In Uganda, in Kibale National Park, lives the largest population of chimpanzees in the world. It has about 200 specimens and is named after Ngogo, the nearest location inhabited by humans.

A few days ago, the journal Science published a study documenting the gradual splitting of the Ngogo into two enemy groups, which began in 2015 and has now escalated into a full-blown ‘civil war’.
The data, updated to 2024, confirmed the deaths of at least 19 cubs and seven adults.

Almost all of the victims belonged to the ‘central Ngogo’ group, which was attacked by the ‘western Ngogo’ group and apparently failed to mount a good defensive strategy.

All crazy for Ngogo

The study instantly aroused irresistible curiosity.
It was picked up by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the BBC and NBC, the Guardian and Reuters, not to mention dedicated portals such as Scientific American.

Needless to add, social media went wild with comments.

“We should arm and train moderate chimps,” suggested some Twitter/X users.
“Here’s finally a conflict where Witkoff can mediate,” Trump critics noted.
But even Trumpians have their own pebbles to get off: “USAID has given money to various wildlife conservation projects in Uganda, so technically my taxes are funding both factions.”

“Behind the chimpanzee civil war is Israel’s hand,” warns someone else, “wake the fuck up.”
When the media then released the alleged videos of the primate clashes, there were those who immediately jumped on the bandwagon: ‘Pay attention, nobody killed the journalist’.

Wikipedia created a real-time page on the conflict, detailing deployments, casualties and hypotheses on the causes, while a Russian military blogger tried his hand at drawing maps of operations within the nature reserve.

“Unbelievable,” commented one user,
“the strategy cards of a chimpanzee civil war came out before GTA 6”.

But why do we feel so drawn to this monkey slaughter in a remote forest?

Twitter like Homer

The ironic tone of many comments suggests a first response: it is a way of downplaying.

In an era of ever-increasing anxiety about wars between humans, applying the lexicon of war to chimpanzees gives us a few minutes of relief and levity.

It might seem a stupid and not very decisive attitude in the face of world crises.
Yet there must be a reason why Homer, in ancient Greece, was already credited with a sarcastic poem recounting the war of the frogs against the mice (that Batracomiomachia that more than one of us had to endure in high school).

One would have thought, in short, that even the great Homer, between a celebration of Achilles and a lament over Hector, would have felt the need to amuse himself by imagining a shrunken war, fought by little animals and thus made funny, pathetic and ultimately painless.

But the truth is, if the monkey war only appealed to us as grotesque amusement that alleviates the fear of human warfare, it would not so easily conquer the front pages of major international newspapers.

To conquer them, unfortunately, a news story must often presuppose some grim and pedantic afterthought, to which the reader must be pedagogically introduced by taking a cue from the news.

And what afterthought would that be, in this case?

Obsession with the ‘state of nature’

But it is obvious. We read the study authors’ own conclusions: “This study encourages a reevaluation of current models of human collective violence. If chimpanzee groups can polarize, split, and engage in lethal aggression without human-type cultural markers, then relational dynamics may play a larger causal role in human conflict than often assumed”.

In the words of Wired (which is just one of the most serious of serious publications): ‘The civil war between chimpanzees teaches us something about human conflicts’.

Why on earth a chimpanzee fight should teach us anything about human strife is actually not very clear.

Of course, the idea is tempting. If indeed, as the authors claim, “many conflicts may originate in the breakdown of interpersonal relationships rather than in entrenched ethnic or ideological divisions” and“it may be in the small, daily acts of reconciliation and reunion between individuals that we find opportunities for peace”, then we could dispose of a long list of crackpot explanations for why wars exist: from ‘class struggle’ to ‘systemic patriarchy’ to ‘greed of arms dealers’.
Not a bad perspective.

It is nothing new, however, that Western man wonders how he would have lived ‘in the state of nature’, i.e. in an original condition without written laws, technologies or constituted authorities.
He has always been desperately searching for other beings that resemble the way he, in his fantasies, imagines himself to have been in a remote past without civilisation.

His secret hope is to find the original cause of all violence, the ‘original sin’ that bleeds our species, and, consequently, the magic recipe to escape from it.

Traditionally, philosophers were inspired by travellers’ accounts of the ‘savages’ of the Americas or the Pacific. Thus, among others, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Freud and Bergson.

To do so today would be ridiculous and offensive, and so we fall back on apes: after all, are they or are they not a kind of pre-human, so similar to us in so many gestures, so many facial expressions and so many emotions?

It would be nice, but the answer is ‘no’.

The last common ancestor we and chimpanzees had was a large squirrel that lived about 7 million years ago.
If today we tend to see the chimpanzee as a pre-human and not as a mega squirrel, it is because of our eternal tendency, so well understood by Giambattista Vico, to ‘make ourselves the rule of the universe’, humanising and describing in human terms everything we do not know enough about.

Some studies, moreover, have estimated that the neurons of a primate have fewer synapses than those of a mouse: they may be wrong, but the comparison with rodents is less unfounded than it seems.

Consider this, moreover: a child not even three years old has cognitive and linguistic abilities superior to those of any chimpanzee. The 390 or so combinations of sounds that chimpanzees produce in response to certain events are not even remotely comparable to the abstruse stories my daughter tells about things that never happened to her or fairy tale characters that never existed.
And yet, if a scientist claimed to trace the matrix of all collective violence to the behaviour of three-year-olds, we would give him very little credit.

The same, a fortiori, applies to chimpanzees.

Horse and plane crashes

The chroniclers of the Ngogo war are under the illusion that:

1) We are just a more sophisticated version of apes;
2) But the overriding cause of wars is not due to this sophistication;
3) So by studying the apes’ wars, we can also explain our own.

Well, even if the first premise is true, the second is completely arbitrary and indemonstrable.

The dream of finding in the ape a simplified man, where the same phenomena that are observed in man can be observed in a simplified form, is destined to remain a dream.

It is as if the pilot of a supersonic aeroplane, the moment he has a breakdown, would set out to study the bolting of horses in order to search for the original cause of all accidents that may occur during journeys.

In order to understand the reasons for our wars, there are no shortcuts: one must follow the steep and arduous road, which consists of consulting the immense amount of documents and data produced by those who lived through those wars, recounted them and reflected on them.

And in going down this road, nine times out of ten, the honest scholar ends up raising his arms and admitting with candour that there is no such thing as ‘the original cause of war’ or ‘the Platonic idea of war’.

There is that crazy and unpredictable kaleidoscope we callhomo sapiens and which, unfortunately or fortunately, will never cease to amaze us.