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You share 98.8% of your DNA with chimpanzees. A group of 200 of them just tore itself apart in a Ugandan rainforest, and researchers have been watching it happen for a decade.
A study came out yesterday in Science, one of the top research journals in the world. For 30 years, scientists tracked the Ngogo chimps in Uganda's Kibale National Park. This was the largest known chimp group on the planet, around 200 animals all living, hunting, and raising families together. Then around 2015, the group started splitting down the middle. Two clusters, one on the west side of the territory and one in the center, stopped spending time together. Males stopped mating with females from the other side. By 2018, they'd drawn a line through the forest and refused to cross it.
The Western chimps started raiding. Between 2018 and 2024, they killed 7 adult males and 17 babies from the Central group. They ripped infants straight off their mothers' chests. Fourteen more Central males vanished during that stretch, bodies never found, while Western's population climbed from 76 to 108. John Mitani, a University of Michigan researcher who spent over 20 years with these chimps, told NBC he believes the Central group is "doomed." He used the phrase "extinction event."
This almost never happens. DNA evidence suggests chimp communities fracture like this roughly once every 500 years. The only other time anyone saw it was in the 1970s with Jane Goodall's chimps in Tanzania, but researchers questioned that case because Goodall's team had been feeding bananas to the animals for years, which may have warped their natural behavior. Ngogo is the first split observed with zero human interference.
The cause dates back to 2014. Five males died that year, likely from disease. These weren't random chimps. They had close bonds on both sides of the group, the kind of friendships that kept 200 animals functioning as one unit. Once they were gone, a new top male seized control in 2015, a disease swept through and killed 25 more in 2017, and the two sides just kept drifting until there was nothing connecting them anymore.
One part of the paper sat with me. These chimps have no ethnicity. No religion. No political parties. The war started because friendships broke down, cliques solidified, and new group identities replaced years of cooperation. Aaron Sandel, the lead researcher from UT Austin, argued that keeping relationships alive across group lines may be the actual recipe for preventing this kind of collapse. In a species 98.8% identical to us, that recipe failed in under ten years.
Polymarket@Polymarket
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