnessed the initial fracturing of the group and the start of what would become a full blown war in real time. While he and a colleague, John Mitani were observing a small group in a clearing, everything suddenly went silent, an unusual hush descending on the normally talkative bunch. The members of the group began exhibiting nervous behavior from there, grimacing and other facial expressions that suggested all wasn’t right, and when another group appeared nearby from the tree line, the greeting was less than friendly. Rather than engaging in the usual vocal calls, pats on the back, and holding hands that accompany meeting their fellows, most of the first group took off running into the forest, leaving the researchers puzzled. “I remember asking John, ‘What’s going on?’ He said, ‘I don’t know,’” Mr. Sandel explained. “And that also stuck with me, because this is one of the world’s experts on chimps. He’d studied these chimps for two decades. But we were seeing something new.” At the same time, the initial incident was easy to rationalize. “Chimpanzees are sort of melodramatic,” he said. They are known to have arguments where there is a lot of “screaming and chasing” followed by grooming and cooperating shortly afterwards.
In retrospect, nothing was ever the same, though it took some time to understand the depth of the rift and the years for the actual war to begin. For six weeks, the groups avoided each other and when interactions did occur, they were “a little more intense, a little more aggressive.” The once unified group of 200 chimpanzees was dividing itself back into the two smaller groups of Western and Central, then violence began to erupt, targeted raids and the killings of both adults and infants. While fighting between disparate groups of chimpanzees is not uncommon, they are territorial animals that patrol their borders and sometimes attack and kill revivals, a unified group devolving into disparate factions is exceedingly rare. Scientists believe it happens only once every 500 years or so, and we have witnessed it ourselves only once before, when the legendary primatologist Jane Goodall observed a similar split at Tanzania’s Gombe National Park in the 1970s, what she dubbed the “Four Year War.” Then as now, it appears that an unexpected change in the dominance hierarchy rippled through the entire community. In other words, the rank and file chimpanzees disagreed as to who would be their new leaders and ultimately went to war over it. While the details remain murky, the group in Uganda suffered a series of deaths prior to the rift. In 2014, five adult males and one adult female died from causes that still remain unknown, in 2015 the alpha male was ousted which appears to have precipitated the re-separation, and a respiratory epidemic followed in 2017 that caused the deaths of 25, among which was an adult male that researchers believed served as the last bridge between the groups. At a minimum, the series of setbacks introduced uncertainty, caused social cohesion to splinter, and the territory to be divided. Though perhaps the group could’ve survived these tragic events in isolation, it was too much taken together and “In the case of the Ngogo fission, individuals who lived, fed, groomed and patrolled together for years became targets of lethal attacks on the basis of their new group membership,” the authors including Mr. Sandel wrote in their paper. Once upon a time, an individual chimpanzee could roam the whole region in relative safety and peace because the preserve boats optimal conditions and more than enough food to go around, but now, the respective groups cannot cross a border roughly in the center.
While chimpanzees do not kill each other with weapons as humans do, it is hard to imagine their innate ferocity. The males can reach up to 200 pounds of compact, powerful muscle, with a much higher concentration of higher-density fast twitch fibers for explosive power than humans. At basic tasks like pulling and jumping, they are estimated at around 1.5 times as strong as a person, but while in a rage, likely several more, able to literally tear one of us almost limb from limb with ease. Errol a 10 year old member of the Central group, was the first casualty of the war. In 2018, he strayed too close to the Western side of the divide and was attacked by five adult males who’d been feeding at a fig tree. Given their intelligence, he probably knew his fate once they surrounded him and began pummeling him mercilessly with their massive fists, blow after blow after blow, beating him to death for no reason other than the split, as humans might in a gang war. A year later, Mr. Sandel and other researchers observed the second fatality first hand. A group of Central chimpanzees were feeding together at a large tree when several Western chips rushed in a surprise attack, coming seemingly from nowhere and scattering their former allies. Before the researcher’s eyes, three of the Western chimps cornered the 33-year old Basie and began brutally assaulting him, the same as must’ve happened to poor Errol. Though another adult female, Aretha, attempted to intervene this time, she was promptly chased away by the superior numbers. Basie survived long enough to be escorted home by an old male chimp, BF believed to be over fifty, but died the next day. Since then, five more adults have been killed along with 17 infants, all from the Central group, with 14 additional chimpanzees missing, a percentage of which are presumed to be casualties of the war. While we can’t say what will happen next, whether they will reconcile somehow rather than one side prevail, or even how long it will last, the Western chimps seem to have the upper hand right now. They are more aggressive than the Central for some reason, as evidenced by the number of fatalities, and control a larger portion of the once unified territory, organizing 3-4 patrols per month against the other group, and proving much more lethal in terms of lives lost.
