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Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers
- dontcontactme 5mo agoI don’t consider myself politically correct but this headline is outright racist
- elcapitan 5mo agoSo which side is fighting for our values?
- culi 5mo agoThe Western Ngogo are clearly trying to spread the values of democracy and equality to the backwards Central Ngogo society that also happens to also have resources important to the Western Ngogo Central Ngogo has complained that every time it's tried to democratically elect a leader, that leader had been overthrown by Western Ngogo—creating an environment that is hostile to anyone other than WN having a so-called "democracy". CN has also criticized WN as ultimately just being "oligarchy with extra steps" and creating an empire that requires the subjugation of CN.
- mchaver 5mo agoI am siding with the group that opens bananas from the bottom.
- pavel_lishin 5mo agoWhich side is the bottom?
- gostsamo 5mo agonegotiations on petrol rights still ongoing.
- Nevermark 5mo agoThat depends on which side of "our values" you are talking about. Are you orange team or green team?
- dyauspitr 5mo agoThis got me thinking. Do chimpanzees try and mate with pre pubescent young or is that somehow nature gated?
- alehlopeh 5mo agoApparently Bonobos regularly have sexual relations with infants.
- codevark 5mo agoThey've been watching us and what we do to each other.
- crazydoggers 5mo agoWe both do it because chimps and humans shared a common ancestor only 8 million years ago.
- tuveson 5mo agoNo bonobo wars though
- jaeh 5mo agothere for sure are, but they are nsfw and will never be aired in a netflix documentation
- Nevermark 5mo agoThey use sex as a weapon. Their wars are legendary. They never give up. Never surrender. And the cycle never ends. Children of war. The end game of "the replacement theory" when everyone fully commits.
- dyauspitr 5mo ago8 million years is a drop on the geological time scale, but on a species scale that’s an eternity. We went from Neanderthals and Denisovans to sapiens in a fraction of that time.
- crazydoggers 5mo agoTo be clear, sapiens didn’t descend from neanderthals or Denisovans, our species lived alongside those and interbred with them. The common ancestor of sapiens and neanderthals was probably around 500,000 years, probably heidelbergensis. So half a million years is “short” but also still Homo, and something you would almost definitely identify closer to human than ape. Shared social structures and behaviors can last through much longer periods of time than 8 million years. For example take bees and ants sharing a common ancestor in the 100 of millions of years age.
- loganc2342 5mo agoIf anyone is interested in going more in-depth on this, there's a four episode documentary series on Netflix called Chimp Empire [1]. I just saw it last week and it's fascinating stuff. You get to know the individual chimps in-depth (they all have names) and get to see conflicts in this "civil war" unfold. Plus I learned a lot about social and "political" dynamics among chimps. [1]: https://www.netflix.com/title/81311783 https://www.netflix.com/title/81311783
- culi 5mo agoFor those of us who are unlikely to make time to watch a 4-part documentary, are there any particular lessons about social/political dynamics that you learned that stuck out to you or felt particularly prescient?
- theultdev 5mo agoI'm on the other end. Finally some content to watch before bed. Love quiet documentary type things in that scenario. Bonus if there's a lot of episodes.
- shimman 5mo agoMight have to do this, better than rewatching the same rotation of sitcoms.
- obsidianbases1 5mo agoMorgan Freeman narrates some good ones on netflix. Works better/faster than melatonin
- codersfocus 5mo agoThere's a post that says illness killed some important leaders (who were friends) on both sides of the camp. Once these leaders died, the two groups realized they didn't have anything in common with each other so they're fighting.
- delichon 5mo agoI hope nobody decides to violate the prime directive and take sides in the chimp war. To the extent that they have good memory, they live in a world of finite resources, and their behavior was shaped by the forces of game theory as applied to tribes, this is more or less inevitable. You can read that as defeatism or just math. We can't overcome the force of game theory, but we can make it work for us by making our transactions increasingly transparent and repeatable, so that cooperation is more successful than defection.
- wahern 5mo ago[dead]
- perfmode 5mo agoThat’s one way to look at it. It’s fairly common to view nature this way. I wonder where it comes from. I remember the time, in some film I watched, researchers intervened to save penguins trapped in a crater. A holy moment that was.
