WE'RE A BUNCH OF CHIMPS!

Will Storr, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us (New York: Overlook Press, 2018):

So chimps are a like us in that our models of the ideal self are very similar, at least in outline. What we also share is our occupation with hierarchy. We have this preoccupation because our tribes, like theirs, have hierarchies that are fluid. An alpha male's reign usually lasts less than five years. This means we're constantly surrounded by intrigue and rumour. There are plots and victories; blood and drama. We're intensely interested in status, partly because that status has a high capacity to change. What our species also have in common is that members of our tribes band together to attack different tribes. The biological anthropologist Professor Richard Wrangham has observed that chimps and humans share 'a uniquely violent pattern of lethal intergroup aggression . . . Out of four thousand mammals and ten million or more animal species, this suite of behaviors is known only among chimpanzees and humans.'

Id. at 29-30. Makes one wonder whether to be 'civilized' is, at its core, to have overcome this preoccupation with hierarchies and tribes.