Another Similarity We Have With Chimpanzees is Fighting War
War isn’t something new to we humans and we always have a reason to always want to go war and when there is a war, there will always be factions for and against. We have heard the Israel - Hamas war, Russia - Ukraine war, and many more just within the last 4 years and it doesn’t look like we humans will anyday stop these multiple layers of war anytime soon as countries spend a lot of money to protect their territories and maintain their sovereignty but while we know this in humans, hearing this same thing in Animals can be very interesting.
If we go back to around 1970 in Gombe park, Tanzania, there was a chimpanzee war and it just showed that asides human, war could also be a thing with animals. The story started as far back as the year 1960 when Jane Goodall went to Gombe park. Let’s be clear that chimps are a different specie from humans and not the ancestors of humans even when we had a common ancestor about 8 million years ago.
The study of these chimpanzees was looking to understand the relationships between humans, our closest relatives and the ape Proconsul which looks like us and chimps. When she got there, her early discoveries included sharing meals, hunting other animals like monkeys and making tools. Jane was able to get close to the chimps by handing them bananas through feeding stations and over time, the chinps allowed her and other researchers to follow them around.
The researchers will follow them and take notes from their early rise to when they reside back to bed but since there were more chimps to researchers in the park, they would select different chimps on different days.
The researchers were able to group the chimps into three main groups which were the Mitumba group in the north, Kasekela in the middle, and Kalanle in the south. Goodall studied the Kasekela groups and she noticed in the early 1970s that even in the group, there were two cliques who would come eat from the feeding station. While they still interacted,it was clear there were two cliques. The southern and the Northern cliques.
Over time the researchers noticed that the cliques started to distant themselves from one another with one clique coming to eat in the feeding station than the other even with intense lures to the feeding station. The southern cliques would not come to the station as often as it would be expected like the northern cloques did.
Chimps had a more hierarchical type of social lifestyle with the male chimp with the best grooming, best food, dominance display and so on become the alpha male while other males remain in the clan but women are the least classified and they will have to migrate to prevent inbreading from males in their clans. Somewhat like they don’t want to marry their relatives.
Other chimps in the group will acknowledge the alpha by making the pant-grunt sound, make a bow or run away when the apha makes threatening sounds. The male chimps would be in different subgroups in their main group and would only come together during hunting, and patrol to check the boundaries of their territory and while they check this boundary, they do not mind hurting or killing any foreign chimp they find in their territory.
According to reaearchers, what began a chimp war started with a fight to be alpha male after the previous one was defeated. Faced with fight of opponents between the members of the southern clique and the northern clique. The cliques were led by individuals who wanted to become alpha and this was the beginning of the war.
The tussle for power lead to the break of another group from the already existing kasekela group known as Kahama group. So there were four groups in total now amd there were no clashed between the two new groups until January 1974 where the Kahama groups were attacked consistently until 1977 when the group no longer existed. The way the war was narrated in books, journals, and from researchers who were eye witnesses, it was cruel and bloody.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kristen-Lukas/publication/24278723
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.google.com/books/edition/Through_a_Window/qfNfMGW7eGEC
https://books.google.com.ng/books/about/The_Chimpanzees_of_Gombe.htm
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/47157731_Impact_of_Simian
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajp.22453
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David-Watts-12/publication
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/am-pdf/10.1002/ajpa.23462
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