Baboons share meat in accordance with the unwritten rules that govern their society, according to new research in the journal iScience. The finding, which echoes patterns seen in hunter-gatherer tribes, may help to explain the evolution of some complex social structures.
Guinea baboons, which live in the dry forests of western Africa, are one of the smallest baboon species. They feed on little items, such as fruits and invertebrates, and, occasionally, large items, such as bushbuck, which they opportunistically chase and catch.
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One antelope provides enough meat for many baboons, but how to distribute the spoils? Baboons don’t actively share their meat, but they do allow it to be taken. To find out how this passive sharing is influenced by social factors, researchers analysed 320 meat-transfer events alongside nine years of behavioural data, recorded from the Guinea baboons of Senegal’s Niokolo Koba National Park.
“We were able to show that Guinea baboons pass meat along their social bonds,” says the study’s lead author William J. O’Hearn from the German Primate Center (DPZ) – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research in Göttingen. Sharing was influenced by social structure.
Specifically, Guinea baboons live in a nested social structure, made up of units, parties and gangs. Units are family groups, that contain a male with his females and their offspring. Parties are made of three to four units, connected by long-term bonds between males that are often related. Meanwhile gangs are made of two to three parties, where kinship is less of a feature.
Tolerant transfers, where animals took pieces of meat from others without conflict, occurred almost exclusively within the closest social units. Further up the hierarchy, however, things became more niggly. As the group size grows and relationships become weaker, scavenging and stealing became more common.
In human hunter-gatherer societies, meat is a valuable food source that is rarely available, and that is widely shared according to community structure, first within households and then within camps. The way baboons do things is not so different.
The study provides evidence that complex social structures can have similar effects on the exchange of resources, regardless of the species. “This suggests that certain social patterns may have developed independently in humans and non-human primates, but in comparable ways,” says Julia Fischer, head of the Cognitive Ethology Lab at the DPZ.
Top image: Guinea baboons sharing meat. Credit: Abteilung Kognitive Ethologie, CRP Simenti
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