Baboons Identify Each Other by Status and Family; Such Abilities May Have Influenced Human Evolution
November 14, 2003
In the Nov. 14 issue of the journal Science, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania report that, much like humans, baboons identify each other based on complex rules that determine relationships between families and status or "rank" within their particular family.
" Humans organize their knowledge of social relationships into a hierarchical structure, and they also make use of hierarchical structures when deducing relationships between words in language," said Robert Seyfarth, a professor in Penn Department of Psychology and Dorothy Cheney, a professor in Penn Department of Biology. "The existence of such complex social classifications in baboons, a species without language, suggests that the social pressures imposed by life in complex groups may have been one factor leading to the evolution of sophisticated cognition and language in our pre-human ancestors."
See more at the Penn News web site.