New Scientist
Image: pattoise
Picture the scene: a weak leader is struggling to hold onto power as ambitious upstarts plot to take over. As tensions rise, the community splits and the killing begins. The war will last for years.
No, this isn’t the storyline of an HBO fantasy drama, but real events involving chimps in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park. A look at the social fragmentation that led to a four-year war in the 1970s now reveals similarities between the ways chimpanzee and human societies break down.
Jane Goodall has been studying the chimpanzees of Gombe for over 50 years. During the early 1970s the group appeared to split in two, and friendliness was replaced by fighting. So extreme and sustained was the aggression that Goodall dubbed it a war.
Joseph Feldblum at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and colleagues have re-examined Goodall’s field notes from the chimp feeding station she established at Gombe to work out what led to the conflict. Read more on newscientist.com…
