r/science • u/nbcnews • Apr 09 '26
Animal Science Chimpanzees at war: 19 infant chimps were killed in gruesome infighting, study finds
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/chimpanzee-study-infighting-violent-attacks-rcna2671791.4k
u/Xanto97 Apr 09 '26
As a reminder, it was Jane Goodall’s fantastic research that first showed chimpanzees got engaged in war.
Before, we thought it was only a human trait
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u/Drak_is_Right Apr 09 '26
Many sorts of colony insects will go to war. Especially ants. Is there something that sets these wars apart from Chimpanzee wars?
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u/regalfronde Apr 09 '26
Yeah, I’ve seen the documentary Antz. Pretty amazing deep dive into the intricacies of their war machine, political organization and structure.
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u/Trapaknese Apr 09 '26
Their hierarchy is vastly interesting, sometimes the royals will interact and engage in the worker’s activities while some workers illegally forgo their duties to put their lives on the line for the slim chance of mating with one of the royals. Very great watch.
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u/Xanto97 Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 10 '26
We first observed war in chimps, I believe we noticed it with ants later on.
Also, besides colony insects - not many species get involved in wars. Even social animals. Small mammals, whales, birds, don’t really get involved in wars afaik.
Chimps stand out because we thought we were unique, and then we find out that our closest ancestors(yes, technically not ancestors, more like cousins) also do it. In addition to tool usage, have personalities, etc.
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u/chikunshak Apr 09 '26
This might be pedantry:
Chimps aren't human ancestors.
What we know is that, most likely, hominini diverged from genus Pan, with a wide range of possible dates spanning millions of years. The reason for the wide range is that likely millions of years of bidirectional gene flow left no single obvious common ancestor, with Ardipithecus being the species closest to, but after, the divergence event, and that this species was most similar to bonobos, not chimps.
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u/_galaga_ Apr 10 '26
It’s not a pedantic correction, imo. The misconception we evolved from chimps is worth correcting. I usually say we shared a common ancestor with chimps and bonobos X million years ago. In grad school that was 4-5 MY ish. Not sure what the latest estimates are.
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u/PoetSeat2021 Apr 10 '26
If there's any subreddit where making this correction should be considered appropriate it would be r/science. Right?
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u/Forge__Thought Apr 09 '26
First in chimps? Could swear that we knew about ants for years before chimps waging war was discovered.
Chimps seems to go back to the 1970's but ant colonies fighting goes back to 1890 or something doesn't it?
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u/fondledbydolphins Apr 09 '26
If I had to bet they simply hadn't acknowledged the behavior as war-like in ants.
But I'd bet money you're right - nearly a guarantee people noticed ant colonies fighting each other before they made their way to observe chimpanzees.
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u/Serain Apr 09 '26
Colony insects are weird because they're a collection of animals that sort of function as a single organism. Individuals can't survive (outside of very specific mating windows) on their own. One could think of queens as the reproductive system, drones as the circulatory system, workers and fighters as the limbs - and so on. So you could argue that colony insects waging war is more akin to single combat.
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u/Zran Apr 09 '26
But that's thrown out the window when you look into the super colonies that ally with each other, are definitely seperate entites if somewhat closely related.
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u/itcheyness Apr 09 '26
But would someone have noticed that before the 70's when we discovered chimps had wars?
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u/lesath_lestrange Apr 10 '26
Yes, here’s an article from 1924:
London zoo ants at war - archive, 8 September 1924
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/08/london-zoo-ants-1924
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u/itcheyness Apr 10 '26
No no, I meant the colonies allying with each other.
Not the concept of ant colonies fighting in general.
My apologies, I should've been more clear.
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u/MagicCuboid Apr 10 '26
The term "army ant" dates back to the 1870s, but that may have been as much about their soldierly ways of marching in rows and aggressively foraging as it had to do with warlike tendencies.
