Despite the human tendency of picking a fight at the drop of a hat, whether over a parking space or at the Walmart bargain bin, we’ve always claimed the top of the evolutionary pecking order.
So it’s not surprising we always wonder just how advanced we really are, despite our mantle for allegedly being able to do the one thing no other species can – reason.
But if we ever doubt our perch we can always find the benefit of comparison to the chimpanzee.
How emancipating to find out that a band of chimps are literally killing each other in a “civil war” based on disputed sovereignty.
Scientists have captured the “lethal violence” for the first time on video.
“A scenic Ugandan jungle has become a bloody battlefield as two rival chimpanzee clans wage what could be the first recorded primate civil war,” the New York Post reports.
The ongoing simian conflict was detailed in a study just published in the journal Science.
“Group conflict among monkeys is well known,” Science says in its report. “However, lethal conflict among animals once socially affiliated has not previously been observed outside of humans, in whom cultural ideologies can drive divisions among individuals.”
Chimps from one group began attacking and killing a competing group, escalating into lethal violence, study author Aaron Sandel, an anthropologist, told Livescience.
Scientists aren’t sure what triggered the cannibalism.
But researchers suspect several adult males acting as “ambassadors” between different factions died, leading to strained relations and a “change in the male dominance hierarchy” the Post says.
It’s yet unclear how the apes dispatched one another, but chimps typically beat each other to death and tear at flesh with their teeth.
Chimps who had been pals in the halcyon days turned on each other after the split.
Kinda sounds familiar so maybe we’re simply in denial.
Hundreds Of Chimps Killing Each Other In A ‘Civil War’
By Ted Cohen
