Agriculture and Property

One of the big questions in the study of ancient human history is, How did agriculture become the main technique humans use to produce food? For thousands if not millions of years, humans gathered food and hunted game to survive; some populations still live this way, as do our surviving ape cousins. To the neophyte, farming might seem like an obvious improvement over hunting and gathering (hereafter, foraging), but it turns out this isn't true. Getting started with agriculture is costly and risky, so how did it happen?

Science has attempted to grapple with this dilemma for decades, and some compelling theories have been developed to grapple with this question. Samuel Bowles' most recent publication in PNAS may be the best original research on the subject in a long time. I'm familiar with Bowles' other work, and I am regularly impressed with the rigor of his models, even if I don't always agree with all of his conclusions. It helps that he is an excellent writer because this isn't the easiest material to make accessible.

In this paper, Bowles and coauthor Jung-Kyuu Choi have built a model, on a foundation of empirical data (archaeological, climatic, and anthropological), which seeks to explain the emergence of agriculture in conjunction with the private property rights. Paleoanthropologists have previously suggested that strict property rights, generally unknown in forager societies, would be necessary for farming to become practical. But, it is difficult to explain why property rights would come into existence because, as with agriculture, there are many disincentives for foragers to adopt property rights. According the authors' model, agriculture and property coevolved: each adaptation is the key to the survival and propagation of the other.

Bowles is an economist by training, so he uses models, agent-based simulations, and game theory to validate his hypothesis. There is a particular brand of game theory called evolutionary game theory which was created to cope with just the sort of questions that Bowles routinely attempts to tackle. The best known evolutionary game theory game is the Hawk Dove game, which demonstrates how two populations of the same species which behave in seemingly irreconcilable ways manage to coexist, in what is known as an Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) situation.

Like so many before them, the authors' adapt the classic Dove Hawk game to fit their needs. Instead of Doves and Hawks, the authors use Sharers, Bourgeois, and Civics. A Sharer's strategy (like a Dove's) is to split a resource by default, but if another individual claims that resource, the Sharer will give all of it up. The Bourgeois is the type that will claim all of resource if possible, contesting if necessary and appropriate (similar to a Hawk). Civics act exactly like Sharers, but if they go up against a Bourgeois, they will band together with other Civics to contest a Bourgeois trying to take the resource. These strategies are modeled on anthropological studies of extant human societies.

Thanks to the power of modern computers and the Monte Carlo engine, the authors can vary other variables as well, such as whether or not property rights are recognized among the populations. If the resource is foraged then ownership is not easily demarcated, and Bourgeois agents will go after it. But if a resource is farmed, then property rights are easily recognized because it is obvious who produced the resource and thus who it belongs to. Bourgeois won't go after these resources; they respect property rights when they are apparent. Additionally, the authors varied climate conditions and simulated inter-group competitions on top of the usual intra-group contests.

After determining all the variables and running the simulations, the authors looked for what combination of conditions create novel ESS situations, with an eye for Bourgeois dominated scenarios since their behavior is the norm for agricultural cultures. A mixed population of Sharers and Bourgeois (but no Civics) forms a steady state, but if you don't have property rights established, Bourgeois have a strong tendency to fight with each other over resources that have no clear owner, which reduces the success of the population. However, if property rights exist, the Bourgeois don't squabble amongst themselves so much, and an all Bourgeois population becomes a stable possibility.

So far the authors have shown that their premises can be incorporated into a model that appears plausible, but does it match the historical facts? A challenge for researchers trying to model early modern human development is matching simulated data with the archaeological record. When we go this far back in time, archaeological evidence is often scarce and difficult to interpret. While agriculture leaves a clear mark on archaeological record, the same is not true for property rights, and there isn't much that anyone can do about that. We just have to make do with what we've got.The authors make do quite nicely. By throwing the Holocene environmental conditions into the mix, they find that

"in the simulations, as in the archaeological record, mixed farming and hunting–gathering is the norm over very long periods, and that the process of transition when it occurred was prolonged, highly varied, and sometimes halting." 

On the other hand,

"the chicken-and-egg problem of farming and private property in our model explains why the transition was a very unlikely event, occurring in only 31 of 1,000 metapopulations that we simulated."

Yet, to me the most striking result is that their model reliably displays the Natufian culture, the first sedentary humans, and possibly the first farmers.