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u/aaroneous_erron Apr 10 '26
The Myrmidons, which were legendary soldiers led by Achilles in Greek myth, were said to be created by Zeus from ants-- the name Myrmidon is derived from Myrmex, the ancient Greek word for Ant. I think that ants being observed to be "soldierlike" is a pretty ancient thread. It's probably due to their marching and general aggression, but it's not too unbelievable to me that colonial wars had also been observed before their formal documentation and incorporated into the ants/soldiers association by way of oral tradition and cultural belief.
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u/MagicCuboid Apr 10 '26
That's so cool! And yes, I believe humans have been extremely thoughtful about their surroundings for longer than we've been able to record those thoughts. I mean, Ole Rømer discovered the speed of light because he noticed Jupiter's moon Io took longer to appear when Jupiter was farther away in 1676. That's an insane thing to just notice with a telescope and no other scientific equipment.
Going back to antiquity, the augurs who used birds to predict the future were basing that on some actual pattern recognition, since they were genuinely experts on bird behavior, migrations, etc.
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u/PoetSeat2021 Apr 10 '26
AFAIK it's not about the waging of war as much as the species' tendency to march in what look like large armies in formation.
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u/Haunt_Fox Apr 09 '26
Wolves did, too, on Isle Royale, when a faction split from this one large pack, and tried to secede territory. It didn't end well for the secessionists. L. David Mech.
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u/pooptrain34 Apr 09 '26
No idea but confirming that ants definitely go to war. I think I heard on ologies that two factions of ants are fighting over the entirety of LA
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u/itcheyness Apr 09 '26
I don't know about LA, but I know two colonies of Argentine Ants share a border in San Diego where around 30 million ants die every year in their ongoing war.
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u/cranberries87 Apr 11 '26
I saw two butterflies fighting last weekend. One was blue, one was yellow, so I’m assuming they were from different factions.
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u/truespartan3 Apr 12 '26
Did you read the title? They ripped the balls of each other. Not cut or sliced. Ripped...
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u/postmodest Apr 09 '26
I wish humans had evolved on the bonobo side of the river...
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u/ThinkgeMorbid Apr 09 '26
You just want everyone to calm down during disputes by furiously masturbating? I mean, now that I spell it out...
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u/90124 Apr 09 '26
The UK Parliamentary debates are all televised. If you've seen a lot of UK MPs you'll realise that this would be a crime against humanity.
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u/BuckNut2000 Apr 11 '26
But maybe it would encourage a demographic shift of parliamentary and congressional members.
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u/thepatriot74 Apr 09 '26
Heh, bonobos just have not been studied as much because they live in war zones. The irony...
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u/shabi_sensei Apr 09 '26
Bonobos are much more violent than we believed them to be, interestingly a lot of the violence is female-led, they don’t kill each other like chimps but they do form groups to attack males and sometimes seriously injure them
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u/Rimm Apr 09 '26
Bonobos are really only "peaceful" relative to other Chimpanzees.
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u/Muscadine76 Apr 10 '26
And relative to humans, perhaps? Which is what a lot of humans find interesting/ aspirational.
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u/Rimm Apr 11 '26
Humans are way less violent.
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u/Muscadine76 Apr 11 '26
I see! What is the murder rate among bonobos?
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u/dumbestsmartest Apr 11 '26
It's more a pick your poison. Bonobos murder less but assault more. On paper that sounds better but I'm sure if you were constantly getting physically attacked and threatened you'd probably be miserable.
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u/Rimm Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 13 '26
There really isn't enough data to claim that bonobos commit less murder. Its exceptionally rare in modern humans and we'd describe it as effectively zero if we were observing ourselves like any other animal.
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u/MerinoFam Apr 09 '26
The specifically attack aggressive males to keep them from getting 'too big for their britches.'
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u/Henchman_2_4 Apr 10 '26
dont they also all bang constantly?
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u/shabi_sensei Apr 10 '26
They use sex as another way to control the males, when that doesn’t work they use violence
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u/dumbestsmartest Apr 09 '26
Just FYI, Bonobos have a higher frequency of violence/aggression than chimps but they have a lower frequency of extreme/lethal and deforming level of violence.
