A Feast for Baboons
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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. Hey there, Lulu here. Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate Christmas.

I am thankful to you for real. I am really, really thankful to you for listening to our show. We love making it for you. And another thing I feel thankful for is the story I am about to play you. I really do. It's a story that gives me hope when I'm feeling worried about humans, when I'm feeling worried about the fact that they can sometimes be mean or greedy. Uh...

And so I wanted to play it for you today. Don't worry, it's not about humans. It's about animals. It is a story about... baboons. ♪

Baboons, they are primates like us. They look a little like really muscly, muscly monkeys with lots of fur and a really furrowed brow. They're kind of scary looking. They are known to fight one another. If they, you know, get into a conflict over territory or food, they can even tear each other apart. And well, because we are primates like them, sometimes people say,

that in our true nature, we're like them too. That if left to our own devices, we too just naturally are greedy or violent or territorial. But this story shows another possibility, that maybe this supposed truth of human nature isn't so true. You'll see what I mean as you listen along, handing it off now to hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krowich. ♪

To get things started, let's just take the question that was just in the air. Are we human beings violent forever and forever and forever? Amen. Is that just who we are? That's a good question. It's a good question, right? And the people who usually say yes, say yes because, in part, because of our ancestors. We're like them. They're like us. That's how it goes. On the other hand...

Let me tell you a story. I was hoping there would be another ham. Yes. Do you remember this guy? Um, Robert Sapolsky. Oh yeah, that's right, Robert Sapolsky. We've had him on the show a couple times. He's a neuroscientist, spends most of the year at Stanford. Being a lab rat scientist, doing neurobiology in the lab. But in the summers. Most summers. I go and spend time in East Africa in the Serengeti studying wild baboons there.

Why? What is it? What is he working on? What's his reason to do that? Well, Sapolsky is interested in studying stress. The effect that stress has on the body. And turns out baboons are a perfect source of data because they're always under stress. You know, the one thing we know about baboons and have known forever is that they fight. Baboons? Constantly. Constantly.

Which is why he studied them.

So what Spolsky does, basically, is he goes into the bush and he watches. His office is covered with these field notebooks, each one containing detailed notes of who groomed who. He tells the following story of a particular moment in his baboon watching, which completely changed his life.

Changed how he sees the world. It happened about 30 years ago. Sapolsky was a young guy just out of grad school, studying his first troop. My first baboons. A troop he really loved. These were animals I was very connected with. In most ways, it was a pretty average group. Yeah, your basic baboon troop. The males, highly aggressive, dumping on each other. Because that's just what males do. Right. Or so he thought.

Okay, mid-80s, a big boom in tourism in Kenya, wonders for the economy, lots of new lodges, lots of lodge expansions, and there happened to be the next territory over, a tourist lodge. And this one particular lodge, he says, had gotten really big, really fast. And during that time, the lodge greatly expanded their garbage dump. Which means basically that they just dug a hole out behind the lodge. And each day, a tractor came out with the leftovers and dumped it there.

So what we're talking about here, if you can nasally imagine, is a big steaming pile of trash, half-eaten food, baking in the sun, smell wafting in the breeze for miles and miles and into the nostrils of baboons everywhere. So it was not long before a troop of baboons, not Sapolsky's, but one nearby, discovered the garbage and just started feeding on it.

And here they are eating leftover desserts and chicken whatevers. To find a dump full of food must be to a baboon like...

like wandering into heaven. - Manna in the wilderness. So this troop almost immediately shifted their entire behavior to they just slept in the trees above the garbage dump and instead of getting up at six in the morning to start foraging, they would waddle down around two minutes of nine and the tractor would show up at nine o'clock and dump the food and they would have 20 minutes of sheer frenzy. And then they'd go back to sort of being couch potatoes.

And this is how it went for a while. So they're over there living off of garbage, and somehow some of the males in my troop figure this out. These males think, we've got to get in on this. We've got to go over there and take their food. What emerged was each morning a bunch of males would run a kilometer or so to the garbage dump and fight their way in.

to get some of the garbage. So every morning there would be a showdown, basically. Yeah, and they would come back with canine slashes and stuff like that. But they'd also have drumsticks, cakes, hamburgers. And this ritual, says Cebulski, went on for years. And then a

A few years into it, I got word that there were a couple of baboons in this garbage dump troop that looked awful and something was wrong with them. Some guys from the lodge had called him and said, hey, you better get down here and look at this. And when he got there, what he saw...

It was horrible. Animals with rotting hands walking on their elbows. Oh yeah. I mean, just really bad. So, trying to figure out what this is about, get veterinarians involved, and we finally figure out it's tuberculosis. Turns out some infected meat had been thrown in the dump and then eaten by the baboons, and this was really bad news. Because while tuberculosis in people...

It's a really slow-moving disease. TB kills non-human primates in weeks, and it's a nightmare of a disease for them. In just a short time, the garbage dump troop was completely decimated. Not to mention that the tough guys in Sapolsky's troop, the ones that had gone to the dump every morning, they got it too. They have the same kind of rotting hands. They all die of it. That must have been really kind of tragic to witness. This was not a good period for me.

These were my animals. I had grown up with these guys. But, you know, while Sapolsky was heartbroken now that half the alpha males in his troop were dead, he did notice some strange things started to happen. Changes. How did they change? Well, grooming spiked him.

So you and I sit on a branch and I take little fleas out of your fur. Yes, well, you know, usually when a female grooms a male, the males never reciprocate. But suddenly they were. Even weirder... You saw adult males sitting in contact with each other and grooming each other. You know how rare that is? Be like if suddenly in the middle of round five of a heavyweight bout...