To wrap things up, the authors make some important points about the role of invention in early culture:

"In many histories of technology, the key event is the invention; the subsequent spread occurs inexorably as the result of its superiority in lessening the toil required to sustain life. This model has been suggested for the Holocene revolution; but it does not work. No invention was necessary."

And so, thanks to an agreeable climate, coincident evolution of farming and property right, and well, the human capacity for cultural learning, our ancestors were able to transform from foragers into farmers. Probably. Maybe. We'll have to see what the expert critics have to say in the coming months and years.

This is a great paper. I think that it may have far a reaching influence, so if you're at all interested in the ideas, have a crack at it yourself. It is not terribly long, and quite accessible.

Bowles, S., & Choi, J. (2013). Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110 (22), 8830-8835 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1212149110

Wound Up

Big news in primatology, or well, there's always "big" news, I just seldom get around to talking about it until I simply can't keep track of all the stories because my firefox session becomes so slow due to all the tabs I have open. I'm not quite sure what that says about my work ethic.

First, the baboons:

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‘Feeding stations’: an answer to conflict?

Baboons foraging in human areas leads to highly undesirable consequences
A question that is being asked of baboon management on a regular basis is whether using feeding stations (or provisioning) can be used to draw baboons away from human areas, where humans and baboons often conflict with one another. In this post we address the question, based on data we have collected . . .

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This post is particularly notable because it utilizes some of the actual data that have came out of the BRU projects, in order to make informed recommendations about what to do about the Cape Town groups.

We spent so much time musing over the various proposals for how to keep the baboons apart, its great to see some facts coming to light. Even though the results aren't positive, its at least one option off the floor, narrowing the debate considerably.

The actual big news concerns the gorillas, and might be well known to everyone by now. I was a little slow on the uptake, though the difficulty I am having in finding the original story is making me feel a little better about myself. Oh, that's why, it was from theNewScientist. Shit. Fine, I'll give you the journal reference, none of their noise.

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Local traditions in gorilla manual skill: evidence for observational learning of behavioral organization

Elaborate manual skills of food processing are known in several species of great ape; but their manner of acquisition is controversial. Local, “cultural” traditions show the influence of social learning, but it is uncertain whether this includes the ability to imitate the organization of behavior. Dispute has centered on whether program-level imitation contributes to the acquisition of feeding techniques in gorillas. Here, we show that captive western gorillas at Port Lympne, Kent, have developed a group-wide habit of feeding on nettles . . .

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The premise here is pretty simple, if you're familiar with the related chimpanzee research. Chimps are known to be able to spread knowledge and techniques among groups, techniques like the famous Use-a-Stick-to-Fish-Some-Tasty-Bugs-Out-of-a-Hole approach. This is the first example of any such evidence in gorillas, which is good news for them, since as far as apes go, gorillas are not known for their intellect, much less tool use. This sort of research drives right at the heart of cultural foundations, one of the least understood concepts, from an ethological perspective, regardless of what a sociologist might tell you.

One of the advisors of one of my advisors worked on this research and paper, so that means it is much more believable research than most other stuff being published... in anything.

This next one bring me backs to my neuroscience days when I studied a fascinating behavior in rats, whereby they were able to transmit taste preferences between rats by breathing tastes and special signal chemicals at each other, in conjunction.

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Bonobos 'chat' about good foods

In the first study of its kind, researchers in the UK found the apes gave each other specific details about food quality. The combination of five distinct calls into sequences allowed others to concentrate their foraging around areas known to contain preferred kiwi fruits.

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Bononbos be smart. More and more, I get the feeling that if I had to choose between chimps and bonobos in a dream job, I would choose bonobos. I still have my reservations, but chimps often do not seem nearly as interesting when you take them out of the wild. These bonobos were studied entirely in captivity! What I really want to know now is the life history of the animals, and the results line up with that. Also what this Twycross Zoo is all about since it is apparently the World Primate Center.

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To conclude, I have an amusing bit of research to share.

I can't wait to see how much (and what kind of...) mileage I can get out of these results.

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Apparently women (but not men) like monkey sex… literally.

Previous research suggests that women’s genital arousal is an automatic response to sexual stimuli, whereas men’s genital arousal is dependent upon stimulus features specific to their sexual interests. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that a nonhuman sexual stimulus would elicit a genital response in women but not in men.

