The Gombe Chimpanzee War, A conflict that didn’t involve any humans.

The Gombe Chimpanzee War, A conflict that didn’t involve any humans.

Many of us think that Chimpanzees are peaceful creatures, that always looked cheerful and playful, without the slightest tendency towards violence, and that Humans alone involve ourselves in conflict.

However, in the early 1970’s, with the death of an alpha male leader of a pack of Chimps in the Gombe region of Tanzania lead to the group being splintered into two, the Kasakela and the Kahama.

Over a period of 4 years, the Kasakela Chimps would kill all of the Kahama Chimps, using sharp stones to kill each other.

Jane Goodall, who would later become a leading expert on Chimpanzees, observed the conflict.

Jane Goodall, being disturbed by the violence of the primal lifestyle of the Chimps, wrote in her memoir Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe,

For several years I struggled to come to terms with this new knowledge. Often when I woke in the night, horrific pictures sprang unbidden to my mind—Satan [one of the apes], cupping his hand below Sniff's chin to drink the blood that welled from a great wound on his face; 


old Rodolf, usually so benign, standing upright to hurl a four-pound rock at Godi's prostrate body; Jomeo tearing a strip of skin from Dé's thigh; Figan, charging and hitting, again and again, the stricken, quivering body of Goliath, one of his childhood heroes.

With our closest living relatives on the Evolutionary Tree having the same techniques of violence as us, It turns out us humans have more in common with our animalistic past than some might like to admit.

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