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A Baboon’s Life
out to be especially
illuminating. It contains a lesson, I think, about how the patterns of a lifetime
can come home to roost.
In most primate societies, such as those of baboons, females spend their entire
lives in the troop into which they were born, surrounded by their female
relatives. Males, on the other hand, tend to leave the troop at puberty, striking
out to make their fortune. This pattern is common to most social species, in
which inbreeding is avoided when one of the sexes migrates. In many species, the
members of one sex are driven out at puberty.
Male primates leave voluntarily. They are possessed of a profound wanderlust, an
itch to be anywhere but on the drab, familiar home ground. They leave and
they gradually make their way into a new troop where they are subordinate and
unconnected at first.
This is a time of life fraught with danger, potential, fear, and excitement. The
mortality risk for a young baboon increases as much as tenfold during the
volatile transfer period. Slowly, though, the young males form connections in
their new troops as they grow into adulthood. Prime-age males also may
occasionally change troops, when there’s trouble at home and too much competition
for status there. And sometimes even an elderly male primate will transfer, an
act that makes little evident sense.
Old age is no time to spend unprotected in the savanna, having left one troop
but not yet assimilated into another. Senses are less acute, muscles are less
willing and predators lurk everywhere. Even if the old baboon makes the
transition to his new troop safely, he’ll hardly be on easy street. As he moves
into a world of strangers, he will have to learn new social and ecological rules:
which big, strapping males are unpredictably violent, which grove of trees is
most likely to be fruiting when the dry season is at its worst.
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