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    One gorilla group will deliberately seek out another and provoke

    a conflict.  The resulting battles between gorilla tribes are furious.  One

    of the bands that Fossey followed was led by a powerful silverback, an

    enormous male who left a skirmish with his flesh so badly ripped that

    the head of an arm bone and numerous ligaments stuck out through

    the broken skin.  The old ruling male, whom Fossey called Beethoven,

    had been supported in the fight by his son, Icarus.  Icarus left the battle

    scene with eight massive wounds where the enemy had bitten him on

    the head and arms.  The site where the conflict had raged was covered

    with blood, tufts of fur, broken saplings and diarrhetic dung.14  Such is

    the price of pre-human war in the Virunga mountains.

    Gorillas are not the only sub-humans to cluster in groups that set

    off to search for blood.  In the early '70s, Jane Goodall had lived

    fourteen years among the wild chimpanzees of Tanzania's Gombe

    Reserve.  She loved the  chimps for their gentle ways, so different from

    the violence back home among humans.  Yes, there were simian

    muggings, beatings and rage.  But the ultimate horror--war--was

    absent.

    Goodall published a landmark book on chimpanzee behavior--In

    The Shadow of Man--a work which to some proved unequivocally that

    war was a human creation.  After all, the creatures shown by genetic

    and immunological research to be our nearest cousins in the animal

    kingdom knew nothing of organized, wholesale violence.15

    Then, three years after Goodall's book emerged, a series of

    incidents occurred that horrified her.  The tribe of chimps Goodall had

    been watching became quite large.  Food was harder to find.  Quarrels

    broke out.  To relieve the pressure, the unit finally split into two

    separate tribes.  One band stayed in the old home territory.  The other

    left to carve out a new life in the forest to the south.

    At first the two groups lived in relative peace.  Then the males

    from the larger band began to make trips south to the patch of land

    occupied by the splinter unit.  The marauders' purpose was simple: to

    harass and ultimately kill the separatists.  They beat their former

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