A chimpanzee 'civil war' erupted in Uganda. Scientists aren't sure why - CBC

June: Welcome to Kindred Minds — I'm June, a primatologist who has spent her career falling deeper in love with our closest relatives, and sharing their stories with anyone who'll listen. Today we have a rich one: a bonobo who may have had an imagination, a chimpanzee community torn apart by something that looks unsettlingly familiar, and a legacy of love for gorillas that is forty years strong and still growing. Before we dive in, a warm thank you to today's sponsors — Ada, who helps businesses integrate A I into their workflows in ways that actually make sense; Ago Consulting, pronounced "Ahh-Go," your partners in silicon development from A I all the way to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a remarkable portfolio spanning the silicon industry. We wouldn't be here without them. Now — let's talk about our family. June: So I want to start with a bonobo named Kanzi. If you've followed primate research at all over the past few decades, you've probably heard his name. Kanzi was a bonobo — Pan paniscus, our other closest living relative alongside chimpanzees — who was born in 1980 and spent much of his life at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa, working with the primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. And over the years, Kanzi did things that kept making researchers stop and go — wait, did he just do that? June: He learned to communicate using a board of symbols called lexigrams — not because anyone sat him down and drilled him on it, but because he was watching his adoptive mother Matata's lessons as an infant and just… absorbed it. That alone was remarkable. But a new study published recently in Scientific American has brought something even more intriguing to light. Researchers are now asking whether Kanzi demonstrated something that we tend to think of as deeply, almost exclusively human: imagination. June: Here's what they found. Kanzi would sometimes arrange objects or create scenes that didn't seem to serve any immediate practical purpose. He'd set things up — sometimes food items, sometimes objects — in ways that suggested he was playing out something in his mind. Not reacting to the world, but projecting onto it. Constructing a kind of internal scenario and then making it visible. The researchers describe this carefully — they're not claiming he was writing novels in his head — but they do suggest his behavior showed signs of what psychologists call mental simulation. The ability to model a situation that isn't currently happening. June: And here's why that matters so much. Imagination — the capacity to mentally rehearse futures, to play out scenarios, to create something that doesn't yet exist — is considered one of the cornerstones of human cognition. It underlies planning, creativity, language, empathy. If Kanzi was doing even a rudimentary version of that, it means the seeds of imagination are not something we invented from scratch. They were already in the genome, already in the primate brain, waiting. June: Kanzi passed away in 2024, after more than four decades of life. And in a way, this new research is a kind of posthumous tribute — a recognition that he was showing us something true about himself, and about us, all along. He wasn't performing for scientists. He was just being Kanzi. And Kanzi, it turns out, had an inner life richer than many of us imagined. June: What strikes me every time I read about him is the word "unexpected." Researchers kept using it. He did the unexpected thing. He learned in an unexpected way. He showed unexpected flexibility. But I think what those moments were really revealing is that our expectations were too small. We kept being surprised because we kept drawing the circle of complex cognition too tight — and Kanzi kept walking right through the line. June: Now — let's talk about the biology underneath all of this, because I think it's the part that makes everything else click into place. June: We share somewhere between 98 and 99 percent of our D N A with chimpanzees and bonobos. That number gets quoted a lot, and I think sometimes it washes over people without really landing. So let me try to make it land. Imagine you had a recipe — a long, detailed, extraordinarily complex recipe — written out in a four-letter alphabet, billions of characters long. That recipe is your genome. Now imagine your neighbor has almost exactly the same recipe. The same structure, the same chapters, the same ingredients — with tiny variations scattered through it. That neighbor, biologically speaking, is a chimpanzee. Or a bonobo. June: The genes that build your brain — the ones that wire your neurons, that shape your prefrontal cortex, that govern your capacity for memory and planning and social bonding — most of those genes exist in chimpanzees and bonobos too. They're running largely the same biological software. The differences are real, and they matter — but they are differences of degree, of tuning, of expression. Not a different instrument. The same instrument, played with different fingering. June: And when you look at what that shared D N A produces, it's astonishing. Primates show grief. They show reconciliation after conflict — actually going back to a former opponent and making peace, which even many humans struggle to do gracefully. They show long-term memory. They show cultural transmission — younger individuals learning behaviors from older ones and passing them on across generations, the same way we pass on language or cooking traditions or music. June: Orangutans have been documented passing medicinal plant knowledge across generations. Chimpanzee communities in West Africa use stone tools to crack open nuts, and young chimps spend years watching and practicing before they get it right — a learning curve that looks remarkably like a child learning a skill. These aren't party tricks. These are the signs of a mind that can hold information, learn from others, and adapt. That's cognition. That's culture. That's us — and them — running the same deep program. June: There's a concept in evolutionary biology called deep homology — the idea that complex traits can share ancient common origins even when they look quite different on the surface. The part of your brain that processes fear is ancient. The neural circuits for social bonding — the ones that fire when you feel close to someone, or when you grieve a loss — those are ancient too. We didn't build them from scratch. We inherited them. From a lineage that runs back through every primate alive today. Which means when Kanzi arranged objects in a way that suggested he was imagining something — there's a very real sense in which he was using the same old, deep, shared machinery that you use when you daydream. June: We are not separate from the animal world with a