“It’s definitely sad to see these chimps kill one another, especially seeing chimps that I know so well being killed. I do sometimes feel like a war correspondent,” Mr. Sandel described his feelings. “I feel like we’re tapping into something really at the heart of what it means to be a chimp,” he continued. “By seeing these relationships change in such a dramatic way, we are getting insight into chimps that we don’t normally have from observation alone, and a window into their mind and to their emotions.” “These were chimps that would hold hands. Now they’re trying to kill each other,” he added. Katie Slocombe, comparative psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of York in the United Kingdom was not involved in the study, but attempted to describe the significance in more general terms. “The careful documentation of this rare event through years of long-term data provides an invaluable insight into inter-group conflict…It was the largest known chimpanzee community, so maintaining effective relationships with so many individuals may have become challenging for community members.” Ultimately, she believes the challenges within the chimpanzee group “could add to our understanding of how interpersonal relationships and other environmental factors contribute to human conflict” to use CNN’s phrasing. While it might be convenient to attribute human conflict to religion, culture, or resources, the reality that chimpanzees go to war seems to suggest more fundamental reasons. Of course, chimps do not have anything resembling religion and to the extent they have limited culture (different groups have been observed displaying different habits that are believed to be passed down through learning) those in Kibale National Park share the same one, nor are resources in the preserve a concern either, and yet they are still killing each other in an organized, targeted, sectional fashion, even infants.
To me at least, there are two potential lessons for human behavior. Taken to the extreme, perhaps many of the wars we believe were due to religion, culture, or resources weren’t and those factors were merely proxies for much deeper, unconscious motivations. Though this may sound like a stretch, it’s no secret that humans frequently attribute conscious motivations to unconscious impulses, that is we rationalize behavior we cannot truly explain after the fact. In other words, we act, then explain, and in the case of conflicts, religion, culture, and resources provide an all-too easy explanation, believing that another group is different from you in some unacceptable way, has wronged you in some unforgivable way, or has something you need which cannot be acquired through other means. Interestingly, there might be at least some support for this point of view when you consider that religious and cultural wars in particular have a hard time withstanding rational scrutiny, and even most wars over resources could likely be resolved at a much lower cost through trade and other means than violence. When you consider what war really means in terms of blood and treasure, is it ever really worth killing someone over their beliefs or customs? If they do not impede you directly, what real rationale is there for going to war over the thoughts in someone else’s head, ultimately hoping to spill out their brains for them? If they have something you need, isn’t it usually easier to make a deal of some kind? Clearly, religion and culture, at least, tend to motivate people on a level beyond reason, prompting an emotional, visceral reaction rather than a merely logical one. The question is where this level comes from: Does religion or culture cause it to spring into being in humans alone, or does the primal behavior inherited from our closest cousins empower religion and culture? To make matters even more interesting, the answer need not be mutually exclusive. There could be a feedback loop between the two, one where primal impulses feed rational constructs which are then fed back into the original impulse, making it impossible to separate where one ends and the other begins.
Perhaps more obvious and likely, there’s a lesson in the dynamics of groups and the things that bind them together. If the explanations posited by the researchers are correct, the chimpanzee community suffered three devastating setbacks in a row. First the unexplained deaths, then a change in the alpha, then an illness that killed one of the few remaining individuals that bound the groups together. Only after all three did the civil war erupt. As we contemplate what becomes of our deeply polarized nation, one some seriously claim is close to another Civil War, consider the last three decades and ask yourself what underlies our own challenges. Between 9-11 and the Great Recession, the United States suffered an unexpected attack on our homeland that was hard to logically explain – how it happened, why it happened, and would it happen again – followed in seven years by a financial crisis that occurred for reasons the average person cannot easily understand, left millions displaced, and set back the earning potential of almost an entire generation. In 2016, a new, controversial leader emerged, seemingly from nowhere, in the form of President Donald Trump, one who still has not been accepted as legitimate by a significant plurality despite winning two terms. In 2020, the world suffered the worst pandemic in a century, an actual respiratory infection that killed millions. Is the situation we find ourselves in really that different than the Uganda chimpanzees? Is it possible that we too might have more easily endured one or two of these shocks, but that all three in a row has had an impact that defies simply logic and rationality? While it is impossible to say for sure, it seems obvious that each of these unexpected events has had an unconscious effect rather than merely a conscious one, that is that we have been altered internally in ways we cannot directly express. In this fashion, we are essentially the same as the chimpanzees. A once more unified group has fractured roughly in half for reasons that do not make entirely logical sense. While each respective group might try to explain what’s wrong with the other, those explanations both fail to capture the underlying enmity on a subconscious level or even a fully conscious one given that neither of these groups represent the same political alignments as before and within each group, members of both sides have radically changed some of their positions. We are instead, simply members of the group, partially because of the leader, partially for other reasons based on recent history. How is that any different than the chimpanzees?
Perhaps more importantly, is there a means to resolve the schism through rational thought rather than continued conflict that might well lead to violence? Sadly, this is not an easy question to answer. While we might like to believe we can discuss our differences rationally as human beings, coming to some type of an agreement about how we will move together in the future even if neither side is fully satisfied, it certainly doesn’t seem that way right now. Instead, it seems that the dark heart we share with our closest cousins is on the verge of being unleashed, same as it is in Uganda, only worse. Perhaps the only thing we can do is look at them, look in the mirror, and do our best to choose who we really want to be.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 