If you are younger than 80, you likely have not seen war on your home soil.
The rare period of relative peace and prosperity enjoyed by recent generations is similar to the time of accord that existed among the chimpanzee communities of the Gombe Stream Research Center in Tanzania when I arrived to begin my study in 1960.
I saw the chimpanzees in “our” community using and making tools and greeting one another with kisses and embraces. I saw close bonds among family members, enduring friendships, infants learning through observation, and examples of true altruism.
I came to believe that the chimpanzees, with whom we humans share 98.6 percent of our DNA, were so like us, but rather nicer.
My awakening to the chimps’ dark side began in 1970, when one of our researchers observed a brutal attack by a group of our males on a female of a neighboring chimpanzee community.
They hit and stamped on her and even seized and killed her infant.
The violence was instigated by the alpha Humphrey, whom I and other researchers referred to as something of a psychopath because he had been abusive to females in his own community.
In 1974, our chimp community divided in two, splitting territory that once was shared.
This marked the beginning of a series of savage attacks by males of the northern, larger group, led by Humphrey, on males and adult females in the south.
From 1974 to 1977, we witnessed the northern males commit what among humans would be called atrocities, including cupping and drinking the blood pouring from the nose of one victim, ripping strips of flesh from another and attempted dismembering. Particularly distressing was seeing one of the males, Rodolf, stand upright to hurl a four-pound rock at young Godi’s prostrate body, and Figan charge and hit, again and again, the mortally wounded, quivering Goliath, who had been his childhood hero.
Virtually all mammals have primal, aggressive drives — mostly linked to survival.
However, virtually everywhere they have been observed, the chimps — our closest animal cousins, with brains that are smaller but structurally identical to ours, and who are capable of reasoned thought, abstraction and generalization — also commit deliberate atrocities and exhibit cruelty.
Our spewwcies observably shares this dark side. But because of the explosive development of human intellect, ours can be far worse than the chimpanzees’.
We have devised and deployed weapons that can inflict massive-scale death and extinguish human civilization.
For the survival of our species, the better aspects of our intellect have also developed sophisticated methods of controlling our aggressive behavior, and of resolving territorial and other conflicts through debate and dialogue — at the ballot box, in the halls of a congress or parliament, or around a negotiating table.