- mrloop 5mo agoBBC Dynasties https://youtu.be/2Co_hmLenD8 https://youtu.be/2Co_hmLenD8
- the_af 5mo ago> To the extent that they have good memory, they live in a world of finite resources, and their behavior was shaped by the forces of game theory as applied to tribes, this is more or less inevitable. You can read that as defeatism or just math. We can't overcome the force of game theory, but we can make it work for us by making our transactions increasingly transparent and repeatable, so that cooperation is more successful than defection. Note that the conclusions of the paper, while acknowledging the problem of access to resources, are different. They also do not conclude that this is "more or less inevitable": > The lethal aggression that followed the fission at Ngogo informs models of intergroup conflict. All observed attacks were initiated by the numerically smaller Western group, contradicting simple imbalance-of-power models that predict an advantage for larger groups. Persistent offensive success by Western males suggests that cohesion supported by enduring relationships can outweigh numeric disadvantage. Our observations are also relevant for predictions from parochial altruism. Because cohesion among the Western cluster preceded overt hostility, external threats may be unnecessary to foster cooperation. Cohesion among members of the wider Ngogo group, however, may have weakened when external threats from adjacent groups decreased after territorial expansion in 2009. and > This study encourages a reevaluation of current models of human collective violence. If chimpanzee groups can polarize, split, and engage in lethal aggression without human-type cultural markers, then relational dynamics may play a larger causal role in human conflict than often assumed. Cultural traits remain essential for large-scale cooperation, but many conflicts may originate in the breakdown of interpersonal relationships rather than in entrenched ethnic or ideological divisions. It is tempting to attribute polarization and war that occur in humans today to ethnic, religious, or political divisions. Focusing entirely on these cultural factors, however, overlooks social processes that shape human behavior—processes also present in one of our closest animal relatives. In some cases, it may be in the small, daily acts of reconciliation and reunion between individuals that we find opportunities for peace. Which sounds kinda hopeful! My own observations is that the preconditions for the split that led to open warfare between the two Chimp groups was: 1. The nonviolent (illness) death of a few key individuals that linked both groups, and... 2. The complete stop of interbreeding. Once the two groups stopped interbreeding, the split was finalized and they became truly hostile. Stretching this a bit, it makes me think of those (usually white supremacists) who claim "multiculturalism" is to blame for all the world's problems, and if only every ethnic or religious group stayed in their lane and didn't mix with the other, we could all live in peace. But it seems to me the lesson from this paper is that this (isolating us in separate groups) would make the split complete enough that we would decisively start butchering each other.
- neom 5mo agoHere is the paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz4944 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz4944 - it's interesting. I noticed there was a respiratory epidemic that killed 25 chimps naturally quickly, one would imagine that would have quite a societal destabilizing impact?
- Aboutplants 5mo agoMy initial instinct is that they were just reestablishing social order among the group after such a dramatic event. Edit : I just read the paper and the discussion does a good job at laying out the entire landscape that contributed to the disruption. Pretty fascinating but also totally explainable due to the circumstances explained, which in and of itself is wildly fascinating!
- the_af 5mo agoI think some of the individuals who died were key in linking the two groups (they were "the glue" that prevented disruptive aggression), and after they were gone, the split cemented and later turned into aggression.
- jandrese 5mo agoSudden power vacuums are often filled by the most opportunistic individuals in human culture. People who are frequently more concerned with personal gain over the collective well-being of the group. It's why assassinating heads of state usually just makes the situation worse.
- cucumber3732842 5mo agoPlenty of people stepped into power vacuums not to make themselves rich but to save their nation Napolean, Tito, Cincinnatus, arguably George Washington.
- estearum 5mo agoRight but this is rare enough for "power vacuums" to generally be regarded as a bad thing and not a good thing. If they frequently had great people step in, we'd just produce them artificially all the time.
- hmokiguess 5mo agoThat's absolutely bananas!
- shevy-java 5mo agoI always wondered when Planet of the Apes would begin. We can see it now: a) Chimpanzees going to war. b) Humans ending humans. Both is presently in the making, if one looks at the geopolitical scale and looks at damage caused by drones; a) is probably not yet full scale. Chimpanzees may be better diplomats than humans.
- OgsyedIE 5mo agoThe primatologist Richard Wrangam once advanced the theory that tribe vs. tribe conspecific homicides - what he called coalitionary killing - are an evolved trait that was selected for in primates by some kind of pro-homicide selection pressures in the ancestral environment (where homicide reliably grants an advantage to the expected relative gene frequency of the perpetrator's genes). I haven't kept up with biology for years and don't know what the current consensus on the topic is but it's interesting to consider if some environments naturally promote the unlucky inhabitants to harm each other.
