Yellow Baboons

Baboons live in a complex and changing world. They cope by being adaptable. Like humans, they specialize in being unspecialized, a mode of life that depends on an ability to shift to alternatives when the primary mode of adaptation is no longer viable. This flexibility is clearly revealed in the development of infant baboons, for whom success often depends on their own abilities and those of their mothers to adopt alternative ontogenetic strategies. In the area of motherhood and infancy, field studies have lagged behind laboratory research. They rarely have made use of suggestive laboratory results or provided essential quantitative information on the range and importance of naturally existing variability. The present field study was designed to test hypotheses arising from laboratory studies and from theoretical considerations. In this first report I summarize resuits of preliminary analyses of the extent of variability in some maternal and infant experiences and thesources and consequences of that variability. Emphasis is placed on data from those infants that were born after the first month of the study. During 14 months (from July 1975 through July 1976 and October 1976), I carried out a field study of 18 mother-infant pairs. These baboons were members of Alto's Group, a group of yellow baboons ( Papio cynocephalus) in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, where my co-workers