few interesting overlaps. We are part of a continuum — built from the same recipe, running the same ancient code — and the more carefully we look, the more that becomes undeniable. June: Alright. I need to tell you about two things happening right now in the world of great apes that I think belong together — because they both tell you something true about what it means to share a planet with these animals. June: The first is a story coming out of Uganda that researchers are still trying to fully understand. In Kibale National Park — one of the most studied chimpanzee habitats in the world — something dramatic happened. Two neighboring chimpanzee communities descended into what the CBC has described as a kind of civil war. Extended, lethal conflict between groups. Raids. Deaths. Territory shifting hands. The kind of sustained, organized intergroup aggression that primatologists have documented before — most famously in Jane Goodall's records from Gombe in the 1970s, in what's known as the Four Year War — but that still stops researchers cold every time they witness it. June: What's striking about the Uganda case is that scientists are genuinely uncertain about what triggered it. Was it resource pressure? A shift in group demographics — maybe a change in the number of adult males, which tends to correlate with raiding behavior? Was it a particular individual's ambition? These are the same questions you'd ask about human conflicts, and that parallel is not superficial. It reflects something real about the social complexity of chimpanzee communities — the coalitions, the alliances, the politics, the long memories. June: Chimpanzees live in what primatologists call fission-fusion societies — large communities that break into smaller subgroups throughout the day and come back together, which means they're constantly navigating social relationships, tracking who owes whom, who has been a reliable ally, who can't be trusted. Frans de Waal spent decades documenting this at the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands — the scheming, the reconciliations, the three-way political maneuvers that would feel at home in any human organization. The Uganda situation appears to be that same social intelligence, turned toward its darkest application. June: And here's the part I keep sitting with: this is not a corruption of chimpanzee nature. It is chimpanzee nature — complex, capable of tremendous cooperation and tremendous violence, shaped by the same evolutionary pressures that shaped us. Chimpanzee communities with more males tend to be more aggressive toward neighbors. They patrol borders. They seek advantage. We recognize all of it because we invented none of it. It was already there, in the primate lineage, long before we arrived. June: But I don't want to leave you there, because the Uganda story, as heavy as it is, exists inside a much larger story — one about people who have dedicated their lives to making sure these animals have a future. And that brings me to Dian Fossey. June: December 27th, 2025 marks forty years since Dian Fossey was killed in her cabin at Karisoke Research Centre in Rwanda. Forty years. And the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, which she founded, is still there. Still working. Still protecting mountain gorillas in the Virunga mountains — and now expanding to protect the critically endangered Grauer's gorilla as well. June: Fossey arrived in Rwanda in 1967 with a vision that was radical for its time: that the best way to save gorillas was to know them. Individually. By name. By face. By personality. She spent years habituating a wild gorilla group to human presence — slowly, patiently, consistently — until the day a young gorilla named Peanuts reached out and touched her hand. That moment, in 1970, was captured in a photograph that traveled around the world. A wild gorilla, reaching out. A human, holding still. A bridge. June: What Fossey understood, and what the Fund has carried forward, is that conservation isn't just biology — it's relationship. It requires knowing these animals, advocating for them as individuals, and building the trust of the communities who live alongside them. Today, mountain gorillas are one of the only great ape populations in the world whose numbers are actually increasing. There are now more than 1,000 of them — up from fewer than 300 when Fossey began her work. That is not an accident. That is forty years of people refusing to look away. June: And I find myself thinking about that as I read about the orangutans. Because the orangutan news right now is genuinely hard to sit with. A major new study found that Sumatran orangutan populations have fallen by nearly 20 percent — even in areas where deforestation has slowed. Which means forest loss alone doesn't explain it. Hunting, fragmentation, climate-related disasters — it's a constellation of pressures. And the Tapanuli orangutan, the most recently discovered great ape species and already the most endangered, suffered an estimated 58 deaths from climate-fueled landslides in a single catastrophic event. Fifty-eight individuals. In a population that may number only around 800. June: Those numbers are devastating. But they're also why Fossey's legacy matters now more than ever. She showed us what sustained, relationship-based, scientifically rigorous care can do. Mountain gorillas came back from the edge. It is not naive to believe that with enough will, enough knowledge, and enough people who refuse to look away, orangutans can too. June: The through-line in all of this — the civil war in Uganda, the imagining bonobo, the gorillas whose numbers are growing, the orangutans whose numbers are falling — is that these are not distant, abstract animals. They are our closest relatives. They imagine. They grieve. They make alliances and break them. They learn from each other and teach their young. They feel the loss of their family members. And they are running, in their cells and their neurons and their social lives, a version of the same ancient program we are. June: Intelligence and feeling are not ours alone. They never were. We evolved them together, from a shared root, over millions of years — and every great ape alive today is a living record of that shared journey. When we lose them, we lose a piece of the story of what life figured out how to do. And when we protect them — when we reach out, the way Peanuts reached out, and hold still — we are honoring something that belongs to all of us. June: Kindred Minds, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. Thank you for listening, thank you for caring, and please — stay curious. If today's stories moved you, share this episode with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and find links to all the research and reporting we talked about today in the link in show notes. I'll see you next time.