CHAPEL HILL, NC – As the fires burn in Alumni Hall for the fifth day, it has become clear, according to reports from those close to faculty and graduate students, that the UNC Anthropology Department has formed a primitive hunter-gatherer society in its corner of McCorkle Place.

“The implications of [our] societal reversion are intriguing,” said Anthropology Professor Duncan Yunez, as he ate a squirrel he had speared in the Arboretum. “To see some of the most educated people in the country completely break down and form a socie…AHHHH! AHHHH! GET AWAY FROM MY FOOD PEACOCK, I WILL EAT YOUR SOUL!”

“Sorry about that,” Yunez continued, lowering his weapon carved from a meter stick. “Ever since [Kenan Distinguished Professor James] Peacock began his colony in the southern halls, he has been trying to raid our territories,” he continued. “You know how academia can be–once you have tenure you think you can do anything.”

The reversion began early Monday morning, when an argument between professors over who got coffee first created a rift in the department.

“Most of us sided with [Department Chair Paul] Leslie. He had alpha male status and the most vicious post-docs,” whispered Professor Teran Izan while spying on a rival tribe in the conference room.

“From there things started splitting as different professors fought for control,” Izan continued. “There are a lot of interesting theories about how these sort of things happen. I actually wrote my dissertation on a processes of tribe subdivision in Papua New Guinea,” he said while notching an arrow created from rock art he had retrieved in Western Africa.

While other tribes have vied for power, Professor Leslie, crowning himself “Big Chieftain,” remains the most powerful in the department.

This morning, sitting on a throne of unfinished anthropology senior honors theses, Chieftain Leslie commanded his hunter-gathering squad of seventh-year graduate students to forage for food in nearby Polk Place with a resounding “GRAHH!” Some reports from inside his tribe have suggested that Lesilie is worried about a growing threat of rebellion, as many of his band have, in a time of scarcity, been forced to subsist on the leather elbow patches from their old tweed jackets.

“We microwave the patches in the grad student lounge and they get a little chewier. But this is no way to live,” said a glaze-eyed Gustav Helphöug, a Ph.D. candidate studying the connection between social media and ancient art from a Durkheimian perspective for a fifth year.

At press time, the Philosophy Department had begun forming a utopian society in Caldwell Hall. Efforts have stalled at the debate over how to equitably, but not necessarily equally, distribute the coffee mugs in the break room.