Nate Rott

And to be fair, she kind of hedged.

Uncomfortably familiar feels like an appropriate way, right?

Yeah.

And strongly suggested I talk to a primatologist named Michael Wilson at the University of Minnesota who studied conflict in primates, including us.

And so I reached out to him.

But here's the problem.

Our other closest living relative kind of throws a wrench in that whole theory because bonobos are just as similarly related to humans as chimpanzees are, and they do not kill each other like this.

Oh, so they'll show aggression towards each other.

There was a study that was done a couple of years ago that says that male bonobos are actually more likely to push or bite or hit each other than chimpanzee males.

But researchers have never seen one bonobo kill another.

Wow.

So in that sense, Michael says, it's kind of hard to argue that we have that shared genetic predisposition for violently turning on each other.

But he still thinks that there's a lot that we can learn from observations like this.

Yeah.

And this is one of the points that Aaron and his co-authors really hit on in their new study of this most recent chimpanzee war that was published in the journal Science.

That even without all of those things, without religion, without ethnicity, without politics –

this kind of conflict can emerge.

So maybe its cause is as simple as the breakdown of smaller relationships between individuals in a community.

Yeah, that's fair.

For what it's worth, Emily, Aaron says it actually makes him feel a little more optimistic.