- londons_explore 5mo agoIt seems obvious to me - it's the combination of two ideas: 1. When competing for resources, killing your neighbour frees up resources, which you can take. Most species of animal and even plants do this to some extent. 2. By collaborating in a group, you can achieve more than individuals acting alone. This is the idea behind teams, companies, countries, etc. Combine the two ideas, and you get war.
- Sharlin 5mo agoIt's definitely not obvious, given that many, many gregarious species may certainly have inter-group clashes and skirmishes at territory boundaries but no full-scale war. Animals in general avoid violence between conspecifics, for the obvious reason that it's rarely worth the risk of being hurt unless you're very sure you're going to win. Dying for your group is something you almost never see outside eusocial species. Never mind dying in your prime reproductive age!
- ozim 5mo agodying in your prime reproductive age! I guess dying because you think you’re going to impress’s a mate and stay alive is quite common.
- bryanrasmussen 5mo ago
- semiinfinitely 5mo agowe can send them some of that vim donation money
- mike_hearn 5mo ago> If chimpanzees - one of the species closest to humans genetically - could do so without human constructs of religion, ethnicity and political beliefs, then "relational dynamics may play a larger causal role in human conflict than often assumed", they added. That's a weird thing to say. Studies of primitive tribes showed decades ago that they only seem to fight each other for a handful of reasons. Religion, ethnicity and political beliefs aren't among them. Fighting over resources, women and blood feuds are. Supposedly academic anthropology had difficulties accepting these findings, especially the Yamomamö studies by Chagnon where he documented them going to war to steal each other's women, as it contradicted the popular idea of the noble savage.
- throwi790 5mo agoNo religion other than Christianity and Islam fought for a man made religion. They haven't slowed down after wiping out thousands of cultures and tribes
- emptyfile 5mo ago[dead]
- bit-anarchist 5mo agoThat's a pretty strong statement. You know the saying: strong statements require equally strong evidence.
- card_zero 5mo agoIt's refuted by the Buddhist nationalists killing Rohingya Muslims. Not sure about the concept of evidence. For best epistemology you'd have to say "if this was false, we'd see evidence X, and we don't, or evidence Y, and we don't see that either, and nobody's thought of what evidence Z might be, so here we are, it seems true so far."
- throw44i3je 5mo agoWhat happened to African cultures? Who destroyed it?
- asterix99 5mo agoThe book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan is a revelation in how close human behaviour is to those of chimps. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61662.Shadows_of_Forgotten_Ancestors https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61662.Shadows_of_Forgott...
- grg0 5mo agoDamn, they've been polarized by social media too? Zuckerberg's greed knows no limits.
- yeison 5mo agoSandel said he first noticed them polarising in June 2015.
- croisillon 5mo agoi remember seeing the chimpanzee descend that escalator in 2015, back then everyone thought it was hilarious!
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ZeidJ 5mo agoAny founders out there using AI to solve this? ;)
- sho_hn 5mo agoGoogle tried, but no apes were impressed with nano-scale bananas.
- enochthered 5mo agoThe apes were so angry about it they claude the researchers eyes out.
- laughing_man 5mo agoThis doesn't surprise me. We've known for decades that chimpanzees groups make war on other chimpanzee groups. Eight years is a long time, though.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- the_af 5mo agoI think the novelty here is that this was the same group which underwent a schism of sorts, and over the course of relatively few years became two completely separate groups antagonistic to each other. edit: I'm rate-limited, so here's my answer to your comment of: > I remember watching a nature documentary many years ago with exactly that scenario. The original group killed all the splitters. Yeah, you're right. You probably remember this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War It does seem like a very similar scenario, so now I'm confused.
- laughing_man 5mo agoI remember watching a nature documentary many years ago with exactly that scenario. The original group killed all the splitters.
- redsocksfan45 5mo ago[dead]
- clutter55561 5mo agoSay that we, primates, have evolved some sort of social structure that values and depends on ‘us’, and antagonises ‘others’. That would explain that sort of behaviour as well as our human shenanigans (country/religion/“race”/politics/football team/etc). Perhaps some groups are biased towards ‘us’ (i.e. more accepting), and other groups are biased towards ‘other’ (i.e. more hostile). The death of a few key individuals can absolutely remove all the commonality between two groups. Seems to have happened with those chimpanzees, and happens all the time in human groups. It is sad though that this is happening, on top of all the shit that is going on.
