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

This work stands out, above all, for the incalculable value of long-term research, something very rare in science. Three decades of uninterrupted monitoring have made it possible to capture a phenomenon—the permanent breakup of a community—that is extremely rare to observe in nature. However, beyond the spectacular nature of the data, the study must be analyzed with scientific caution. Although the authors accurately document the ‘how’ and ‘when’ of this breakup, the ‘why’ remains, to a large extent, an inference based on correlations. Factors such as the group’s excessive size or the death of key leaders are mentioned, but we cannot determine with certainty whether these were the exact causes or merely symptoms of a prior structural instability not assessed in the study. An alternative explanation, which the study does not address, is that what we are seeing is not the breakup of a cohesive unit (the community), but rather the collapse of an ecological equilibrium: perhaps the energetic and social costs of maintaining such a large group outweighed the benefits of cooperation, forcing a split due to sheer resource pressure rather than a social “decision.” It would have been interesting, therefore, to assess how ecological factors might have been related to the community’s split into two.

Likewise, I believe it is essential to warn against the risk of using terms like ‘civil war’ to describe these events. Although it is an appealing label for public communication, it carries an obvious danger of anthropomorphism that can skew our interpretation. Human warfare involves ideological structures, symbolic identities, and shared political objectives that do not exist in the same way among chimpanzees. Labeling their violence as such can lead us astray, ignoring the fact that their conflicts are typically rooted in much more direct biological mechanisms, such as competition for reproductive success or physical territorial control over access to ecological resources. The parallels with our species are undeniable in biological and demographic terms, but the true relevance of this work should not be to “humanize” chimpanzees, but rather to help us understand which ecological and cognitive mechanisms we share that are associated with serious conflicts in these species. What Ngogo teaches us is that intragroup violence can escalate lethally when individual reconciliation mechanisms break down, a finding that underscores that social cohesion is a fragile process requiring constant maintenance, both in their species and in ours.