DipNovel Chapter 76 Ngogo Chimpanzee
Chapter 76 Ngogo Chimpanzee
While Zhou Yunci took Jiang Ning and Chang Niankong to the Beijing Aerospace City, Lu Xue from the Fanhuali residential area was also busy.
She kept watching all the research videos released by primate experts, and if she found them helpful, she would then look for relevant papers.
As for "Milk," having left Jiangning and returned home, it bounced around the house all day, appearing exceptionally happy.
"One evening in 2019, in Kibale National Park in western Uganda, an adult male chimpanzee named Beth was beaten to death by dozens of his own kind. Those who did it were all his friends of ten years—friends he had groomed together, hunted together, held hands under the shade of trees, and slept together. On the night he died, another 53-year-old chimpanzee, BF, stayed by his side, not sleeping a wink all night..."
Lu Xue found the video and was immediately captivated after watching it for only a few seconds.
"BF and Bass had been friends for over ten years. The next morning, BF stood up and reached out his hand, wanting Bass to walk with him, just like they had done countless times over the past decade, but Bass couldn't move..."
This is a paper published in the journal Science in 2026.
The two main authors of the paper spent 30 years in this forest, telling the story of how 200 chimpanzees who had lived together for 20 years gradually ended up killing each other.
Lu Xue opened the paper and carefully read it word by word. Her fingertips slowly slid across the screen. Behind those cold words was a shocking tragedy of a species.
The paper states that these 200 chimpanzees were once the most united group in Kibale National Park. They fought off enemies together, shared food, and raised their young together. They had a deep bond with each other, just like Beth and her boyfriend, who had been together for more than ten years and whose relationship had long surpassed that of ordinary chimpanzees.
One interesting detail is that these 200 chimpanzees naturally divided into two groups in the forest: the western group and the central group, slightly to the east. This isn't a conflict, but rather more like two city blocks.
In the West, chimpanzees would go to the central area every day to visit each other, groom themselves, mate, and eat together. The reverse is also true. They share territory and can go wherever they want. The movement of people between the two blocks is completely free.
If you had to sum it up in one sentence, Ngogo is a species in the chimpanzee world that almost embodies the ideal state of a human group: 200 individuals, two city blocks, and 20 years of peaceful coexistence.
However, from 2018 to 2024, the two sides began a six-year civil war, with 24 to 28 killings, 19 infants and 7 adult males dying, and another 14 juvenile or adult individuals disappearing without their bodies being found.
Lu Xue, filled with curiosity, patiently continued reading:
"The crack didn't appear in a day; it grew slowly, and no one noticed it at first."
In 2014, six chimpanzees in Ngogo's group died of illness; five were adult males and one was an adult female. Animal illness is not uncommon in the rainforest, and researchers initially didn't pay much attention. However, in retrospect, the deaths of these six chimpanzees became the first domino in the chain of events…
Why? Because these six aren't just any six.
Think about your own circle of friends. Aren't there one or two people who always create group chats and arrange times to bring together people from different circles whenever a dinner party is organized?
If one or two people suddenly disappear—not because they've fallen out, but simply because they've moved away or stopped making contact—you'll likely find that two or three years later, many people have lost touch with each other, not because they dislike each other, but because no one is there to keep them in touch anymore.
Social network theorists call this kind of role a "bridge." The six chimpanzees that died in 2014 were members of the Ngogo group's dinner party; they were the most active intermediaries between the Western and Central clusters.
After the bridge collapsed, the changes weren't immediate; there wasn't a single day when everything was fine yesterday and then turned upside down today.
The changes are reflected in the data: the number of times the two clusters groom each other is decreasing, the frequency of visits is decreasing, and the lines that cross the east and west sides of the social network graph are disappearing one by one.
Then in 2015, a young male replaced the previous leader. Leader changes are common for chimpanzees, but this time the timing was terrible. The social network had just lost a few key nodes, and then there was another top-level reshuffle.
Then there was June 24, 2015, a day that was repeatedly mentioned in the paper. On that day, Sandel was making his daily observations in the forest when he saw several chimpanzees from the western group walking in the woods and encountering members of the central group.