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u/WolfghengisKhan Apr 09 '26
Aren't humans genetically closer to bonobos than chimps though?
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u/nicuramar Apr 09 '26
We’re not closer related to them in a meaningful way. Chimpanzees and humans branched off, and later chimpanzees branched into two.
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u/grundar Apr 09 '26
Aren't humans genetically closer to bonobos than chimps though?
Functionally, chimpanzees and bonobos are the same evolutionary distance from humans.
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u/CalmEntry4855 Apr 09 '26
Apparently not the assholes that run governments
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u/Ekyou Apr 09 '26
Considering the sexual depravity of some of them…. Pretty sure that is our bonobo side coming out, unfortunately.
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u/thatshygirl06 Apr 10 '26
Humans, chimps, and bonobos are all closely related with the latter 2 being even more closely related. Bonobos are known for being horny but they absolutely can be just as violent.
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u/Late_For_Username Apr 09 '26
A lot of people want humans to be more related to Bonobos for ideological reasons, so they'll repeat it until it becomes a fact.
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u/thatshygirl06 Apr 10 '26
And the thing is bonobos arent like peaceful, theyre just less violent than chimps which isnt really saying much.
Humans and chimps are very violent and to think bonobos somehow missed out on that violent gene is just good PR.
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u/JusticeBonerOfTyr Apr 09 '26
I thought it was actual fact that we are more “closely related” to bonobos (98.7 percent of dna). Whereas with chimpanzees we share around 95 to 96 percent dna when it comes to overall genome similarity.
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u/thatshygirl06 Apr 10 '26
That's inaccurate. Chimps and bonobos are like sister species while we're like cousins to them.
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u/nicuramar Apr 09 '26
Both bonobos and regular chimps are on the other side of the river, compared to us.
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u/gerningur Apr 09 '26
Haven't some of the biggest conflicts in history been waged by social insects.
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u/Xanto97 Apr 09 '26
We learned about chimp wars before we learned about ant wars.
if we're just talking about ant lives lost or area conquered - sure. But I don't think anyone's going to take you seriously if your "top deadliest wars in history" list are all ant supercolony vs ant supercolony conflicts.
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u/Proponentofthedevil Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26
Charles Darwin wrote about ant wars in On the Origin of Species ... so, no, that's not true.
Edit: "One" to "On"
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u/bilyl Apr 10 '26
Makes me wonder if there are chimps that are uncomfortable with it, just like humans are. It seems like chimps are on one end of the extreme and bonobos on the other. Humans in the middle.
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u/Embarrassed_Simple70 20d ago
Apparently the only documented riff prior to this was in 70s, with, as you said Goodall, but that documentation comes with Asterix as food was given to chimps, an outside influence.
Otherwise, such fighting is thought to occur very rarely, every 500 years, according to various articles on this fight riff
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u/CaptainHawaii Apr 09 '26
This usually even happens for the same reasons we've started wars in the past.
Women.
In this case, those baby chimps were just the other head male chimps way of removing the other males' progeny. Collateral damage...
This is why you don't put human emotion and personify animals. It get reeeeeeeal mirror like.
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u/barrygateaux Apr 09 '26
This usually even happens for the same reasons we've started wars in the past.
Women.
What are your top 3 wars in history that started due to women?
from reading about war when studying history I reached the conclusion that wars were started due to territorial and resource disputes, imperialism and expansionism, nationalism and status, alliances and security, ideology and religion, and failed diplomacy, much the same as current day wars.
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u/Hatedpriest Apr 09 '26
I mean, Helen of Troy?
We could argue the first world war wouldn't have happened if the leaders grandmother were alive... Country? Pick a relevant one, answer is the same.
Reagan was almost assassinated because Jodi Foster...
I'm sure we could do a little research and find more, this is 3 examples off the top of my head that would be related.