Human Ethology: On Social Networking

I dislike the Facebook (tFB) - that's no secret. One reason is because of this fascinating article about demographics of populations who use different social networking sites. But the real reason is because I'm not on board with the "social networking is the future (of innovation/interaction/huuurgle/etc )" crew is that I just happen to think that its unproductive and unhealthy. Don't get me wrong, I'm from the Internet, and I even am willing to agree that moderate levels of internet browsing helps with work. Hell, I won't even deny that maybe tFB is the future. But that doesn't mean I'm going to say its a good thing. Have a look back at my previous Human Ethology writings: in short tFB isn't friendly with our ethology. Sucks, I know.

The reason I bring this up is because a short while ago, I was linked to an article about how tFB is bad news for people's self-esteem. Aha! I thought to myself, Now that's what to see, meaning either my hunches are getting confirmed, or tFB is not only meritless, but a legitimately negative insitution!

Then I was reading one of my blogs the other day, and was surprised to find myself reading an article which spoke of a recently published paper which indicated that tFB improves one's self-esteem. Now this provides a bit of a conundrum worth investigation, I thought.

Well, let's first have a gander at the more recent of the two. This "mirror, mirror" article is obviously about self-esteem derived from looking at images of one's self. The real-life test is, incredibly enough, having subjects look at themselves in a mirror. Okay. And on theFaceBook? Looking at your own profile.

So the results imply that one gains more self-esteem looking at one's own self-generated profile than ones "physical" profile. This immediately comes back to the dichotomy of stated versus revealed preference. A person's tFB profile is stated information, it is written by the individual according to their choices and beliefs. A mirror reflection is revealing information, it tells no lies, unless one is wearing makeup.

That's all well and good, but the authors, or at very least, the press, would argue that these findings suggest that tFB use in general is better for one's self-esteem than living in the real-world.

Slight problem: I may not be an average tFB user (in fact I hope that I am not), but I don't spend a lot of time looking at my profile. Particularly under the newest layout, its awfully difficult for anyone to easily see the complete contents of one's profile. What's allegedly the best part about tFB, and certainly what takes up most people's time, are the status updates, photos, quizzes, games, etc. Dealing with other people is what takes up the majority of time spent on tFB.

Which is where the original paper comes back into play. Except not as much as you would think. The TIME article, from which I was lead to the scholarly paper, strongly implied that people were more miserable on tFB.
Yet,the actual overview of the paper tells a different tale:

"In a series of five experiments, the study— which was inspired by the Facebook envy experience though does not explicitly address it— identified several intersecting psychological factors that underlie the grass-is-greener phenomenon. The first two experiments showed that people consistently underestimate how often other people have negative emotions, while overestimating how often they have positive ones."

Emphasis mine. Well then.

Blogger seldom angers me in a substantial way, but when it deletes my whole post for reasons I do not comprehend and refuses to let me undo, I get mad. And delayed. Everything should have a built in revisioning system.

By the time I realized what was going on while I was reading the articles and writing this post the first time around, it was "too late." There's not more to be said on the relevance of these two articles. "Mirror, Mirror" is limited by its odd assumption about the importance of profile information and viewing, and "Misery," while a solid paper in its own right, doesn't actually gather any evidence directly related to tFB activities.

The two can hardly be compared under the circumstances. Thus, the moral remaining with us: the press is a difficult creature to interact with.
Read the actual papers, and if you can't do that, at least real the abstracts. I skim a lot of papers, read quite few, since so many pass across my desk, but I will always read the abstracts. From the abstract of "Misery":

"Taken together, these studies suggest that people may think they are more alone in their emotional difficulties than they really are."

That's quite a finding, regardless of not being directly tied to tFB. Ehh, it didn't deserve the attention anyway.

Sorority?

Last time I promised that I would elaborate on the situation I presented last time, namely, Gertrude and Hilda. To my trained but imperfect human eyes the two look like sisters. As an exercise, let's assume that they are. But if they are, how and why do they appear to differ so greatly in rank?

