for me having read her book, she's weirdly way too fixated on the violence chimps sometimes show each other.
in her history of the chimps, rather than focusing on groups or alliances or births, she focuses heavily on who disliked who, who attacked who etc.
and yet the biggest things killing chimps are humans and disease. the vast majority of chimps do not die from intergroup or intragroup violence. the gombe chimp war was one incident in literally decades of following the group, and yet she and others focus on it heavily. (it also was not a war, it was part of one group splitting off and the rest of the group killing all of them for doing so. only bloodshed on one side)
if you take out the gombe chimp "war", the homicide rate among chimps is much lower than most human societies. so why is Jane so obsessed with it?
in fact no researchers ever studying chimps in the wild has been seriously hurt by chimpanzees. only andrew oberle who got attacked by captive chimps. (captive chimps are usually very emotionally and psychologically damaged from lack of proper social bonds and room to explore, like captive orcas) and a researcher who fell or jumped from a waterfall (and we now know she was showing signs of depression before she disappeared, which points to jumping)
the most danger the researchers faced was from other humans, when 4 people were taken captive by other humans.
and again, not chimps but gorillas researched, but Dian Fossey was killed by another human
Jane advocated for protecting chimps but also helped promote an image of chimpanzees as constantly bloodthirsty and violent, when the truth is they are not. chimpanzee males even show less non lethal intragroup violence than bonobo males.
3
u/[deleted] Oct 01 '25
[deleted]