"The long-running conflict in a formerly unified community, the second ever observed, adds to Jane Goodall’s studies about a different chimp war in the 1970s."
"On the last full day of his life, Basie, a large gregarious male chimpanzee, woke up at dawn in a tree nest he’d fashioned from branches and leaves, surrounded by other chimps also dozing in nests, as he’d done nearly every day for 36 years in the forest.
After an ordinary day of swinging between trees and snacking on ripe figs, danger appeared. A patrol group of about 13 adult chimps from the opposing faction arrived as daylight began to fade. Three adults surrounded Basie, who jumped from a tree. Then 10 chimps attacked him on the ground, piling on him and biting him.
“In the moment, I felt like a war correspondent. I wanted to be there, I wanted to witness it, to document it, and try to understand what’s going on,” says Aaron Sandel, a primatologist at the University of Texas at Austin, who was following the chimps that day and taking notes on his smartphone. “Once I’d written up my notes and shared them with colleagues, that’s when the emotions hit me.”
Basie’s death in 2019 was the second casualty in what scientists call a “civil war” among chimps in Uganda’s Kibale Forest National Park. Sandel co-authored a new study in the journal Science describing an eight-year conflict that continues to this day in a community that used to live in peace."
Christina Larson reports for National Geographic April 9, 2026.
