How infighting turns toxic for chimpanzees

March 26, 2018 by Robin A. Smith, Duke University

Power. Ambition. Jealousy. According to a new study, the same things that fuel deadly clashes in humans can also tear apart chimpanzees, our closest animal relatives.

In the early 1970s, primatologist Jane Goodall and colleagues studying chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, watched as a once-unified chimp community disintegrated into two rival factions. What followed was a period of killings and land grabs, the only civil war ever observed in wild chimpanzees.

Now, thanks to newly digitized field notes in the Jane Goodall Institute Research Center at Duke University, scientists have been able to take a closer look at the seeds of the conflict. What started as infighting among a few top males vying for status and mates is likely what eventually caused the whole group to splinter.

The study was published March 22 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

The exact nature and cause of the split leading to what Goodall called the "Four-Year War" at Gombe from 1974 to 1978 has long been a mystery, said first author Joseph Feldblum, postdoctoral associate with professor Anne Pusey at Duke. During the war, males within an area of the park known as Kasekela teamed up to raid neighboring territories, brutally beating and killing half a dozen former comrades.

Some researchers have suggested the friction was sparked by the banana feeding station Goodall used to lure chimpanzees for observation. They proposed that two distinct chimp communities may have existed all along or were already dissolving when Goodall began her research, and the feeding station merely brought them together in a temporary truce until they parted again. But new results from a team at Duke and Arizona State University suggest something more was going on.

Using data extracted from Goodall's copious hand-written notes and checksheets, which Pusey has spent the last 25 years archiving and digitizing, the researchers analyzed the shifting alliances among 19 male chimpanzees leading up to the split.

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