Reacción a "The largest known group of wild chimpanzees splits up and attacks one another, a very rare occurrence"

Intergroup conflict is common among animals competing for the same resources, whether food, territory, or access to mating partners. Throughout history, conflicts and wars between human groups have also been frequent due to cultural differences—religious ones, for example. However, conflicts within a single human group, or civil wars, have likewise been common. This study documents the first known case of conflict between individuals within the same community in wild chimpanzees, observed over several decades and without human intervention, which resulted in the deaths of several individuals and the permanent division of the group into two subgroups.

The study proposes several factors that may have contributed to social tension and instability within the chimpanzee community: a group size too large to sustain cohesive social relationships, a change in the group’s leadership, and the loss of several individuals due to disease. These factors may have reshaped social relationships to the point of fragmenting the social network and giving rise to two new group identities. This social breakdown ultimately triggered lethal attacks between individuals who had previously belonged to the same group and had coexisted peacefully in the social context prior to the conflict.

Such events are estimated to occur only once every 500 years in chimpanzees, making these observations crucial for understanding the factors that trigger within-group conflict in non-human animals. Since chimpanzees do not exhibit human cultural elements such as language or ideology, this study shows that social changes alone can be sufficient to produce polarisation within a single group, leading to deadly aggression and the emergence of new group identities. This suggests that similar underlying mechanisms may drive conflict within human groups, offering a new perspective for understanding conflict in our own species.