- nutjob2 5mo ago> If chimpanzees - one of the species closest to humans genetically People seem to talk a lot about chimpanzees and their closeness to humans, and comparative behavior, but a lot less is said about the other closest species, the bonobo monkey. Their society is very peaceful and things like infanticide, a popular pastime in chimpanzee society, is absent among bonobos. The most notable trait of bonobos is that everyone has sex with every one else, constantly, (almost) regardless of relation, gender or age. You'd think humans could learn much from such a peaceful species, but most people don't even know they exist.
- Reason077 5mo ago> ”Chimpanzees are “very territorial", and have "hostile interactions with those from other groups"” So just like humans, then.
- hn_acc1 5mo agoSo wait - after a respiratory virus, let's call it SARS-C, that killed > 10% (25/200 = 12.5%) of their population, they split into two major groups that are now at each other's throats, when before they had a generally-ok alliance / relationship? Where have I seen this before.. Think.. Think..
- mckirk 5mo agoI mean, it's understandable; having to endure a lockdown _with_ Doordash was really rough on our civilization.
- rustystump 5mo agoYa, imagine not being able to pay for the doordash because your job was nonessential. Real rough indeed being hungry.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- bad_username 5mo agoNo, the outright political warfare in the US you are alluding to began much earlier than 2020. Things were getting quite ulhealthy already back in 2015/2016, probably even earlier. The "black swan" for this deep division was (I believe) not the epidemic, but the proliferation of the smartphone and social media, and the earlier transitioning of traditional news to infotainment format.
- globalnode 5mo agofascinating. so if humans are more like chimpanzees than not, then we are a group based animal that distrusts/fears other groups unless some strong leaders are able to bridge the gap? its an over simplification but then you have to ask, what defines a group? language? location? appearance? religion? wrt politicians, their job should be (amongst other things), bridging gaps between groups, instead of what we see going on in the world now.
- beloch 5mo ago"The third factor was the deaths of 25 chimpanzees, including four adult males and 10 adult females, as a result of a respiratory epidemic, in 2017, a year before the final separation. One of the adult males who died was "among the last individuals to connect the groups", the research paper said." ------------- There's a theory that humans (and likely chimps as well) have a cognitive upper limit to the number of stable relationships they can maintain (i.e. Dunbar's number[1]). Also, there is the idea that most people have nowhere near that many relationships, but some people are super connectors. They know everyone in the community and tie it together, even if the average member of the community doesn't know most other people in it. It almost sounds like, before the conflict, the tribe was at or a little beyond their "Dunbar's number"[1] and then several of their super-connectors died. Suddenly the community, despite its losses, was too big and not connected enough to remain stable. Minor conflicts arose, individuals started choosing sides, and there wasn't anyone with connections to both sides able to bridge the gap and calm things down. I'm not a sociologist/anthropologist/etc., so I'm probably woefully misinformed and spewing nonsense here. I'd love to hear what someone up to date on this stuff thinks actually happened. _______________________ [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
- ingen0s 5mo agoI wonder if there is a spill over effect to other species/ ecosystems
- Quarrelsome 5mo agoI thought the general premise is that humans can't form social groups bigger than around ~200. Which scans for me personally, its a struggle to maintain so many relationships. At which point group dynamics break down and factions begin to form. We have mental tech to try to minimise these issues, like nationalism or identity politics. We back these through cultural expression like dress, language, writing, the printing press, radio or the internet today. Personally I feel like the effects of counter-culture are understated in humanity because I think it might drive a lot of human behaviour and its a natural outcome when a grouping grows beyond people's ability to maintain it. Counter-culture also offers a solid explanation for human insanity such as anti-vax which imho makes much more sense couched as: "I hate that guy and that guy is keen on getting vaccinated, so fuck vaccinations, they're awful". I would imagine one could find similar outcomes as this study of chimps, in human groupings too, albeit such experimentation would be unethical. Which is why I imagine it will eventually become a reality show someday: Lets play 400 friends or 200 enemies! Day 4: lets reduce the available food by 50% and see what happens... etc, etc.
- cbdevidal 5mo agoWe really got Planet of the Apes before GTA VI
- wisty 5mo agoAnyone read Goliath's Curse? The author (Kemp) is extremely opposed to the more Pinker-ish idea that humans in their natural consition led lives that were nasty, short, and brutal; dismissing this sort of thing as overblown. Kemp had the very anarchist friendly theory that it's states (Goliaths) and / or the conditions that lead to them that lead to violence. His evidence is most convincing when it's looking at the paleolithic, as h sapiens made its way out of Africa ... but maybe this is not a natural state as they had not yet reached any population limits so migration was always an alternative to conflict?
