{"id":259746,"date":"2025-10-30T00:36:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T00:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/259746\/"},"modified":"2025-10-30T00:36:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T00:36:12","slug":"baboons-filmed-sharing-meat-like-hunter-gather-humans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/259746\/","title":{"rendered":"Baboons filmed sharing meat like hunter-gather humans"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Baboons share meat in accordance with the unwritten rules that govern their society, according to new research in the journal\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.dpz.eu\/en\/public-engagement\/news\/article\/guineapaviane-teilen-fleisch-nach-festen-sozialen-regeln\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">iScience<\/a>. The finding, which echoes patterns seen in hunter-gatherer tribes, may help to explain the evolution of some complex social structures.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Footage shows different meat transfer types in Guinea baboons. Credit: William O&#8217;Hearn<\/p>\n<p>One antelope provides enough meat for many baboons, but how to distribute the spoils? Baboons don\u2019t 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\u2019s Niokolo Koba National Park.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe were able to show that Guinea baboons pass meat along their social bonds,\u201d says the study\u2019s lead author William J. O\u2019Hearn from the\u00a0German Primate Center (DPZ) \u2013 Leibniz Institute for Primate Research in G\u00f6ttingen.\u00a0Sharing was influenced by social structure.<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1707\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Guinea-baboon-meat-transfer-scaled.jpeg\" alt=\"Two male Guinea baboons share meat\" class=\"wp-image-143752\"\/>Two male Guinea baboons sharing meat. Credit: Abteilung Kognitive Ethologie, CRP Simenti<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The study provides evidence that complex social structures can have similar effects on the exchange of resources, regardless of the species. \u201cThis suggests that certain social patterns may have developed independently in humans and non-human primates, but in comparable ways,\u201d says Julia Fischer, head of the Cognitive Ethology Lab at the DPZ.<\/p>\n<p>Top image: Guinea baboons sharing meat. Credit: Abteilung Kognitive Ethologie, CRP Simenti<\/p>\n<p>More wildlife stories from around the world<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Baboons share meat in accordance with the unwritten rules that govern their society, according to new research in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":259747,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":{"0":"post-259746","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}