#chimpanzees

[eldergodchucky]

Chimpanzees and bonobos have human-like friend circles, study finds

A new research report is adding another piece to a larger scientific puzzle, and the important part is not the drama of the finding but the practical work it could make possible. For readers, the useful question is what the research changes: whether it gives scientists a cleaner measurement, a better tool, or a result strong enough for other teams to test. Continue reading Chimpanzees and bonobos…

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[paradoxfeed]

So it turns out wild chimpanzees have been day drinkers for *thirty million years* and nobody really asked them about it until now. They get tipsy on fermented fruit as a matter of course. This genuinely rewrites how we think about alcohol and primate behavior. Read more on Paradox Feed

[imjustheretoseetheprivateblogs]

NGL, everyone in that theater is lucky to be alive

[thebiscuiteternal]

A Cure for Lu — Our Tennessee

A Cure for Lu — Our Tennessee

UT veterinary and human neurosurgeons teamed up to treat Lu, a Zoo Knoxville chimpanzee diagnosed with a spinal cord tumor.

An MRI revealed Lu, a 35-year-old chimpanzee at Zoo Knoxville, had a tumor on his spinal cord. Specialists at the UT College of Veterinary Medicine (UTCVM) first thought radiation would be the best course of action. But Dr. Talisha Moore, a clinical assistant professor and veterinary neurosurgeon, had another thought.

She texted Dr. James Killeffer, the chief neurosurgeon at UT Medical Center and associate professor in the UT Health Science Center College of Medicine-Knoxville, across the river. They already had a working relationship by hosting each other’s residents, consulting and talking about different neurosurgical approaches for animals and humans, speaking at conferences and planning future collaboration.

This partnership between University of Tennessee animal and human doctors proved to be the perfect medicine for Lu.

It also, perhaps, will make its own page in history.

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

The Sociology of the Killer Chimps

What a civil war among our closest relatives tells us about human conflict.

Warfare is often understood as a contest between visibly distinct groups. But history shows that the worst conflicts can occur within such groups. Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong oversaw the killing of millions of their own people. The executioners spoke the same languages, ate the same foods and practiced the same religions as their victims. Yet the bloodlust was unrivaled.

This isn’t uniquely human. A new study in Science describes a vicious civil war among our nearest evolutionary relatives: chimpanzees. A community of nearly 200 apes that had lived together, groomed together and raised offspring together slowly fractured into two rival groups. Then one group began killing the other.

The study, led by Aaron Sandel at the University of Texas, draws on 30 years of data from the Ngogo chimpanzee community in Uganda’s Kibale National Park. Ngogo was the largest known group of wild chimpanzees and was the subject of the popular 2023 Netflix docu-series “Chimp Empire.” For two decades, researchers tracked the social networks, movements and family relationships of every ape. The picture that emerged was of a single community with internal clusters, akin to neighborhoods in a city. For years, the chimpanzees had loose subgroups, but individuals moved between them.

Then, in 2015, something shifted. The social ties holding the group together suddenly pulled apart. By 2018 the chimpanzees had formed two separate communities that no longer mixed. After that, the smaller Western group began killing members of the larger Central group. From 2018 to 2024, they killed at least seven adult males and 17 infants from the other group in coordinated attacks. These weren’t strangers. They were former partners in grooming, hunting and territorial patrols.

The chimpanzee civil war challenges a dominant theory about human conflict. A prominent view in political science holds that warfare requires cultural markers such as religion, ethnicity, language and political ideology. This is why civil wars are often explained through the lens of sectarian or ethnic division.

The Ngogo chimpanzees had none of these things. No religion. No ideology. No language differences or ethnic identities. The animals didn’t need ideology to divide. They needed only a change in their network of social ties. As relationships weakened, the perceived cost of harming former allies fell.

The researchers identified several forces that may have tipped the group from unity to fracture. The sheer size of the community, nearly 200 individuals, likely strained the ability of any one chimpanzee to maintain the relationships needed to hold the group together. In 2014, the deaths of several older chimpanzees removed key social connectors. In 2015, a new alpha male took over, a shift that often raises tensions. Then, in 2017, a respiratory epidemic killed 25 chimpanzees, including one who acted as a bridge between the two increasingly separated groups. No single event caused the split, but together they weakened the bonds that held the community together.

One finding deserves special attention. All the lethal attacks were initiated by the smaller group. The researchers suggest that the males’ long-standing internal cohesion within this smaller group, built over years of close association, gave them an effectiveness that outweighed their disadvantage in numbers. Tight bonds made the small group dangerous.

Of course, humans aren’t chimps, and we shouldn’t read too much into this conflict. Still, it does shed light on the commonly held view that if we could only implement the correct ideology, reform institutions or overcome cultural divisions, peace would naturally follow.

The raw materials for collective violence may be built into the social nature we share with our closest relatives. Culture gives human conflict its particular shape and scale. But the engine underneath may be older and simpler than we prefer to believe.

The researchers close their paper by suggesting that “it may be in the small, daily acts of reconciliation and reunion between individuals that we find opportunities for peace.” The bonds we maintain aren’t merely decorative. Relationships do the work, for good and for ill. And when they fail, the consequences can be lethal.

[protoslacker]

In the private signing study, imagination was defined as an utterance that is 'sung' or is word play, or represents a transformation of real objects or events, whether present or not: we found that 5 per cent of the utterances were imaginary. For example, rhythmic movements of signs or form alliteration of signs would be considered comparable to vocal singing. These were such events as Loulis playing with a block of wood by placing it on his head and then referring to it as a hat. Another instance was when Moja produced an alliteration by 'rhyming' signs that all used the same initial hand configuration.

Roger S. Fouts & Deborah H. Fouts via Animal Rights Library. Chimpanzees’ Use of Sign Language

In PAOLA CAVALIERI & PETER SINGER (eds.), The Great Ape Project New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1993, pp. 28-41

Somewhere online recently I read an allusion to this sort of private signing in Chimpanzees. I thought about it long after the time I could find what I read again. This whole chapter is a humbling exhumation of how we could have imagined ourselves as so different from Chimpanzees in the first place.

[ansy1984]

Inside the Deadly Civil War That Tore Apart a Group of Chimpanzees in Uganda

A chimp group’s success may have led to its violent downfall, a new study suggests. Source link

Inside the Deadly Civil War That Tore Apart a Group of Chimpanzees in Uganda

[unbfacts]

A 2025 study found that wild chimpanzees likely get about 14 grams of alcohol a day from fermented fruit, which works out to roughly 2 to 2.5 human drinks when adjusted for their body size. A 2026 follow-up urine study backed that up and said it supports the “drunken monkey” idea that humans may have inherited some appetite for alcohol from fruit-eating primate ancestors.