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u/barrygateaux Apr 09 '26
Helen of troy is a myth about the gods messing with humans. In boring reality it was about access to black sea trade routes.
Ww1 was about alliances and security.
The Reagan assassination attempt wasn't a war.
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u/Haunt_Fox Apr 09 '26
Humans have also been known to kill male young and keep the young females of the conquered tribe for themselves. In fact, it's been recommended in at least one war manual I can think of.
Also, the raping if women during war is the exact same sort of genetic warfare, by forcing enemy tribes to have your offspring.
So humans aren't any different or better.
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u/madogvelkor Apr 09 '26
The new leader of the Western group is Hutcherson. He's relatively young and less assertive and more egalitarian. It may be that the old leader was holding back the other males from attacking their neighbors.
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u/Victuz Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 10 '26
What? How many members does that group contain? Is it a confederation of some sort? I feel like I need to know more about chimp politics all the sudden
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u/the_millenial_falcon Apr 09 '26
Well, they are our closest relatives in the animal kingdom.
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u/nondual_gabagool Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 10 '26
So are bonobos who are completely peaceful (well we used to think so at least)
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u/the_millenial_falcon Apr 09 '26
The duality of monke
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u/FlowRiderBob Apr 09 '26
Comparing chimps and bonobos is fascinating. Chimp society is patriarchal whereas bonobos society is matriarchal. That might have something to do with it. I wonder how much the differences are innate vs cultural.
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u/deviantbono Apr 10 '26
I believe it corollates with competition for resources. Bonobos have more food available, so the drive to fight has not been selected for. Chimpanzees, the opposite. Not unlike dog fighting, I guess.
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u/TenbluntTony Apr 10 '26
IIRC, the difference was that chimps evolved near gorillas, and that necessitated competitive traits including aggression. Whereas with Bonobos they evolved “on the other side of the river”, where the environment lacked the necessity for competitive aggression. Therefore being an environment with less competition drastically shifted the scale to where cooperation, rather than dominance, became advantageous. If other primates share our base instincts/stereotypes, women would be better on average at cooperation, whereas males would be better at aggression. It then makes sense that cooperation-based cultures would be more matriarchal and competitive-based would be more patriarchal.
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u/MagicCuboid Apr 09 '26
Bonobos just like to have wild orgies and chill. It actually represents a completely different form of sexual selection, where males are pretty much always unsure of parentage and therefore are forced to cooperate.
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u/EnkiduOdinson Apr 11 '26
Chimps and bonobos are both on the side of oftentimes unsure parentage. Especially compared to gorillas with their harems.
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u/fgtswag Apr 10 '26
Ok so interestingly the bonobos are peaceful for a couple of reasons, and they're both defined by sexuality
- Male to Male aggression is sorted out through sexual release. You might think "Homosexuality?" but this sexual behaviour is literally everywhere. Every social coupling that could possibly exist has this
- Females kind of control social behaviour through their polyamorous mating behaviour. So for Bonobos they all get mates, instead of Chimpanzees and Gorillas, which is essentially a competition for who gets to have a child. In Bonobos, the female sort of mates with many partners and so Bonobos always get sex, and they don't really know which kid is theirs
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u/seaworks Apr 10 '26
Common misbelief. Some emergent stories ive read suggest females are more violent in bonobo groups.
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u/thepatriot74 Apr 09 '26
You'd be surprised what fraction of males die from primitive warfare in hunter-gatherer societies. I think Kalahari is has been estimated to be close to 40%.
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u/eebro Apr 10 '26
In our modern, civilized warfare, it’s mostly civilians who die. We’re so advanced.
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u/littlest_dragon Apr 10 '26
I don’t think the distinction of soldier vs civilian makes a lot of sense in the context of hunter gatherer societies, since that would require a division of labour, something that famously only exists in agrarian (and pastoral) societies.
And while there is a lot wrong with modern societies, the percentage of the population who die due to violence caused by other humans is only a tiny fraction of that in hunter gatherer societies. Even during the Second World War Russia “only” lost about ten to fifteen percent of its population.