- jonahbenton 5mo agoAm reading Sapiens now, missed it the first time around. Incredible book. The point it makes isn't the killing among chimps being surprising. It is not relative non killing among humans- current day events notwithstanding. Contra the BBC, various human storytelling manifestations- religion/culture/etc- make large scale coordinated peaceful actions possible.
- vivzkestrel 5mo ago"give a man a chimpanzee and he ll put it in a cage and feed bananas for 8 years and give a chimpanzee a man and he ll go to civil war for 8 years"
- zdc1 5mo agoJust like kids on a playground; only more brutal. Thank you, ancient chimp brain.
- eucryphia 5mo agoCan we bet on this yet?
- rurban 5mo agoWhat they don't tell here, but a german researcher told yesterday on radio, was that the initial conflict arose in the 90ies, when one large group of Ngogo chimpanzees raided a nearby group and killed all males. Thus they came later to that insanely large number of 200 members, which a decade later lead to this conflict with the two groups already seperated. Similar to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War observed by Jane Godall. Also missing is the Killer Ape theory of the sixties which led to the research that chimpanzees have much higher lethal conflict numbers than humans. Also, this Ngogo group is highly researched, and many many films where made about them.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- fguerraz 5mo agoI find it interesting that the BBC published this at a time they are already under heavy criticism for their coverage of the war in the Middle East (where they didn’t blink at Trump’s genocidal threats and published an article claiming that Iranians wanted to be nuked). Now we’re saying that war is just natural. It must be a coincidence.
- dirasieb 5mo agodo they wear red and blue?
- frakrx 5mo agoFunny how many people presume collective conflicts and violence are uniquely a human thing. Chimpanzees, lions, and wolves are some of the species where this kind of behavior is best known and documented.
- broken-kebab 5mo agoI blame social networks!
- timcobb 5mo ago> Commenting on the study in Science, he wrote: "Humans must learn from studying the group-based behaviour of other species, both in war and at peace, while remembering that their evolutionary past does not determine their future." Why not? On what timescale? Rosy amorphous statements like this are borderline triggering for me these days-- why conclude a piece like this with some sort of unsubstantiated wishful thinking Disney ending? We see what we see, and it's been, oh what, a million years since chimps and humans diverged, and humans are melodramatic and vicious as ever. Why, on top of that, are we so hard into drinking our own Kool-Aid?
- slfnflctd 5mo agoAgreed. I came to the conclusion years ago that we are going to keep having the same problems until we engineer our way out of them by altering our biology-- either genetically or with implanted augmentation devices (or both). I have yet to see a convincing counter argument to this hypothesis.
- timcobb 5mo agoAgreed, hard to imagine a different outcome with the same starting parameters.
- quietsegfault 5mo agoCan I get involved like an arms dealer and influence the course of chimpanzee history?
- atentaten 5mo ago>If chimpanzees - one of the species closest to humans genetically - could do so without human constructs of religion, ethnicity and political beliefs, then "relational dynamics may play a larger causal role in human conflict than often assumed", they added. Aren't religion, ethnicity and political beliefs strong factors in human relational dynamics?
- Infinint 5mo agoWe tend to get a lot of things backwards when considering the hows and whys of behavior. The underlying nature is diffuse and chaotic, hard to describe or point at. These superficial differences are built on top of or used to leverage our inclinations and so provide perfect looking reasons.
- netcan 5mo agoTrue. That said... the term "underlying nature" may be part of that backwardsness. We intuitively model human behavior as underlying beliefs and stuff leading to a rationale, leading to behavior. But really, it's often the other way. There is an underlying behavior, behavioral pattern or whatnot. The rationale, beliefs and suchlike are overlying. We do know these things exist, but tend to think of them as pathlogies and abhorations... like motivated reasoning. But, conscious reasoning following an intuitively reached conclusion is probably the standard model for human reasoning.
- andrewflnr 5mo agoFactors in. Not identical to. They might not have phrased that very well, but the point is that you don't need any relationship much more complex than personal acquaintance to fuel this kind of violence.
- poulpy123 5mo agoNot only strong factors but some of the main human relational dynamics. Of the three only ethnicity goes a bit being pure relational
- classified 5mo agoI don't suppose they would respond to mediation?