A few things first. If the two are sisters, they are almost certainly not full sisters, they probably only share one parent. This I shall assume, as males generally do not maintain their rank long enough for a single copulatory pair to make it through two pregnancies. This would also require Gertie and Hilda be born one after the other; there are just too many unlikely aspects to such a setup. Thus we'll assume they shared only one parents, but which parent will prove to be an interesting question.

Sharing a mother between the two sisters is problematic. If this were to be the case, the mother would need to be quite highly ranked, to explain Hilda's own rank. Gertrude's low rank is less of a problem this way - female's can lose a great deal of rank much more easily than they can gain rank. So under this scenario, how does Gertie lose all of her ranks?

Alright, we don't really know enough about Gertrude's rank to say where she's fallen to. Maybe she never really collapsed, maybe she just got super old and couldn't protect herself, or developed some disease which makes her weak. Even though males are the sex whose rank is primarily based on pure strength, and females can rely on the cushion of their matriline, they still need to be able to protect themselves. in truth, Gertie is very seldom bothered by anyone because she stays out of the way and is no longer sexually receptive. In theory she could still hold a high rank, but just doesn't make use of it.

What if they shared the same father? Well, an alpha male is likely to mate with the top rank females, and create progeny of high rank, like Hilda. However, males are never long in the alpha spot. An up and coming male may have joined a troop and impregnated a mid-to-low rank female, and several years later, having risen to alpha status, impregnated a high ranking female who in turn gave birth to Hilda.

On the other hand, a low ranking, but clever male may have regularly mated with low ranked females, but slipped in a few sneaky, extra-pair copulations with a high ranking one, and one such copulation might happened to have yielded a successfully pregnancy. This isn't a terribly likely option, but either scenario would give us Gertrude and Hilda as they are today.

So there you have it, a wealth of different ethologically sound (I swear) explanations for how two old sister baboons ended up in such different places in the autumn of their lives.

The Old Ladies Club

In the main baboon troop (but probably not your average troop), there is a small cohort of elderly baboon female folk. It is not a distinct group, but more of a spectrum which merges into the rest of the troop's females.

Gertrude and Midi spend much of their time in solitude. Gertrude in particular is usually found at one end of the troop or the other. Midi is harder to place, mostly because she is a very shy baboon, particularly around humans. And in my personal opinion, she's not much of a remarkable or interesting baboon to observe.

Gertrude is the most easily recognizable baboon in the troop. She is so old that she seems to have developed some type of bone pathology; she stands and walks with a permanent stoop. Her fur is ragged and her ears are torn, even more than usual. I think one might be almost entirely invisible, but the thing is, I never came to recognize her ears because she was so easily identifiable without them.

The connector between these two and the rest of the troop is Hilda, and without her, the group my be mistaken as actually being distinct. Then again, without Hilda, it would only be Gertrude and Midi exchanging groomings all day. The three of them form a triad, though Hilda is quite clearly the dominant of the three.

There is always an exception, however. Punzle's jaw is permanently fused out of place, and she's had so many children that her nipples and breasts can be seen as visibly uneven from possibly a hundred feet away. She is no spring guineafowl. Yet her only connection to the senior citizens of the troop is through Hilda, which indicates nothing, as Hilda is a highly ranked female, and as the beta female, she is deserving of attention from Punzle. I've never seen Punzle affiliate with either Gertrude or Midi.

Hilda is the true exception. She is a powerful memeber of the troop, probably the third ranked female. Why would she interact with the other old ladies?

When I think about the odd structure of the old lady demographic of the troop, I wonder at why some of the older females have maintained their ranks, and why some seem to have fallen off the chart. In a matrilinear system, these old females ought to have many female offspring surrounding them who would be locked into the a similar rank for life. Midi and Gertrude (in particular), appear to have almost no one.

The old ladies club doesn't seem to have any different relationship with the males. They seem to have very little relationship at all with the guys, of little surprise given the low fertility of these females (Gertrude has ceased to cycle at all). Yet, the only time I've ever seen a male herd Gertrude, it was Chester, and he made it into quite an affair. I'd never heard Gertrude make more than a couple grunts before then, and I've never again heard anything quite so desperate as Gertrude's screams.

Hilda and Gertrude are a particularly odd comparison, since I believe the two to be related. I might be totally off, but those faces are just a bit too similar for me to write off. They couldn't have the same mother, though. Then rank would follow inheritance, and they would not appear so far distant in the heirarchy. I tell you what, though. This post is nearing the length I'd like to keep it at, so I'm going to bow out of this example and give it a of its own, in a few days. It deserves it.


