Episode Details

In this episode of Based Camp, Simone and Malcolm explore the ongoing chimpanzee civil war in Uganda’s Ngogo community—the largest wild chimp group ever studied—and what it reveals about how civil conflicts actually start.

What looks like a random outbreak of violence among chimps turns out to be the mechanical result of a few subtle shifts: the deaths of key intermediary individuals who once connected rival subgroups, a power transition, and the complete breakdown of everyday social exchange. Once those bridging relationships vanished, the community split into hostile blocs that began patrolling, ambushing, and killing with deliberate cruelty—including females participating in infant killings.

The parallel to modern human politics is hard to ignore. When groups stop talking, stop sharing social spaces, and begin treating the other side as non-human, the same fission dynamics appear. Simone and Malcolm discuss the research graphs that look eerily like U.S. political polarization charts, the role of “compromise monkeys” who keep factions stitched together, and why deliberately targeting intermediaries may be one of the most dangerous strategies a side can pursue.

They also dig into practical implications: the value of cultural networks that maintain cross-group exchange, the strategic importance of tech capital and institutional control in a modern “civil war,” and why freezing people out of coalitions is a reliable way to lose.

A darkly fascinating look at primate politics, human polarization, and what it actually takes to keep a society from splitting into permanent, hostile camps.

Show Notes

Major hat tip to Gutsick Gibbon on YouTube for putting this back on my radar.

Chimp Investigation

People are really into studying chimpanzees. They have been studied at roughly 120 field localities across 20 African countries

* This process involves:

* Spending months or even years getting chimpanzees used to humans just being around

* Focal follows, which involves trained observers following one identified individual for extended periods of time, writing detailed notes every 15 minutes for adults and every minute for mother-infant pairs, noting party composition, location, feeding, and social interactions

* Individually identifying and getting to know multiple generations of chimpanzees

* Doing more at-length analysis ranging from use of camera traps to analyzing feces for hormonal shifts.

* Around 10 of these sites have continuous research spanning a decade or longer

* It is one of these sites that experienced the civil war:

This civil war research is discussed in Lethal conflict after group fission in wild chimpanzees, published April 9th in Science.

* The researchers drew on 30 years of behavioral observations of the chimp community involved

The Chimp Civil War

* This civil war began in 2015 in the Ngogo community in Uganda, which had over 200 members

* It’s the largest known wild chimpanzee community ever studied

* Though this is NOT the first chimpanzee civil war; there have been others, such as the “Gombe Chimpanzee War” (1974–1978), which Jane Goodall observed and documented

* While Goodall says it was triggered by the death of the alpha male and an ensuing power struggle and others thought resource (both in terms of food and fertile female chimpanzees) scarcity was at play, others suspected it was downstream of Goodall playing the chimpanzees with food, creating artificial crowding, competition, and violent conflict.

* Later studies using less intrusive observation methods at other sites confirmed that wild chimpanzee societies do naturally wage coalition-based violence, cementing the Gombe war as a landmark case rather tha