"Rodney Long" wrote in message ...
pearl wrote:

This SHOT DOWN ALL OTHER "THEORIES" BEFORE HER. Blowing out all of the
earlier theories. She had the "real" facts, and had them on film, from
the hunting, to the eating of meat. She even recorded at least one case
of cannibalisms . Why don't you check that out, I've even seen the
videos of it. Everyone was surprised by these facts.

Gombe National Park is a limited area, and competition is high.

'..The park is made up of narrow mountain strip of land about
16 kilometers long and 5 kilometers wide on the shore of Lake
Tanganyika. From the lake shore steep slopes rises up to form the
Rift Valley's escapement, which is covered by the dense forest.
..
The dominating vegetation in this park include the open
deciduous woodland on the upper slopes, gallery forests on
the valleys and lower slopes. This type of vegetation is unique in
Tanzania and has been supporting a large number of Chimpanzee,
Baboons, and a large number of bird species. Other species seen
here are colobus, blue and red tail monkeys.

I was not going to even mention Baboons, meat eating is an accepted
practice for them.

Their habitat has been described as flat, semi-arid savannah with
occasional trees or woodland, with highly seasonal rainfall. Not
a place where succulent fruits could be expected to be abundant.
So, yet, ..
"their diet emphasizes roots, tubers, grass seeds and fruits."
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~bramblet/ant301/eight.html

As you mention baboons....

'No Time for Bullies: Baboons Retool Their Culture
By NATALIE ANGIER
Published: April 13, 2004

Sometimes it takes the great Dustbuster of fate to clear the room of
bullies and bad habits. Freak cyclones helped destroy Kublai Khan's
brutal Mongolian empire, for example, while the Black Death of the
14th century capsized the medieval theocracy and gave the Renaissance
a chance to shine.

Among a troop of savanna baboons in Kenya, a terrible outbreak of
tuberculosis 20 years ago selectively killed off the biggest, nastiest and
most despotic males, setting the stage for a social and behavioral
transformation unlike any seen in this notoriously truculent primate.

In a study appearing today in the journal PloS Biology (online at
www.plosbiology.org), researchers describe the drastic temperamental and
tonal shift that occurred in a troop of 62 baboons when its most belligerent
members vanished from the scene. The victims were all dominant adult males
that had been strong and snarly enough to fight with a neighboring baboon
troop over the spoils at a tourist lodge garbage dump, and were exposed
there to meat tainted with bovine tuberculosis, which soon killed them. Left
behind in the troop, designated the Forest Troop, were the 50 percent of
males that had been too subordinate to try dump brawling, as well as all the
females and their young. With that change in demographics came a cultural
swing toward pacifism, a relaxing of the usually parlous baboon hierarchy,
and a willingness to use affection and mutual grooming rather than threats,
swipes and bites to foster a patriotic spirit.

Remarkably, the Forest Troop has maintained its genial style over two
decades, even though the male survivors of the epidemic have since died
or disappeared and been replaced by males from the outside. (As is the
case for most primates, baboon females spend their lives in their natal home,
while the males leave at puberty to seek their fortunes elsewhere.) The
persistence of communal comity suggests that the resident baboons must
somehow be instructing the immigrants in the unusual customs of the tribe.

"We don't yet understand the mechanism of transmittal," said Dr. Robert M.
Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford, "but the jerky
new guys are obviously learning, `We don't do things like that around here.'"
Dr. Sapolsky wrote the report with his colleague and wife, Dr. Lisa J. Share.

Dr. Sapolsky, who is renowned for his study of the physiology of stress,
said that the Forest Troop baboons probably felt as good as they acted.
Hormone samples from the monkeys showed far less evidence of stress in
even the lowest-ranking individuals, when contrasted with baboons living
in more rancorous societies.

The researchers were able to compare the behavior and physiology of the
contemporary Forest Troop primates to two control groups: a similar-size
baboon congregation living nearby, called the Talek Troop, and the Forest
Troop itself from 1979 through 1982, the era that might be called Before
Alpha Die-off, or B.A.D.

"It's a really fine, thorough piece of work, with the sort of methodology
and lucky data sets that you can only get from doing long-term field
research," said Dr. Duane Quiatt, a primatologist at the University of
Colorado at Denver and a co-author with Vernon Reynolds of the 1993
book "Primate Behaviour: Information, Social Knowledge and the Evolution
of Culture."

