Chimpanzees Go to War

Chimpanzees Go to War


You'd think "Chimpanzee Researcher" would be the most hilarious job in the world, what with the subjects always putting on people clothes and pretending to smoke pipes. But during a 10-year study of a community of chimps in Uganda, scientists found something terrifying.

Every once in a while groups of strong chimp males would form up and head north, toward the border between their territory and the land of the neighboring tribe. They'd move through the jungle silently and in a single-file line, with practically no eating, socializing, or masturbating allowed. They'd stealthily scavenge for signs of individuals from the other tribe, such as feces, abandoned termite-fishing tools, etc. When they found a member of the northern tribe off on his own, then they'd gang up on his ass and murder him, goddamn Sam Fisher-style.

Then they did it again. And again. It wasn't just random animal-on-animal savagery; when the scientists studied the pattern of the attacks, they found the chimps were at war.


During the decade they watched the area, scientists saw 18 of these attacks, mostly all along the northern border, wiping out more than 13 rival chimps from a tribe of 100 (you don't get kill ratios like than in most human wars). And each time, they moved the border north. They were fighting over land, and doing it in a very organized way.

This isn't some freak occurrence, either. In Tanzania, researchers witnessed a chilling civil war when one tribe of chimps got angry and split off from a larger tribe. Over the next five years, the group of heretics destroyed the original tribe with a series of covert attacks.


Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_18766_5-creepy-ways-animal-societies-are-organizing.html#ixzz12e5PvfFu

Can you find some other source for this, please? Cracked.com is a humor site and a satire site. Now, this may well be a valid story, but that is not at all a reliable source.

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(10)00459-8#Summary

Chimpanzees make lethal coalitionary attacks on members of other groups <1>. This behavior generates considerable attention because it resembles lethal intergroup raiding in humans <2>. Similarities are nevertheless difficult to evaluate because the function of lethal intergroup aggression by chimpanzees remains unclear. One prominent hypothesis suggests that chimpanzees attack neighbors to expand their territories and to gain access to more food <2>. Two cases apparently support this hypothesis, but neither furnishes definitive evidence. Chimpanzees in the Kasekela community at Gombe National Park took over the territory of the neighboring Kahama community after a series of lethal attacks <3>. Understanding these events is complicated because the Kahama community had recently formed by fissioning from the Kasekela group and members of both communities had been provisioned with food. In a second example from the Mahale Mountains, the M group chimpanzees acquired part of the territory of the adjacent K group after all of the adult males in the latter disappeared <4>. Although fatal attacks were suspected from observations of intergroup aggression, they were not witnessed, and as a consequence, this case also fails to furnish conclusive evidence. Here we present data collected over 10 years from an unusually large chimpanzee community at Ngogo, Kibale National Park, Uganda. During this time, we observed the Ngogo chimpanzees kill or fatally wound 18 individuals from other groups; we inferred three additional cases of lethal intergroup aggression based on circumstantial evidence (see Supplemental Information ). Most victims were caught in the same region and likely belonged to the same neighboring group. A causal link between lethal intergroup aggression and territorial expansion can be made now that the Ngogo chimpanzees use the area once occupied by some of their victims.

Here is another:

http://sitemaker.umich.edu/mitani/research

And cracked has people on it who pull together info into one place and make it readable and enjoyable, I try not to be biased especially when they provide links.

Every time an article is rewritten, it loses some of its accuracy. I'm sorry, but, when it's that easy to find an original source, why not post that?

Or look up things if you doubt them on something we call a 'search engine'?

http://news.discovery.com/animals/chimp-war-behavior.html

Googling chimps at war was all that I had to do to find a reliable source. Cracked.com is never a good source to quote, even though they do sometimes run factual articles.

Knowledge can be entertaining

Chimps are the only other species besides us that has inter-group conflicts that can be called wars.

And we might as well give in to our wicked natures, because it's only natural?

Thank goodness the majority of us are Good Christians and have outlawed such behaviors. Chimps look up to us, you know.

One of the kinks within the original article...very interesting.

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/11/02/economics.monkey.business/index.html

as we learned between 2002 and 2008.

Is anyone really surprised?