Regardless, Hilda does interact with the other old ladies, so maybe Gertrude and Midi were once of higher rank (I have seen female baboons fall and be ruined, in the dramatic Aristocratic sense). Or perhaps Hilda is just a magnanimous kind of baboon. Come to think of it, I just like Hilda. She isn't a shameless flirt like the young Siri, nor a raging bitch like Punzle, nor terrifying like Lottie. She might not be the best looking lady baboon out there, but she seems like a pretty decent monkey being.

Mo Infants, Mo Problems

Thanks to a colleague for haphazardly pointing this out to me: an interesting bit of research managed to surface on the front of the Science Times from Tuesday. The article discusses male-infant interactions in a variety of species, but most notably, primates.

The main citation of the Times article is a recent publication in Animal Behaviour from Julia Fischer's Cognitive Ethology Group. I know a few of these people: its solid research. Alas, I don't know so much about the everyday behavior of Barbary macaques - though they are the only primate species to have a wild population in Europe, on Gibraltar.

In my rendition of a previous near-death-experience, I mentioned a hitherto unexpected behavior where old Chester forcibly "played" with a nearby infant who was handily playing nearby. At the time, I was only able to come up with a paper which examined male monkey's treatment of dead infants (how was it easier to study their handling of dead infants rather than live ones?). Fischer's paper was what I was actually looking for, it just didn't exist yet.

These studies feed into the nebulous domain sometimes known as "monkey economics." A related paper which investigates baboons, was published a few years ago in Animal Behaviour as Infants as a commodity in a baboon market. Baboons, nay monkeys, nay primates love babies. Why they love babies so much is unclear, but they sacrifice a great deal of time and effort in the form of grooming the mother in order to be able to handle and/or grunt to the infant. Its a fascinating paper which explores the details of these interactions, from which a market has emerged. In short, the fewer young infants in the troop, the more demand there is for them, and the greater "price" a mother can charge for another female to handle her infant. However, someone like Lottie can always pull rank and handle the baby with a minimal amount of grooming in return.

The paper focuses exclusively on female-infant interaction, which is no surprise, since the female baboons spend all day grooming each other and grunting to babies. The males are a lot less involved with the infants. They prefer to herd the troop, aloofly hang around the periphery, or lay about. In the last case, females will often approach and groom the male in order to strengthen or maintain a reciprocal bond with the powerful male.

Barbary macaque males are intensely social with their infants, likewise among female baboons. How do the Chacma males fit into this picture? Again, as I described in the near-death-experience, the use of the infant appeared to diffuse tension between the two... or redirect it elsewhere.

A similar incident occurred more recently, and this time around, I wasn't directly in the line of fire. It occurred in a another troop between the alpha male (not quite as secure in his position as Aaron) and a young adult male, perhaps only a couple years younger than the alpha. The younger male has been growing like a weed, but still lacks the experience; possible the drive of the current alpha. I missed any lead-up to the incident, what I saw and heard, was the younger male come charging down a hill full tilt directly at the alpha, who was sitting a few feet up in a tree. The younger male was grunting like an express train, and clutching a screaming infant to his chest throughout the charge. It happened to suddenly, out of nowhere, but the alpha made no response. The younger guy just charged into the thicket under the tree, and I believe passed straight on by. I lost sight of him then, and am unsure what became of the infant and his carrier.

In both these instances, it seems like when the infant is brought into play by the lower ranked male, the higher ranked baboon will act ignorant of the lesser baboons offense. The infant is sort of like a shield, a bit of insurance against reprisal. My next question, is the male afraid of incurring the wrath of the females by messing with the male and infant, or does the infant appeal to the male's adoring baby-sense?

Very recently, I was pleased to discover a 2003 Nature article which specifically addresses paternal behavior in Savannah baboon (not Chacmas, but very close). Its a Letter to Nature, so it is brief, but its a wonderfully descriptive study which lays the foundation for expansive research into the how and why of male-infant relationships among baboons.