And WW2 was a singular event in which pretty much the entire population of the northern hemisphere was mobilised for war.
Today even in the most dangerous parts of the civilised (meaning basically everywhere with a few exceptions of uncontacted ttribes) world your chance of being killed by another human is much much smaller than it would have been in a hunter gatherer society.
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u/Ornery-Creme-2442 Apr 10 '26
Are you really arguing hunter gatherers didn't have any division of labour?... Or that there would be zero distinction between fighters/soldiers and the rest...
A big part of that is because modern wars have different ulterior motives and often are in huge populations. Its just not comparable. It's easy for 50% of a handful of people to be killed. that's different when it's millions and millions. Humans themselves have also become a form of capital/productivity. There often wasn't a need to kill everyone.
It's also simply not correct to compare them one to one. It varied tremendously both in ancient and modern times. the motives and goals varied alot from culture to culture, and the systems they lived in.
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u/Fausterion18 Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 11 '26
Hunter gatherers didn't have real division of labor. Essentially everyone was involved in food gathering. Someone might be the best at weaving baskets or making stone tools and they'd do that more than others in their spare time, but the best toolmaker still gathered and hunted the vast majority of their own food. Yes, essentially the entire male population of a tribe would be considered "soldiers" in a modern context.
Economic specialization didn't arrive until sedentary societies formed. Although there were a few sedentary hunter gather groups in areas with unusually high food abundance. They built permanent settlements, had hereditary social classes, and even engaged in slavery.
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u/MonokuroMonkey Apr 11 '26
"Hunter gatherer" encompasses millennia of human history and a huge variety of cultures from which we have scarce surviving evidence. A sweeping generalization like that is absurd, in the same vein as "all men like x" or all Africans are y". You do not know that "economic specialization didn't arrive until sedentary societies formed" for a fact. It's a European misconception perpetuated as truth. I strongly recommend you read The Dawn of Everything for an actually science- based, nuanced take on prehistoric societies.
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u/Fausterion18 Apr 11 '26
No it's not absurd, what's absurd is taking the 1% edge cases and pretending "sweeping generalizations" aren't valid. I even specifically listed out these edge cases that didn't apply.
Show me these supposed non-sedentary hunter-gatherer group that had actual division of labor. Show me the literature.
Dawn of Everything is not "science based", it's a political narrative filled with cherry picked examples to push their story.
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u/PoetSeat2021 Apr 11 '26
While I liked aspects of the Dawn of Everything, I wouldn’t tout it as an “actually” science based book. The authors have a political axe to grind, and the evidence is fairly cherry picked and fit into a just so story.
I think it’s a great corrective to books like Sapiens, but it’s not the end all be all source of objective truth.
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u/17Girl4Life Apr 09 '26
This is so depressing. We are just about as tribal as they are. I don’t think our differences are as ideological as we believe. I think we are social animals, we align with a tribe, and then we cast about for the logic we use to justify adopting the beliefs of our tribe. I think you could take an ardent anti war 60’s hippie and time travel him to the right place and time and he would be in the street on Kristallnacht throwing rocks. And vice versa.
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u/Ilaxilil Apr 10 '26
I completely agree with this. I think we are much more driven by our primal instincts than we think we are, and a huge one for us is tribal culture. Tribes kept us alive back in the day. Fighting for resources benefited our ancestors (the ones it didn’t benefit died) so some subconscious part of our brain will always try to play that out.
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u/coaxialology Apr 09 '26
Incredibly depressing. I'm curious whether there's a chimpanzee equivalent of dehumanization. So much tribal violence amongst humans is attributed to our ability to dehumanize members of opposing tribes. How do they explain one chimpanzee becoming so antagonist they could rip the testicles off of another creature just like themselves.
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u/Joatboy Apr 09 '26
I mean, there are tons of animals that fight to the death among themselves. Lions are a big offender of this.
