We then learned that such killings between males of adjacent chimp communities happen at nearly every research site where the apes have been observed. They argue that intergroup violence is the product of outside forces such as Western contact. The argument gained traction especially among scholars who view human societies as egalitarian and peaceful by nature. Some anthropologists argued that the violence was precipitated by the presence of human researchers, or by humans provisioning chimps with bananas, or perhaps by humans altering the habitat, or perhaps even by the habituation process itself. Since these two groups had recently split from one another, males were ganging up to kill their former comrades. This charge was first raised shortly after Jane Goodall first observed the males of one Gombe community seeking out and attacking the males of the neighboring community. There is a school of thought-a poorly informed one-that holds that chimpanzee aggression is somehow the product of human interference in their behavior. Most researchers have concluded that “might makes right” when it comes to chimpanzees’ treatment of one another, but that hasn’t stopped anthropologists from citing chimpanzee aggression as a potential example of how punitive violence may have its cultural origins in our own species. An entire wing of animal behavior research is founded on the idea that the roots of human morality may be found in the premoral behavior of nonhuman primates, with chimpanzees serving as a prime animal model. We tend to view great apes in a different light because of their close evolutionary connection to us. We don’t get angry at lions for attacking each other or for killing zebras that’s just what lions do. They are amoral their violence is a means to reach an end. Chimpanzees who injure or kill one another are not immoral. It’s harder to take a utilitarian approach to understanding violence in chimpanzees than it is in lower mammals. Like every other mammal on the planet, chimpanzees have the capacity to inflict physical harm on one another. After minor squabbles they reconcile, and the ways in which they restore social harmony are as interesting and important as the violence that gets all the attention from scientists and the media. And just as humans have myriad ways to defuse disputes before they reach a stage at which violence seems a feasible option, chimpanzees have many fail-safes that prevent lethal aggression from taking place. The potential for violent behavior is within each of us, but it surfaces only rarely, or never at all. Of course the same could be said about us. And both males and females are known to commit infanticide.Ĭhimpanzees are the only primates other than us who routinely kill one another in the name of territory and resources.Ĭhimpanzees are not killing machines 99 percent of their lives are spent in peace. And yet they carry out grisly attacks on members of their own and especially neighboring communities. Their canine teeth, while impressive, are no match for those of a carnivore. Chimpanzees lack the weapons we associate with efficient killers they have hands and fingernails, not paws and claws. As in human societies, the killers are virtually always males, as Wrangham pointed out in his book Demonic Males. A separate study by Harvard University primatologist Richard Wrangham and his coauthors found a similar “murder” rate between chimpanzees and traditional human hunter-gatherer societies, and a much higher rate of nonlethal aggression by chimpanzees.Ĭhimpanzees are the only primates other than us who routinely kill one another in the name of territory and resources. My University of Southern California colleague Christopher Boehm estimated that the rate of nonlethal violence among wild chimpanzees is greater than that of most human societies. Chimpanzees use aggression in ways that repulse us when we see it in our own species.
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