Gombe Chimpanzee War

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The Gombe Chimpanzee War from 1974 to 1978 was a violent clash between two groups of chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes ) in the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania . The Kasakela group in the northern part of the park and the Kahama group in the southern part were involved. Both groups emerged from the same community, which had increased in membership and eventually divided. The action was mainly observed by the British behavioral scientist Jane Goodall . Computer-aided analyzes were carried out on the basis of their records, which showed that there had been major tensions within the original community as early as 1971, which resulted in the formation of two rival groups.

The Kahama group in the south consisted of six adult males and one juvenile male (among them those named by Goodall "Hugh", "Charlie", "Goliath" and "Sniff") and three adult females with their offspring in childhood or infancy. The casakela group, however, consisted of twelve adult females with young animals and eight adult males.

The war"

The first fatal attack occurred on January 7, 1974, when six of the kasakela males surrounded the chimpanzee "Godi" of the Kahama group, who was in a tree, attacked him and brought him to the ground, beating, kicking and biting him for so long. until he died of the injuries. This represents the first documented situation in which chimpanzees killed a conspecific.

For the next four years, all males in the Kahama group were killed by the males in the Kasekela group. One of the females has also been shown to have fallen victim to the attacks, two other females are considered missing, and three were integrated into the Kasekela group. As a result, the kasakela males managed to take over the territory of the Kahama group. This gain in space did not last, however, as the area now bordered directly on the territory of another group of chimpanzees, the Kalande group, and was largely abandoned after some disputes with this community, which proved to be clearly superior.

Implications for primate ethology

The violent actions shocked Goodall, who until then had assumed that the behavior of the chimpanzees was similar to that of humans, but was much "nicer". In connection with a cannibalistic infanticide carried out by a senior chimpanzee mother against a low-ranking chimpanzee mother in 1975, Goodall interpreted her observations as the "dark side" of the behavior of our primatic relatives. In her memoir Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe , she wrote:

“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. "

“For years I had problems coming to terms with this new knowledge. Often times when I woke up at night, unsolicited, appalling images would pop into my head - Satan [one of the monkeys] holding his hand under Sniff's chin to drink the blood that flows from the large wound on his face; old Rodolf, usually so kind, standing upright to hurl a four-pound stone at Godi's outstretched body; Jomeo tearing a strip of skin from Des thigh; Figan, as he strikes again and again on the battered, trembling body of Goliath, one of his childhood heroes. "

Observation station that Goodall used to feed the Gombe chimpanzees

When Goodall reported the events in Gombe to the professional world, their thesis of naturally occurring "wars" among the chimpanzees was initially questioned. The scientific models of that time assumed that there was little in common between human and animal behavior. Some scientists therefore accused Goodall of excessive anthropomorphism ; others believed that their presence and the habit of feeding the animals triggered the violent conflict in an otherwise peaceful society. As a consequence, later research began quite deliberately to leave the animals as unaffected as possible, i.e. not to feed them. In fact, Goodall's idea of ​​attracting chimpanzees with bananas had favored the reproduction rate and thereby unknowingly contributed to the outbreak of the conflict. Nonetheless, it could be confirmed that war-like conflicts - both with foreign groups and internally, in connection with the division of communities that have grown too large - are part of the natural territorial behavior of our closest genetic relatives.

Goodall's interpretation of what happened was finally confirmed by a project she undertook independently. The primate ethologists David Watts and John Mitani researched and filmed a chimpanzee horde that last consisted of more than 200 individuals for a period of over twenty years. Place of the event: Ngogo in Kibale National Park, Uganda. Result: The excellent food situation in their unusually fertile area had allowed the group to grow significantly, but the number of members of a male team seems limited to a maximum. At least one group of males had started to split off from the others and to launch regular attacks on an alien horde of chimpanzees living nearby. Ultimately, their territorial instinct for fighting turned deadly against members of their own horde, apparently because they had failed to wrest enough space from the foreign horde to emigrate from "offshoots" of their own former community.

This pronounced aggressive behavior is in the nature of the common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytis) and is generally beneficial for their general defense. Without their willingness to fight, the teams would hardly be able to assert themselves and the respective women's / children's communities against the strong gorillas (eating competitors). This situation was spared the bonobos , whose range does not overlap with that of the gorillas, probably for precisely this reason. Not only are they less muscular, but they can also afford to form predominantly women-dominated communities and to live according to the motto Make Love, not War .

Interdisciplinary meaning

Evolutionary biology

How the male specimens of the common chimpanzees organize themselves into “fighting units” in order to assert the territories they occupy against predators and species-specific competition, the 'conquered' women's communities look after their offspring and they in turn interact is of interest to anthropology as well as the Psychology. Jane Goodall was one of three assistants that Louis Leakey commissioned to study the forms of coexistence among chimpanzees, orangutans (through Birutė Galdikas ) and gorillas (through Dian Fossey ). As a paleoanthropologist, he hoped to be able to draw conclusions about the evolution of behavior in the early phylogenetic development of humans from the results of the newly established research areas - for Goodall a task that she made her life's work.

Philosophical anthropology

The Homo sapiens are several other options to choose from: His relatives have so far evolutioniertes awareness that they are in principle able to keep the events experienced wars in memory, to be handed down and to control their birth rate in wise considering the limited surface of the planet . In principle, they are no less capable of consciously taming their combative impulses by themselves. B. agree agreements with their enemies that compensate for the lack of resources (as a frequent result of overpopulation) through peaceful exchange of goods. The primate ethologist Frans de Waal draws attention to this ability on the occasion of the impression of the cruelty of the war-like behavior of our closest relatives and the questions raised by the interview, what we share with them, how we differ.

bibliography

  • Jane Goodall: Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010, ISBN 978-0-547-48838-7
  • Ian Morris: Was! What Is It Good For? The Role of Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots. MacMillan, 2014, ISBN 978-1-84765-454-0
  • Jane Goodall: The chimpanzees of Gombe: patterns of behavior . Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986, ISBN 978-0-674-11649-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Goodall 2010, p. 121
  2. ↑ a b c Goodall 2010, p. 120
  3. ^ Barras, Colin: Only known chimp war reveals how societies splinter. In: New Scientist. May 7, 2014, accessed March 6, 2017 .
  4. ↑ a b Morris, p. 288
  5. ↑ a b c Morris, p. 289
  6. ↑ a b Goodall 2010, pp. 129-130
  7. ↑ Goodall 2010, p. 128
  8. ^ Goodall 2010, pp. 128-129
  9. ^ A b Bradshaw, GA: Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us about Humanity . Yale University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-300-15491-7 , p. 40.
  10. ↑ a b Morris, p. 290
  11. ↑ Nature of war: Chimps inherently violent; Study disproves theory that 'chimpanzee wars' are sparked by human influence. In: ScienceDaily . September 17, 2014, accessed March 6, 2017 .
  12. ↑ Battle of the Warrior Monkeys. Retrieved June 17, 2019 .
  13. ↑ David P Watts, John C Mitani: Battle of the Warrior Apes. 86 minutes; Director: James Reed, 2016. Seen on September 20, 2018
  14. ↑ Kevin E Langergraber, David P Watts, Linda Vigilant, John C Mitani: Group augmentation, collective action, and territorial boundary patrols by male chimpanzees. In: Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 114/28/2017: 7337-7342. Free article
  15. ↑ Philip Bethgen and Rafaela von Bredow: Hippie or killer monkey? In: Der Spiegel. Retrieved August 26, 2019 .