I'd like to see the Barbary macaques in action, since its adorable to see the musky males toss the babies about, sometimes carelessly as if they don't know their own strength. Perhaps the behavior would lose some of its magic were it to become common-place as it is in Barbary macaques, but there's just something constantly comical about the males in primate species where a large sexual dimorphism exists.

When you're on top

From my perspective, the scene began with Punzle and a sub-adult male having a spat. Punzle probably started it; she's known for being mean to anyone she can push around. Luckily for her, she's quite high up there in the ranks, so seldom does a day go by that she doesn't mess with someone who probably doesn't deserve the magnitude of grief she gives.

As usual for females, Punzle was shrieking at the guy while he silently threatened her, and pushed her back. He was much larger, and despite her rank, his physical presence was something that could not be ignored.

But rank did come in handy, since a minute, Queen Lottie, overlady of the entire troop, arrived. She and Punzle appear to be on good terms, most of the time. Today Lottie appeared early in the fight, to back up Punzle. The female screams doubled in magnitude, but the sub-adult was not particularly perturbed. This guy was not just some juvenile - any day now, he could pack up and leave for another troop, ready to begin working on his career as a full fledged adult.

With him pitted against two females, the match appeared even. Lottie and Punzle would drive him back a bit, but the next moment, the male would lunge and the pair of females would retreat. Ultimately, the females appeared to be losing ground.

So, they resorted to blatant social manipulation. Aaron was lying about 30 meters away, and today he didn't seem to care about the fight at all. I would say that about two-thirds of the time, he ignores the melodrama. Aaron's behavior didn't change a bit, today. What changed was Lottie and Punzle proximity to the massive alpha. One of their retreats turned into an about-face, and ended with them standing below the rock upon which Aaron lazed.

The sub-adult found himself in a quandary. He obviously was quite annoyed at the females to have persisted this long, but now he risked arousing the rage of Aaron. Despite appearing not to care (from my perspective), baboon moods can change suddenly. Lottie and Punzle were two of Aaron's favorite females, so the sub-adult could only push so far.

The three stood at an impasse for a couple of minutes. Lottie and Punzle continued to scream, though less often and at lower volume than previously. The male continued to threaten, but kept his distance to at least ten meters, much further than he had previously dared to venture. It was if Aaron's body generated an invisible perimeter which the younger baboon knew he could not cross. In the end, the sub-adult male gave up and moved on with his day, leaving Punzle and Lottie alone.

The females triumphed. However, there are very few females in the troop who could have pulled such a stunt. Suffice to say, its good to be a top ranked female.

Woah, how is it May already?

Human Ethology: MIT Housing Edition

I meant to post this the day it came out, but times be hectic.

I wrote an editorial for The Tech, MIT's Oldest and Largest Newspaper, briefly applying principles of human ethology and evolutionary psychology to dormitory housing in defense of MIT's current housing system. Newspaper spaces are a bit more constraining, forcing me to omit a more in depth explanation, but the ethology of living is important enough that I'll return to it, probably many times. The particular issue of dining plans is a recurring big issue, so that's a major focus of almost all discussions concerning MIT's housing system. But enough enough synopsis, go read the full article for your self.

That piece had been lying in wait for an opportune moment for some time, but these particular writing take quite a bit more time and energy to put together. However, I think I'll be having a little more time now, so I'm hoping to produce human ethology posts on a more regular basis.

Friends with benefits

Damian has continued to maintain his unusually good ties with Lauren for the past few months, and this relationship doesn't appear to be dying down anytime soon, if one looks at all the obstacles they've mounted thus far.

Its been found that Damian is not exclusive with Lauren. Recently, another timid young female by the name of Reyna has gone in and out of estrus, and Damian chose to consort with her. Lauren got this time "off," which I first observed when she was scene interacting with other females for the first time in months. One of those situations where you look and think, I don't know that baboon, and then puzzle over it for a few minutes before face-palming over the obvious answer.

Nevertheless, at the end of the affair, Lauren returned to Damian's side. She remains even now, despite the fact that she is clearly pregnant, and Damian has no need to worry about guarding her swelling or her child. He could leave her to her own devices and return later to guard their child, but he keep her exclusive, and the two show no signs of giving up their status as the weird, reclusive couple of the troop.

