The war in Iran has sent fuel costs soaring, and consumers scrambling for savings. At the New York Auto Show, many drivers are warming up to the idea of buying an electric vehicle, because of high petrol prices, as our correspondent Jessica Le Masurier reports. Also in the show – the relief rally loses steam as the fragile Iran ceasefire enters its second day, and the OECD decries a ‘historic decline’ in international development aid, driven by the US.
The war in Iran has sent fuel costs soaring, and consumers scrambling for savings. At the New York Auto Show, many drivers are warming up to the idea of buying an electric vehicle, because of high petrol prices, as our correspondent Jessica Le Masurier reports. Also in the show – the relief rally loses steam as the fragile Iran ceasefire enters its second day, and the OECD decries a ‘historic decline’ in international development aid, driven by the US.
In a new study published this week in the journal Science, Sandel and his colleagues document what may be the first observed “civil war” in wild chimpanzees. While chimpanzees have long been known to wage campaigns of lethal aggression on outsiders, witnessing a once unified group turn on itself is something new – and very human.
“Cases where neighbours are killing neighbours is more troubling and, in a way, it gets closer to the human condition. How do we have this seeming contradiction within us where we are able to cooperate, but then also very quickly turn on one another?” Sandel said.
“These shifting group identities and dynamics that we see in human civil war rarely have a parallel in other animals, but they do have a parallel in the case of chimpanzees.”
The researchers drew on more than three decades of behavioural observations of the well-studied group of chimpanzees to determine the permanent split in the largest known group of wild chimpanzees in the world. While the chimps had been socially cohesive from at least 1995 until 2015, something shifted in the group’s dynamics, and by 2018 two distinct groups had emerged – the western chimps and the central chimps.
With the two groups solidified, members of the western group made 24 sustained and coordinated attacks on the central one in the seven years that followed, killing at least seven adult males and 17 infants.
Scientists think that a similar rupture and civil war may have occurred in the 1970s within the chimpanzee group in Gombe, Tanzania, observed by the renowned primatologist Jane Goodall. But, at the time, our basic understanding of chimpanzee behaviour was too limited to fully appreciate the rarity of in-group violence.
In the case of the Ngogo chimps, a change in social hierarchies may explain the group’s fracture, researchers said, producing organised aggression and violence. On the day Sandel observed the chimps acting strangely in 2015, earlier that morning, the group’s alpha male had grunted in submission to another chimpanzee. Yet the group’s social structure had also been affected by the death of several key older individuals in the years that preceded the division.
“Their abrupt death likely weakened connections among the neighbourhoods, which then made the group vulnerable to this polarisation that happened when the alpha change occurred,” Sandel said. “Then there was also a disease outbreak in 2017 that probably made the split inevitable, or expedited it slightly.”
Central group male Morton (left) and western male Garrison (right) in 2013, before the split. Photograph: John Mitani/Science
That should cause some worry for ape conservation, as chimpanzees are threatened with extinction. The study notes that, based on genetic evidence, these “civil wars” among chimpanzees likely only occur every 500 years. But any human activity that disrupts social cohesion – deforestation, the climate crisis or disease outbreaks – could make such inter-group conflicts more common, Sandel said.
Brian Wood, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of California Los Angeles, who has also studied the Ngogo chimpanzees but was not involved in the new research, said it was important to consider what one group has to gain by attacking its former community members.
In the theory of Darwinian fitness – a measure of how successful an animal is in passing on its genes – “you can increase your Darwinian fitness by increasing your own survival, increasing your reproduction orby decreasing the survival and reproduction of your competitors,” Wood said.
“And this is what the western chimps have done. The central chimps, after facing the onslaught of the westerners, now have the lowest survivorship that has ever been documented in a wild chimpanzee community.”
Sylvain Lemoine, a professor in biological anthropology at the University of Cambridge, said: “Here we have the first thoroughly reported case of what can be qualified as civil warfare in the species … It shows that, even in absence of cultural group markers, social ties and network connectivity are the cement of group cohesion, and that these ties can be fragilised in specific circumstances, especially when they rely on few key individuals.”
Tame was able to speak publicly about her childhood sexual abuse after pushing for law changes in her home state Tasmania in a campaign that began in 2018.
“We helped shift the national conversation by putting safeguarding children firmly in the public spotlight – even when it was uncomfortable or costly,” the foundation said.
“Thanks to our campaign efforts, every jurisdiction in Australia has stopped naming the crime of ‘persistent child sexual abuse’ as a ‘relationship’.”
Tame in March said she had lost speaking engagements because of a media “smear campaign” against her.
The foundation had four board members including Tame and had more than 48,000 followers on social media platform Instagram.
Tame was named in 2021 as one of Time magazine’s next generation leaders.
The foundation said it had helped push for the harmonisation of survivor identification laws across Australia, advocate for anti-grooming education and had supported hundreds of survivors seeking justice.
“None of this would have been possible without Grace’s fierce and uncompromising advocacy for survivors,” it said.
“[As well as] her determination to ensure the experiences of those harmed as children could no longer be ignored.”
Tame was abused as a teenager by her high school teacher Nicolaas Ockert Bester.