The new work vividly demonstrates that, Putumayo records notwithstanding,
humans hold no patent on multiculturalism. As a growing body of research
indicates, many social animals learn from one another and cultivate regional
variants in skills, conventions and fashions. Some chimpanzees crack open
their nuts with a stone hammer on a stone anvil; others prefer wood hammers
on wood anvils. The chimpanzees of the Tai forest rain-dance; those of the
Gombe tickle themselves. Dr. Jane Goodall reported a fad in one chimpanzee
group: a young female started wiggling her hands, and before long, every
teen chimp was doing likewise.

(Page 2 of 2)

But in the baboon study, the culture being conveyed is less a specific
behavior or skill than a global code of conduct. "You can more accurately
describe it as the social ethos of group," said Dr. Andrew Whiten, a
professor of evolutionary and developmental psychology at the University
of St. Andrews in Scotland who has studied chimpanzee culture. "It's an
attitude that's being transmitted."

The report also offers real-world proof of a principle first demonstrated in
captive populations of monkeys: that with the right upbringing, diplomacy is
infectious. Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal, the director of the Living Links Center
at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University in
Atlanta, has shown that if the normally pugilistic rhesus monkeys are reared
with the more conciliatory stumptailed monkeys, the rhesus monkeys learn
the value of tolerance, peacemaking and mutual hip-hugging.

Dr. de Waal, who wrote an essay to accompany the new baboon study,
said in a telephone interview, "The good news for humans is that it looks
like peaceful conditions, once established, can be maintained," he said.

"And if baboons can do it," he said, "why not us? The bad news is that you
might have to first knock out all the most aggressive males to get there."

Jerkiness or worse certainly seems to be a job description for ordinary male
baboons. The average young male, after wheedling his way into a new troop
at around age 7, spends his prime years seeking to fang his way up the
hierarchy; and once he's gained some status, he devotes many a leisure hour
to whimsical displays of power at scant personal cost. He harasses and
attacks females, which weigh half his hundred pounds and lack his
thumb-thick canines, or he terrorizes the low-ranking males he knows cannot
retaliate.

Dr. Barbara Smuts, a primatologist at the University of Michigan who wrote
the 1985 book "Sex and Friendship in Baboons," said that the females in the
troop she studied received a serious bite from a male annually, maybe losing
a strip of flesh or part of an ear in the process. As they age and lose
their strength, however, males may calm down and adopt a new approach to
group living, affiliating with females so devotedly that they keep their
reproductive opportunities going even as their ranking in the male hierarchy
plunges.

For their part, female baboons, which live up to 25 years - compared with
the male's 18 - inherit their rank in the gynocracy from their mothers and
so spend less time fighting for dominance. They do, however, readily battle
females from outside the fold, for they, not the males, are the keepers of
turf and dynasty.

The new-fashioned Forest Troop is no United Nations, or even the average
frat house. Its citizens remain highly aggressive and argumentative, and the
males still obsess over hierarchy. "We're talking about baboons here," said
Dr. Sapolsky.

What most distinguishes this congregation from others is that the males
resist taking out their bad moods on females and underlings. When a
dominant male wants to pick a fight, he finds someone his own size and
rank. As a result, a greater percentage of male-male conflicts in the Forest
Troop occur between closely ranked individuals than is seen in the control
populations, where the bullies seek easier pickings. Moreover, Forest Troop
males of all ranks spend more time grooming and being groomed, and just
generally huddling close to troop mates, than do their counterpart males in
the study.

Interestingly, the male faces in the Forest Troop may have changed over
time, but the relative numbers have not. Ever since the tuberculosis
epidemic killed half the adult males, the ratio has remained skewed, with
twice as many females as males. Yet the researchers have demonstrated
that the troop's sexual complexion alone cannot explain its character.
Examining other troops with a similar preponderance of females, the
Stanford scientists saw no evidence of the Forest Troop's relative amity.

Dr. Sapolsky has no idea how long the good times will last. "I confess I'm
rooting for the troop to stay like this forever, but I worry about how
vulnerable they may be," he said. "All it would take is two or three jerky
adolescent males entering at the same time to tilt the balance and destroy
the culture."

http://tinyurl.com/3hn4m