When others were playing, they would stop if they saw Frodo because if he joined in, someone would get hurt. He attacked the visiting cartoonist, Gary Larsen. At his worse, he threw rocks and snatched and killed a human baby. He also threatened Jane Goodall, the woman who had been studying him his entire life (JaneGoodall.org, 09/29/2015).
For 56 years, Jane Goodall lived with chimpanzees like Frodo in the Gombe National Park of Tanzania. Jane not only named her subjects but also developed relationships with them. During her long years in the field, she described their individual personalities in detail in several of her books and in the films of her photographer ex-husband, Hugo van Lawick. Many of Jane's recorded observations of the social relationships and behaviors of the Gombe chimpanzees allowed her to make groundbreaking discoveries about our connections with the great ape species, including tool use, eating meat, and displaying human-like emotions in inter-species relationships. During Jane's tenure, she saw births, deaths, and hierarchical dominance played out among males and females. She also saw the original tribe split in two and wage war with each other. This “Four Year War” also revealed aggressive behaviors, as well as the details about two particularly violent females – Passion and her daughter Pom—who killed other mothers and infants without provocation in their own community,
Their goal was to seize the infants and eat them. In other words, they showed cannibalistic behavior. Between them they may have killed all 10 infants born during a two-year period. The attacks only stopped when both Passion and Pom delivered babies of their own… We still do not totally understand this unpleasant behavior. I felt I hated Passion and Pom at the time. Unfortunately, we have seen the same behavior in other mothers over the succeeding years. These violent behaviours – boundary attacks, the Four Year War and cannibalism – forever changed my view of chimpanzees: I had thought they were so like us, but nicer. This turned out not to be true – but it is almost certain that chimpanzees cannot fully comprehend the pain and suffering they inflicted on their victims. Nor can they plan physical and mental torture. Only we are capable of true evil (JaneGoodall.org. (07/20/2015).
Dominance in the Gombe chimpanzee tribe was linked to status, and with that status came better access to food and sex. A 2014 study of the offspring born between 1995 and 2003 confirmed this underlying motivation when it was found that the dominant and more aggressive chimps had fathered more babies.
These findings lead researchers to suggest that long-term intimidation tactics offered what may have been the first genetic evidence of sexual coercion as an adaptive strategy in any social mammal (Feldblum et al., 2014). As an explanation of our animal past, these chimpanzees indicate that bullyingmay have been encoded during evolutionary development as a reproductive means of survival. This adaptive strategy has also been suggested as narcissism's evolutionary root (Holtzman & Donnellan, 2015).
References
Feldblum, J. T., Wroblewski, E. E., Rudicell, R. S., Hahn, B. H., Paiva, T., Cetinkaya-Rundel, M., Pusey, A. E., & Gilby, I. (2014). Sexually coercive male chimpanzees sire more offspring. Current Biology, 24(23), 2855-2860. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.10.039
JaneGoodall.org. (09/29/2015). https:// news.janegoodall.org/2015/09/29/the-famous-chimps-of-gombe/7
JaneGoodall.org. (07/20/2015). http://news.janegoodall.org/2015/07/20/55-years-at-gombe-qa-with-jane-on-origins-of-life-work/