Beaten with rocks and sticks, stomped on, then eaten: it was a violent demise for the chimpanzee known as Foudouko. Worse still, he died at the hands of his own community in south-east Senegal. This is one of just nine known cases of chimpanzees killing one of their own adult males, as opposed to a member of another group. Such rare intra-group killings can give insights into chimp behaviour, such as male coalition building, says Michael Wilson at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who was not part of the team that studied Foudouko's death. "Why do these coalitions sometimes succeed, but not very often? If s at the heart of this tension between conflict and cooperation, which is central to the lives of chimpanzees and even to our own," he says.
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