What does the Gombe Chimpanzee War say about our past?

the gombe chimpanzees O'War 1974 to 1978 a war between two chimpanzee tribes if you can believe it that fundamentally changed the way that humans look at not just the Society of chimpanzees but also the origins of our own history I want you to imagine chimps marching into battle against rival tribes this is the reality of chimpanzee society it is not that different than our own so before I start this video I just want to say that this is an analysis video of the war where we try to draw some conclusions not just about chimpanzees but also of humanity maybe form some speculative opinions about chimpanzees and maybe try to extrapolate from their own society how our society formed so if you're looking for a video purely on the history of the gombe chimpanzees or I highly recommend just giving it a quick youtube search so let's analyze the gombe chimpanzees war the conflict happened from 1974 to 1978 between two communities of chimpanzees in the Gombe stream National Park in Tanzania now before we go any further we can extrapolate quite a bit from this very simple bit of information about chimpanzees so think about the following another species as engaging in what humans would describe as war another species is capable of premeditated genocide another species has the mental capability to strategically plan the extermination of a rival tribe and another species has what we would describe as tribes I would say just about all of those points were things that had for the longest time been attributed to humans or hominids but it turns out that our behavioral origins go a lot farther back than we originally thought our origins are instincts what makes us human takes one step further back than we thought it doesn't start with a line of hominids it starts one step further back as we can see with chimpanzees who are exhibiting these exact traits albeit in a less advanced form in other words it's safe to say that whatever the missing link is so to speak for humans and hominids and apes was engaging in very human-like behavior long before humans were ever a thing but even long before hominids were even a thing so there were two groups at the Gombe stream National Park in Tanzania they were once unified actually as the Cossack Ella community now Jane Goodall which is going to be the person who really gave us all of the information as she was watching these tribes of chimpanzees in Tanzania and observing them under the pretense that chimps were nicer than humans because chimps were previously thought to be less aggressive and that humans were actually the most aggressive of the primates turns out that's not really the case so this is a short summary on how we found that out the mobile chimpanzee war again was between two groups once unified as the Cossack Ella community however the group splintered okay this is something that Jane Goodall noticed so two chimpanzee brothers are actually going to lead the splintering group that is going to start this entire war two brothers Huw and Charlie and they're gonna take their chimpanzee comrades go dee dee Goliath and sniff alongside a few females and they're young and they're gonna move south away from their old tribe now it's important to keep in mind that rod that they leave the Cossack Ella tribe is far larger than the splinter tribe right and they're gonna consist of the male's Mike Satan Cheri Everett Rudolph homeo Figgins and Humphrey now these names are very important because as I tell the story I'll be referring to the chimps by their actual names so after the group splintered Jane Goodall realized that both of the groups were starting to become more and more independent they relied on each other significantly less they interacted with each other significantly less and from our point of view it looks as if both tribes became their own independent separate communities we now know prior to the splintering the chimpanzees in the area of Tanzania that we're talking about roamed across the hills of Tanzania and territorial communities so already we know chimpanzees are territorial just like humans are and these communities tended to consist of up to 40 members very similar to primordial human tribes now the splinter group is gonna be called the comma okay again they were led by the brother duo of Hugh and Charlie and they're gonna move south however their new tribe is going to be short-lived because first blood is gonna be drawn by the Casa Kelly community the original tribe On January 7 1974 now Ben when a party of six adult Kasich elem males which consisted of Humphrey Fagan homeo Sheree Everton Rudolph they ambushed gaudí while he was feeding on a tree so goatee was a member of the splinter group the kama tribe now before I continue I just want to say that there has been some criticism with anthropomorphizing the chimps I would say that this is probably not very valid criticism considering the fact that if we're gonna anthropomorphize any animal I think it's fair to be doing it to primates considering how close they are to us just in behavior instincts however keep that in mind when you're listening to this story as a lot of the terms used are very clearly human terms and until context such as this really only ever applied to human society now up until this point nobody had ever seen chimps engage in any kind of premeditated conflict with each other so this was going to be the first time that we watched a chimpanzee deliberately kill another male chimp this is less weird than what comes after because it's not unheard of for animals to kill their own kind especially male-on-male conflict this happens for a variety of different reasons but one of the most notable ones tends to be for getting a mate however the weird thing that Jane Goodall is going to observe when she sees Humphrey fig in homeo Cherie Everett and Rudolph ambush goatee is that when goatee was killed the victorious chimps celebrate dragging branches throwing branches screaming with hoots and hollers and screeches now what seems to be as you will see as we continue the story the main differentiating factor between what seems to be chimpanzee warfare and what is human warfare is that as you parse through the way the chimpanzees seem to fight you get a ironically a very guerrilla warfare type of feel from it what they tend to do it seems is pick out single individual males and then gang up on them as a team so we don't tend to see chimps occupying other chimps territory the way that humans will occupy territory they just get rid of the rival tribe entirely then the chimpanzees that grouped up on the single male will be minimizing their chances of getting hurt themselves so they don't engage in large-scale warfare where they're not really worried about bodies where it's not really a big deal if a lot of people on your side as long as you kill more people on the other side in my opinion is incredibly similar to again primordial human tribal society in which we suspect that large-scale warfare most likely was not the way that it was today because they would be trying to make sure that they limited their own casualties as much as possible now the scary thing about this is the concept that chimpanzees are capable of premeditated murder keep in mind that when we're talking about premeditated we're talking about a group of chimpanzees sitting minding their own business with other chimpanzees and collectively coming with a decision