Overview
- A peer-reviewed Science paper released Thursday compiles decades of Ngogo monitoring and confirms at least 28 killings since the 2018 split into Western and Central groups.
- All recorded attacks came from the Western subgroup, whose population grew from 76 to 108 as the Central subgroup shrank, raising fears the Central community could vanish.
- Researchers documented infants torn from mothers and killed and group beatings of males that left victims with fatal internal injuries.
- The team links the collapse to an unusually large community of about 200 chimps, the loss of key adult males to illness, and a change in the alpha male around 2015.
- The episode is only the second well-documented case after the 1970s Gombe 'Four-Year War,' and the authors caution against simple parallels to human warfare.