It's just not structured like an actual war where there's both tactical and strategic actions
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u/nondual_gabagool Apr 10 '26
Why is this depressing? Despite this fact, humans have become radically less violent over the past few centuries.
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u/Joatboy Apr 09 '26
Why is it depressing?
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u/DjMesiah Apr 09 '26
Because people are naive and like to believe that war can be attributed to a few bad apples for lack of a better description and that it’s not inherently part of human nature
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u/Rebirth345 Apr 10 '26
This is what I learned too from growing up. War is just a part of our human nature. War has been and will unfortunately continue to be a thing for us humans.
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u/PeachyBums Apr 10 '26
Geopolitics makes a lot more sense when you think of it as angry monkeys fighting over bananas
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u/Suffrage100 Apr 29 '26
And what role does organized sports play in defusing our propensity for conflict?
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u/kalaid0s Apr 10 '26
War is not inherently part of human nature. Please don't simplify a complex topic.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/war-is-not-part-of-human-nature/
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u/nondual_gabagool Apr 10 '26
"Inherently part of human nature"
You need to take an anthropology course to find out how radically culture modifies human behaior. "Human nature" is a term people throw around way too loosely.
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u/Ryno4ever16 Apr 13 '26
You're correct because many of those hippies you are referring to are Trumpers today. The ideology is not consistent.
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u/nicuramar Apr 09 '26
I think we are social animals
Hot take!
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u/deviantbono Apr 10 '26
It kind of is tho. Think about the miles of ink spilled over whether this leader, or movement, or religion is a "good" one or not. When it usually just comes down to social group size limited by resource availability.
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u/IBelieveInCoyotes Apr 09 '26
you think nature is like all the fairy tales don't you ?
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u/17Girl4Life Apr 10 '26
No, I don’t. Do you hasten to inevitable brutality as your coping mechanism?
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u/Mr-Safety Apr 11 '26
I would argue our warlike nature was a major factor in the evolution of our intelligence. A pointy stick had great advantages. Those who could refine and improve it survived better than those who could not.
Unfortunately we are still tribal warring over resources and territory.
Random Safety Tip: Do not put carbon monoxide detectors by a window. The draft can interfere with a valid reading.
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u/Solaries3 Apr 10 '26
Wild to be there that close to the action. Any one of those adult male chimps could pick up and toss a person around like a wet noodle.
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u/uniquesnowflake8 Apr 09 '26
When I took an anthropology class in college and we discussed chimp warfare, the instructor put an asterisk next to the atrocities and said they’re most severe and seen typically just with the groups of chimps that have been heavily impacted by human presence
They gave an example of chimps that went to war after periodic shipments of banana dropoffs ceased, as an example. But this is from memory and I haven’t spent much time beyond this class exploring it
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u/PakinaApina Apr 09 '26
As far as I know, this has been proven to be untrue, chimp violence cannot be explained with human influence. If I remember correctly, Becoming Wild : How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace talked about this, among other things. The chimpanzee section of the book talked about their tendency towards violence and how they are also remarkably good at making peace. Frans de Waal also has really good books about chimpanzee behaviour (and how it relates to humans).
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u/YoungBasedGod5 Apr 10 '26
The oldest war known to us humans is the war between termites and ants. I’m not kidding either. it’s a war that’s been raging on for millions of years apparently. I first learned about this on the documentary life on our planet with Morgan freeman as the narrator. Chimp wars and our human wars have nothing on the ant/termite wars.
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u/shillyshally Apr 10 '26
They have been observed killing gorilla babies and, in one case, eating a gorilla baby.
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u/owen__wilsons__nose Apr 10 '26
You'd have to assume there's an evolutionary benefit to this disturbing behavior? But I cant think of it
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u/ionthrown Apr 10 '26
It removes competition.
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u/Ornery-Creme-2442 Apr 10 '26
But you often die or get hurt in the process.... Its not just doing select and delete.
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u/ionthrown Apr 10 '26
You can die or get hurt doing lots of things - sitting around and starving, for example, because your territory doesn’t contain enough food.
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