or at least following another chimpanzees decision to systematically kill and commit genocide on a rival tribe but again the point is that it was premeditated that it was something they thought of there's something that they wanted to do is something that they took joy in after it happened now another very interesting chimp in this story is the chimp called Goliath who was an elderly chimp part of the kama tribe that splintered south now the reason this particular chimpanzee is special is because Goliath had been relatively friendly with the Casa Keller neighbors whenever encounters occurred now he had never exhibited any kind of aggression and typically it seemed like he was well respected by the members of the Casa kala tribe and he was promptly killed just like all of the other males notice how only the male chimpanzees are the ones getting killed and I think this is incredibly important for understanding Apes and hominids and why they act the way that they do on a very primordial and instinctual level now after the death of go dee dee Hugh and Goliath we only had three left Charlie sniff and one who I did not mention before Willy Wally who believe it or not was crippled from polio now Charlie is going to be killed next after his death the polio stricken chimpanzee Willy he's gonna disappear and never be found again now sniff sniff was able to survive actually for over a year even though he was able to hold out for some time young sniff was also killed by the Casa kala tribe over the course of four years every single male from the kama tribe was systematically murdered it was premeditated and they were well aware of what they were doing again they're territorial just like humans are they had their land a splinter group formed in the south you could tell there's animosity there there's a little of angst right they split from them now they're separating the resources they're making it harder to get what was probably much easier before but they've also dramatically weakened the Cossack alla tribe which I'm sure was not taken lightly by the Cossack allas and they acknowledge the land of other troops and tribes and they back away if they can't win if they're outnumbered for example in fact this is exactly what's going to happen when the Cossack elaheh defeat the Coahoma and they push further into the Coahoma territory they're actually gonna get pushed back by a rivaling chimpanzee tribe who was larger than they were now unfortunately for the Cossack Ella all of these neighboring tribes outnumbered them and this was probably partly caused by the splinter group so it makes sense why there would be animosity and angst between these two groups considering the fact that by splintering they've dramatically lowered the chance of survival of the original Cossack Ella tribe it seems that chimpanzees have a whole array of different emotions and thoughts they're capable of thinking about things like war and well I think this does is it gives us a little bit of insight into exactly where hominids and human tendencies and instincts came from humans are renowned for war we are renowned for being incredibly aggressive and destructive animals for the longest time we thought that this was unique to hominids and it was most likely not something that was carried over that would have existed even far before hominids and apes but this no longer should be the case considering the fact that chimpanzees exhibit territorial warfare as well as a complex society and complex forms of thought that we thought were very exclusive to just humans or at least hominids meaning that war is older than human society itself now the concept that might immediately come to your mind when hearing this story and attempting to analyze it is the killer ape theory now the killer ape theory is a very interesting theory because what it states is that war and interpersonal aggression became the driving force behind human evolution the hypothesis originated by Raymond dart in the 1950s and according to the theory the ancestors of humans were distinguished from other primate species just by their greater aggressiveness now again I say Jane Goodall thought that chimpanzees were much more docile than humans and more peaceful and she actually watched them go on a hunting trip where they hunted monkeys in the surrounding area which they of course hunted in a fairly complex way however this is less important considering the fact that a variety of different animals do hunt in a pack formation in fact what's more important to take away from this is that chimpanzees do in fact eat meat when they found the monkey they actually ripped it apart from the waist ripped its arms off and just ate it alive so this also shows us that primates and the ancestors of primates have most likely been eating meat since long before hominids ever picked it up and it also goes back to the concept that perhaps fire itself and that ability to cook meat was probably the main driving force in human evolution what it makes you wonder right if we were to go to these tribes of chimpanzees now we know they're not capable of speech of our kind of speech however they are capable of interacting with each other in forming complex plans so they must have either some kind of pseudo language or some ways of communicating with each other that are very very advanced compared to most animals other than humans that allows them to come up with these complex plans have these complex emotions and well wage war with each other now the killer ape theory was one that honestly most people seem to think was a bit of a joke until the jane goodall experience only twenty years later with the gombe chimpanzees war but I think it's very important to keep in mind that what this event and this theory is doing it's perhaps more important less so because it's allowing us to know more about chimpanzees but really what it does is it gives us a little bit of a closer look on our own evolution and our own origins that the way evolution happened with humans and with hominids is that it started with some kind of primordial ape-like ancestor that probably did act very similar to chimpanzees they probably formed tribal structures of some kind they probably waged war on each other they were probably incredibly territorial and again with this story really tells us is that war predates humankind so what do you guys think about the Gombe war of 1974 to 1978 pretty interesting event that happened learning that chimpanzees not only engaged in war bear capable of very complex tribal systems that really put them far closer to home and then perhaps we originally thought so hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did make sure to give it a like and subscribe I'll see you guys in the next video hope you guys have a good day

Channel: The Millennial Perspective

Views: 987,018

Rating: 4.8411474 out of 5

Keywords: gombe chimp documentary, gombe chimpanzee war, gombe, gombe gombe, gombe chimps, gombe chimp observation, gombe chimpanzee war reddit, gombe chimpanzee war book, gombe chimpanzee national park, chimpanzee war, The Millennial, Millennial, All You Need To Know, Animals, Chimpanzee, Chimpanzee History, Chimpanzee Information, Chimpanzee Facts, Chimpanzee lesson, Mcdoubles, monkey war, war and our past, jane goodall, The Millennial Perspective, gombe chimpanzee analysis, gorilla war

Id: 0oRN0VeJlu4

Length: 13min 30sec (810 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2020