You might have heard a fascinating bit of news in recent weeks: Researchers at the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project in Uganda published a paper documenting a deadly split among a large group of chimpanzees.
For eight years, they have been embroiled in what’s being called a bitter “civil war” that’s resulted in 24 killings — including 17 infants.
It’s an incredibly rare turn of events in chimpanzee behavior and the story has been published all over the world. Jacob Negrey watched it happen with dismay.
Negrey is a primatologist and assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona as well as co-director of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project. He told The Show that their ongoing conflict says a lot about humanity, even if not everyone has wanted to hear it.
The Show spoke with him more about it recently, beginning with his reaction to all of the attention the story has gotten.
Full conversation
JACOB NEGREY: I am just overwhelmed by the range of reactions to this story — some who see so much from their own lives and their own political experiences playing out in this chimpanzee mirror world, and other folks who are so deeply offended by any comparison between what we're observing in the chimpanzees and in humans. This story has in certain venues been described as a quote "civil war" unquote between chimpanzees, and that term as applied to these chimpanzees has really ignited diverse responses.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, I guess, I mean, are you surprised by that? It sounds like you were struck by it, but did it surprise you?
JACOB NEGREY: I was struck by some interactions I had in my department, actually, where other anthropologists were just so displeased that this was being described as a civil war between chimpanzees. I think for some folks, a civil war must involve nation-states, so from that perspective, I understand.
But I do believe that our story about the chimpanzees has a lot to tell us about shared social mechanisms for fissions in societies, for splits that perhaps, although we like to think that we are so exceptional and so special as humans, that perhaps some of our own social experiences are reflected in the lives of these animals to a pretty extraordinary extent.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Ah, so it's fascinating. OK, we'll get to that in a moment. But let me back up for a minute, Jacob, and just ask you about what you saw happen with these chimps in Uganda. I mean, obviously, this is a well-observed, you know, group of chimpanzees there as part of this project.
But it sounds like this was almost a decade ago, more, that you started to see these kinds of divisions, this polarization within these clusters, as you call them, of chimpanzees. What did it look like?
JACOB NEGREY: Yeah, so I have been working at this field site, Ngogo, for about 13 years now. So when I started working at Ngogo, it was very clear that we were still looking at one group — what we call community — of chimpanzees, that they would come together to eat and to socialize. And then one summer in 2015, we began to notice that the chimps weren't all coming together.
We had chimpanzees in what we call the western subgroup no longer joining together with chimpanzees in our so-called central cluster. And it was quite obvious to us. We noticed this, that yeah, we had two distinct clusters.
We thought that this was just an indication that conditions at Ngogo, ecological conditions, were so good — to put it another way, that there was so much food at Ngogo — that these chimps didn't have to come together. So, yeah, none of us could have predicted in 2015 how this would play out. We were all genuinely shocked.
LAUREN GILGER: Right. So, I mean, talk about how this played out and watching it. Like, these are chimps that I think it sounds like you all as researchers there know kind of intimately — like they have names, you watch them, you're aware of them, they're aware of you, right? But you started to see like real violence happen, even to some infants.
JACOB NEGREY: Absolutely. So, we began to see when these two different clusters of chimps would come together, they acted more and more as if they were encountering a stranger group of chimpanzees. Chimpanzees are are quite fearful of strangers; if we were talking about humans, we might call them xenophobic. When they meet, there's a lot of fighting, there's a lot of screaming, there's a lot of running around. And as we've known for decades, there is lethal violence between chimpanzee groups.
And when we began to see this happening between different members of the Ngogo community, that's when we began to grow really quite concerned. And I do use the word concerned quite genuinely. We are scientists, but we are also deeply invested in these animals. We spend a lot of time to protect them as well. And so to see the relationships at Ngogo deteriorating into increasingly violent interactions was was genuinely disheartening to us.
And of course, to then see that ultimately in 2018 rise to the level of lethal violence was, although we had seen this on the horizon for a few months at this point, it was still shocking that it finally happened.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So I mean, you mentioned at the beginning some of the reaction that you've got to this and some of the skepticism, like this this, you know, sort of pushback that we are as human beings closely related to or should learn something from what's happening in chimpanzee communities.
But you as authors here describe these results as as maybe a challenge to this idea that when humans go to war, right, including go to civil war, it's got to be something that's driven by these kind of cultural markers like religion, countries going to war. Do you think that this says something about humanity?
JACOB NEGREY: I may be biased in this regard. I've been watching these extraordinary animals for quite a long time now. Every time we as humans try to draw a a line in the sand between our species and say, "OK, humans do this and other living things do this," you know, "this is the thing that makes us human," inevitably we have to walk those claims back the more we learn about other living things.
And I personally think this is one of those cases, that although chimpanzees might not have religions, they might not have political ideologies, I do think that their social relationships have a great deal to tell us about our own. These animals live for a very long time. We think that some of our chimpanzees have lived into their 70s.
And so the depth of their relationships across time is quite striking. And so to see these chimpanzees be able to treat other chimpanzees that they have known for decades as enemies is truly striking. It's difficult to overemphasize from a scientific perspective everything we know about chimpanzees, just how unusual it is to see them turn on their long-term friends, for lack of a better word.
And so I think this story tells us a lot about the importance of maintaining social relationships for, you know, the good of society at large, that perhaps we like to think that our conflicts boil down to these big ideas like religion and political ideologies, but when it comes right down to it, I think it begins with how we interact with people and whether we interact with them affiliatively.
Are we occupying shared spaces? You know, are we coming together to perform basic human social functions? I think there is a lot to this — how we relate to each other on, you know, a personal level and how that may scale up to the societal level.
LAUREN GILGER: Mmm, super interesting. All right, we'll leave it there. Jacob Negrey is a primatologist, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona, as well as co-director of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project in Uganda, joining us. Jacob, thank you so much for coming on. This is fascinating.
JACOB NEGREY: My pleasure. Thank you, Lauren.
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