The Guardian reports:

[John] Mitani [a primatologist from northern California] estimates he has spent 85 months of his life hiking the forests of Ngogo [in Uganda’s Kibale national park], or approximately seven years. What began as a few basic structures and tents has grown into a large – albeit rustic – research camp that has housed the nearly 90 researchers who have worked with the Ngogo project over three decades.

The findings that have emerged from Ngogo over the years have stunned the scientific world, similar to the discoveries first made at Gombe in Tanzania by Jane Goodall in the 1960s and 1970s. Mitani and his colleagues documented the lowest mortality ever recorded for a wild chimp population, suggesting that good habitat conditions could lengthen life expectancy to close to that of human hunter-gatherers.

They found that unrelated males could form strong alliances and cooperate, moving beyond the accepted paradigm that only close kin would work together. Hunting and meat-eating (particularly munching on the red colobus monkeys) were found to be important for male social bonding, not just nutrition.

But the most notable – and disturbing – finding of Ngogo began on a June day in 2015. Mitani and his fellow researchers were observing a cluster of the group when the chimps began to display nervous behaviour and scattered at the sounds of approaching group members. “All of a sudden, the individuals I was following just ran down the hill for no apparent reason,” Mitani says. “Chaos erupted. They started to run around and chase each other.”

That moment, in retrospect, was the first sign of what would become a years-long bloody conflict – chronicled in the 2023 Netflix series Chimp Empire – between a once close-knit group of chimps. In a study published this April in the journal Science, Mitani and his colleagues describe what may be the first “civil war” among wild chimps. [Continue reading…]