Female baboons that form strong social bonds have longer-lived offspring. The need to maintain such relationships may be one of the factors that drove the evolution of bigger brains in humans.
Baboons that live in close social groups are healthier and have longer-lived children, according to scientists. The research supports the idea that close human groups are good for mental and physical wellbeing and sheds light on when group-living might have evolved among our ancestors.
The conclusions come from a 15-year study of a group of baboons in the Moremi Game Reserve of the Okavango Delta in Botswana. Led by Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney of the University of Pennsylvania, the observations were carried out for seven hours a day, six days a week between 1992 and 2007. The observers monitored the reproductive lives of 66 adult females during this time.
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that is if the male doesn’t kill you with housework first.
Housework for baboons seems to involve tearing the windscreen wipers off passing cars and chewing the rubber from around the windows. Judging by the small community that was crawling all over my VW lupo at the safari park the other day, it’s also a useful social activity.
Don’t know if it makes the kids live longer though, they tend to jaywalk a lot.