Mike Tyson just decided to stop boxing and... And nuzzle his opponent. Or comb Evander Holyfield's hair. It would be like that. If you're a baboonologist, it would have been less shocking if these guys had wings or were photosynthetic or something. Up to then, I had seen like 30 seconds of male-male grooming in the course of 15 years. But at the time, Sapolsky kind of wrote it off.

This was just some freak event that wasn't going to last. So he actually stopped studying them. Even after that big investment of time. Scientifically, they were ruined by such a non-natural event, removing half the study subjects. Oh, as a scientist, it became less interesting to you. You know, that was the rationale. It was just too painful to go and watch these guys. So I moved to the other end of the reserve and

We'll be back in a moment.

Brains On is an award-winning science podcast for curious kids and adults. Each week, a different kid co-host joins me to find answers to fascinating questions like, what was the first life on Earth? Do dogs know they're dogs? And why can't we remember when we were babies? Plus, we have mystery sounds for you to guess, songs for you to dance to, and lots of facts, all checked by experts. You can listen to Brains On wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, we're back. On with the story.

Now fast forward six years and we come to the moment that really changed things for him, really flipped him into a different way of thinking. And it happened kind of by accident. So about six years later, I'm out there for the first time with who was soon destined to become my wife and decided I wanted to kind of show her where I had grown up, what part of the park. Ah, you wanted to go to the old haunt. Yeah, basically.

So went there and the troop was there. And they were acting pretty much the same as before. Lots of grooming, not so much fighting. Isn't that nice? And they're still like this great remnant troop. And he's sitting there with his wife, just pointing out all the different baboons. Oh, there's Teva. And there's, I don't know, whoever. And then it hits him. This epiphanal whatever. Wait a second. There was only one male left. We'd been there at the time of the TB outbreak. Dun-dun.

I don't follow this. What? One male? Stick with me for just one second and you will get it. The thing about male baboons, first thing you gotta understand, is around puberty, the males get a little antsy. They get itchy, they're bored, and they just pick up and leave. So in a troop, any of the adult males grew up someplace else. Which meant that these new guys that were coming into Sapolsky's troop...

We're coming in from the outside, from the old world order. The jerky, real dog-eat-dog world out there. Which would mean that this whole kumbaya situation should evaporate the moment these guys show up. But it didn't. It stuck. Oh my god. The new guys are learning we don't do stuff like that here. And if the new guys are learning a new way, well that means the old way, the violent way,

Isn't the only way. And this floored me. It was one of those moments. It will be one of the three or four best science moments of my life. The key question was, how did these guys unlearn their entire childhood culture of aggression, blah, blah, and somehow learn we don't do stuff like that around here? Well... Well, what? Well, how did they unlearn something that was supposedly built in? No, um...

Well, he doesn't really know exactly. But here's Sapolsky's hunch. Here's his hunch, and this is really cool. It may have to do with that precarious moment when the new guy comes in. Now, normally what happens in this sort of status quo is

is that the new guy arrives and it's just a really bad experience for him. It's awful. I mean, you look at them and you just identify with, like, freshman year in college or something. They're completely peripheral. Every male who's higher ranking dumps on them. And even worse, this freshman baboon is completely ignored by the ladies. You just sit there and say, somebody groom him. Somebody groom him. Come on.

Why don't they Google him? Well, because if they did... Some adult male would have attacked them. Oh. So the lady's hanging back while he's out there biting and clawing and trying to scratch his way in. And what you've got here is a cycle. ♪

that has existed for a long, long time. But if you make one small change, just remove the alpha male, take him out of the equation, suddenly... The females are more relaxed and more likely to take a social gamble of reaching out to somebody new. The key thing is the females. Spolsky thinks that it's all about timing. If the females can get to the new guy early enough...

Everything is different. It's remarkable. In your typical troop, it's three months on the average before the first female grooms you. In this troop, six days. Get out. Six days as compared to three months? Yeah. In a world in which from day one, as an adolescent male, you're treated better, something about the aggressiveness melts away.

It has been 20 years. Really? Yes, 20 years, and Sapolsky's original baboon troop is still operating in this peaceful mode, even though dozens of new males have come and gone at this point. And the idea that something that was thought to be so unchangeable could change, and change quickly, and then stay changed as a result of something so airy and undefinable is culture. Well, that has caused Robert Sapolsky, dare I say it, to...

Hope. Absolutely. And it's not something that I do by nature. You're not a hopeful guy by nature. No, not at all. All right. That'll do it for today. Hoping that whoever you are, wherever you are, you get a little break today and maybe a moment to pause and think about who and what you are grateful for in this world. And if it's a person, maybe even let them know. If it's an animal, maybe go give them a hug.

Again, I am truly, truly grateful to you for being here for these nature stories. We'll have another one coming in two weeks.

Hi, this is Emma Jacobs, outgoing Radiolab intern. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Soren Wheeler, Michael Raphael, Owen Horn, and Lulu Miller. With help from Adina Ryan, Emma Jacobs, and Elsa Chang. Special thanks to... Bill Hare, I'm Brian Hare's father. To Aaron Scott, Ann Hepperman, Dr. Anna Kukova, Dr. Irina Playa. And Chris Lehman. Hi, I'm Emma, and I live in Portland, Maine.

Here are the staff credits. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Jnanasambandam, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Valentina Powers, Sara Khari,

Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. ♪