A year ago, the next step would have been to greet each other, groom each other, sit down and eat something together—a standard Ngogo routine.
But that didn't happen that day. The Western ones suddenly quieted down after hearing the voice from the center. They touched each other, which Sandel described as "soothing," and then turned and left.
They didn't run; they quietly and quickly left the area. There were no screams, no biting, no anger, no conflict as we might imagine. There was only an unusual silence.
Sandel later said he had never seen such behavior before; it wasn't even an incident—no injuries, no bloodshed, nothing happened.
But looking back, this is the most important moment in the whole story because it shows not "they started to hate each other," but something more fundamental and terrifying—"they no longer consider each other as one of their own."
In 2017, a respiratory disease swept through Ngogo, claiming the lives of 25 chimpanzees—four adult males and ten adult females, several of whom were key individuals connecting the two groups. Three events piled up: the disease in 2014, the power shift in 2015, and the epidemic in 2017, like three muffled punches, each more powerful than the last.
By the end of 2017, the daily interactions between the two clusters had almost disappeared. They began to patrol and defend themselves independently, treating each other as neighbors to be wary of.
But what's truly unsettling about this isn't the outcome of the split itself, but the way it happened—there wasn't a single big argument, no betrayal, no dramatic trigger, no one doing anything to wrong anyone; they just slowly, day by day, stopped eating together, and then friends became enemies.
Up to this point, not a single drop of blood had been shed; the bloodshed only began in 2018. In 2018, the first deadly attack occurred when adult males from the western cluster began to systematically penetrate the territory of the central cluster—not for patrols, not for demonstrations, but to kill.
Now let's go back to the beginning. Do you remember the bass?
The large male in the central cluster is gentle and doesn't cause trouble.
On that evening in 2019, at the end of an otherwise ordinary day, Beth was foraging for food in the woods as usual. As darkness fell, a patrol from the western group silently approached from the other side of the forest.
Beth jumped down from the tree and tried to run away, but 10 pursuers caught up with it on the ground, pounced on it, pinned it down, and bit it repeatedly. Sandel was there that day, and later he said, "At that moment I felt like a war correspondent. I wanted to witness it, record it, and understand it." It wasn't until he shared his notes with his colleagues afterward that his emotions gradually came to the fore.
But what bothers me most about the whole thing is not the attack itself, but what happened afterward.
BF, 53 years old, had been Basie's friend for over ten years, grooming her, foraging for food together, and sleeping together. After the attack, BF didn't leave; he stayed with the badly injured Basie, helping her move back step by step.
That night, BF stayed by Basie's bleeding body and didn't move all night.
The next morning, BF stood up and reached out his hand, wanting Bass to go with him, just like he had done countless times over the past ten years, but Bass didn't move...
Lu Xue sat in front of the screen for a long time after seeing this.
She thought for a moment and then shared the video she had just watched with Sun Fumin.
About twenty minutes later, Sun Fumin replied: "BF is not a particularly kind chimpanzee. It's not because it has any noble qualities that it stayed to keep its friend company. BF is just a chimpanzee that still remembers how to be friends in the past. In a world where being friends is no longer allowed, its body is still executing an old program."
Lu Xue asked, "How long can humanity maintain this old system?"
Sun Fumin did not answer, and turned around to continue playing mahjong with Sun Lingmin and others.
In that paper, the author, Model, said: "If the dynamics of social relations themselves can drive a group into fatal conflict without language, race, or ideology, then in humans, these cultural labels may be secondary to something more fundamental."
Sun Fumin guessed that the "most basic thing" he mentioned was daily companionship.
However, this sounded like motivational platitudes, and Sun Fumin couldn't explain it clearly, so he had no choice but to remain silent.
As for how long the old procedures could last, Sun Fumin had no idea.
P.S.: This chapter... well, it had to be written, it needed to be a transition. The author spent a long time thinking about how to connect the post-chaos world when creating the outline, but couldn't figure out. Then I saw Ngogog's story and found it very interesting, so I used it as a metaphor. Also, a lot of content in this chapter comes from TikTok. The author thought it was very well told, so I just used it. I'm currently contacting the original author, and if it's inappropriate, I'll revise it later.