Baboons: Long-Term Research Reveals Who They Really Are

Source: Shirley Strum.

Baboons are remarkable animals. While they often are written off as unintelligent violently aggressive creatures and bear the brunt of uninformed slurs, nothing could be further from the truth about these remarkable primates who display unexpected complex strategies of negotiation, collaboration, and resilience in difficult times.

For decades I've followed the detailed and groundbreaking classic research on baboons by biological anthropologist Dr. Shirley Strum, and I was thrilled to learn of her new highly acclaimed book Echoes of Our Origins: Baboons, Humans, and Nature in which she not only summarizes the results of her detailed long-term studies but also dispels myths about these highly adaptive primates. She also explains why science must move beyond its rigid frameworks, and how to think about evolution. Here's what she had to say about her wide-ranging and most important book.

Marc Bekoff: Why did you write Echoes of Our Origins?

Shirley Strum: I have had a long career, over 5 decades, watching baboons. A lot has changed during that time: me, baboons, science, and nature. My book gives a very different take on baboons than what we imagined and what the media feeds us. I hope to change the baboons’ recent bad reputation.

MB: How does your book relate to your background and general areas of interest?

SS: I am a biological anthropologist and originally wanted to understand where human aggression came from. I set out to test the “baboon model”, the idea that early humans wandering out of the primate habitat, the forest, would share some characteristics with successful savannah baboons. In the 1960’s, baboons had been studied more than any other primate. Those three studies suggested that baboon social organization was the same despite being different species and locations. The baboon model was very male focused because only large males were identified as individuals. Baboons were the right study animals because males had the anatomy of aggression. But right away, I realized that baboon society wasn’t as it had been described.

MB: Who do you hope to reach?

SS: I hope to reach anyone who is interested in baboons as wild animals successfully navigating the Human Age, interested in nature, in science, and in the life story of a woman scientist who encountered many obstacles, changed her mind and in the end, learned a lot about baboons. Finally, I look again at early humans but this time wearing baboon spectacles.

Source: Johns Hopkins University Press/with permission.

MB: What are some of the main topics you consider and what are some of your major messages?

SS: Baboons may be the most sophisticated nonhuman society yet described but it takes a really long time to understand a smart animal who doesn’t talk. Baboons have social strategies of competition and defense because aggression is always risky.

But in order to be strategic, you first have to win the trust of others. Friendship precedes strategy which explains the strong non-kin social relationships. Many negotiations (my term) are needed to earn trust. I was the darling of a second wave of feminists for suggesting that females were the core of the group protecting, defending and settling conflicts—all tasks previously ascribed to males.¹

Initially I believed that female status and reproductive success were related. Thirty-five years later I had the courage to say what I thought: the female hierarchy created a predictable order (baboons hate unpredictability) that saved transaction costs making baboons able to find time for foraging, socializing, and avoiding dangers. In these and other ways, baboons have agency but they don’t all make the same choices.

In 1981, the main study group split into raiders and non-raiders. Raiding wasn’t an aberrant foraging strategy as colleagues thought at the time. It made good evolutionary sense when the benefits exceeded the costs. However, not all adolescent males chose to be raiders and females followed their raider best friends. But not all of them. Over the years, I learned how baboon society operates, including a social contract which has a “golden rule”, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But without human characteristics of symbols, language, culture and cooperation, baboons can’t break a social complexity glass ceiling that humans have broken.

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Although I started out mainstream, testing the baboon model, the baboons quickly made me a heretic. Most of my work turned to conservation because the baboons were threatened. They were a herald of the Biodiversity Crisis. I studied crop-raiding, did a translocation experiment, engaged in community- based conservation, and ecotourism. The baboons also taught me that evolution is not as we imagine. It is a lot more tolerant with the matrix of evolution being not “survival of the fittest” but “survival of the fit enough”.

Adult male yawn.

Source: Sally Strum.

MB: How does your work differ from others that are concerned with some of the same general topics?

SS: It is in vogue to criticize human exceptionalism. While I expect to find the origins of behavior like language, culture, tool use, higher cognition, and even cooperation in other animals, my position is that humans are exceptional. They have changed the nature of social interactions using their special characteristics.

Compare, for example, chimp tool making with current human technology. The weight of human-built environment recently exceeded the entire weight of Life on Earth. We did this because we are humans. We can only look to ourselves for our “worst” behavior. Early humans diverged from chimps/bonobos about 6 million years ago. That means each species had 6 million years to change and all of us did.

MB: Are you hopeful that as people learn more about these fascinating animals they will come to respect them more for who they really are?

SS: Absolutely. There has been a lot of social media focused on the conflict between humans and baboons in Southern Africa. Sadly, it is hard to change human behavior. Unsurprisingly, in today’s world, human wildlife conflict, is usually a human problem yet it is always the wild animals who pay the price. Co-existence turns a win/ lose into a win/win through compromise. Neither side gets all that it wants. But until now, humans haven’t compromised. We must rethink the relationship between humans and nature, and between baboons and people.