They would have had some competition for that title, had not a similar turn of events lead the other pair away. Chester, one of the old males (probably the oldest male in the area) has always had a fondness for Eunice, a female of little consequence. Chetser, Eunice, and her baby would often be seen at the periphery, alone, grooming one another and playing with the baby. None of them have been so rigidly withdrawn as Damian and Lauren. Chester is a genial old male, and often has a small pack of infants following him around. He's like the friendly neighborhood grandpa. He's very protective of his playgroup, too.

But, when Chester decides to go for a rest, often he'll go to Eunice and her child and settle down for a nap right next to them.

Similarly, Eunice will actually mingle with the rest of the troop, unlike Lauren. Neither half of this pair is the most social of baboons, but neither are they they the token reclusive couple, ala Damian and Lauren. Then again, there's also Wilhelmina, who is the oldest and shyest female anyone has ever seen. She grunts like a male, her voice is so worn out.

I suppose the child must be Chester's - it seems very strange that Chester would favor this single infant over the others. Perhaps this is what will happen between Damian and Lauren when her child is born.

There is another possibility: Eunice is Chester's daughter. Since females stay in one troop throughout their entire lifetimes, and Chester is old as sin, this is quite reasonable, and the possibility makes incest discussions even more fun. Oooh! Maybe he's the father of both of them. It would be like the baboon version of Chinatown. What I wouldn't give to have full genetic data for these troops.


So Damian and Lauren had their reclusive title locked up pretty securely in the first place, but now its completely inconsequential because Chester, Eunice, and her infant have vanished.

Okay, that's blowing it a bit out of proportion. A couple weeks after Mortimer pulled his stunt, I began to wonder what Chester was up to when I didn't remember seeing him. One morning I received a call from a colleague up the mountain, "I've spotted Chester up with the troop here, and, uh, Eunice is here with her baby as well."

It was odd enough for an old male like Morty to switch it up, but an old guy, his filly, and their young ward? If I were the mother, I'd be pretty afraid for the life of my baby upon entering a foreign troop filled with testosterone bloated males just dying to spread their genes around some more. That's some impressive loyalty to follow your male into the hornet's nest... of other males.

I wish the news had been more surprising, but the funny thing is that this isn't the first time Chester and Eunice have eloped together. The previous occasion was before my time, but I gather it was quite similar. One day, the two of them went off to the second troop and stayed there for about a month. Then they came back. I really hope they come back soon, I miss that old guy already...

Human Ethology: Microblogging

I'm an internet sort of guy, and the internet is big, going on bigger. The internet is something which appears to be reaching its tendrils into every aspect of our lives, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Such growth may cause great trouble, because while the human mind is very adaptable, that doesn't mean it is always a quick study, and as I'll argue, microblogging has some deep ethological conflicts we need to address immediately.

Following the recent introduction of Google's new Buzz service, the company and internet were flooded with privacy concerns on the new service. Facebook has been through privacy scandals too many times, and Twitter is no stranger to these catastrophe's either. It appears that microbloggers are particularly susceptible to judgment or design errors. Why might this be?

A Selective History

Microblogging could hardly exist as a term without the older and respectable weblog, from which we derive "blogging." A blog isn't as mock conversation though, a blog is primarily associated with written work - logs, journals, diaries. Blogs were (and are) longer, thought out, and usually edited. When they were journals, they were more private and introspective, but they attempted to be contemplative.

Microblogging is closer to being a stream of consciousness; indeed, it was described as such by Jason Kottke when the term tumbleblogs was coined in 2005. A "no holds barred" philosphy was embraced, encouraging tumblers to post tiny messages, straight links, quotes, videos, songs, images, and even full length blog style posts. Whatever was on your mind, you ought to be able to leave it on the tumbleblog.

Together, Facebook and Twitter made microblogging more about status updates than media. Links are still common, but a greater emphasis is placed on the blogger's internal thoughts.

Why would you want to put your stream of consciousness, you inner thoughts, passions, and desires, all over the internet, the greatest single network in history?

What Microblogging represents in our minds

I need to take a moment to talk about the importance of symbolism in understanding human ethology. Let's use a linguistic example: a widely used title for a king or lord is "highness." Why highness? The meaning is quite literal. In our hunter-gatherer days, having an position elevated above the rest of the group meant you could see everyone when they cannot easily see each other. One could see further into the distance, to spot approaching game or enemies. One is visible to all, and can more easily issue commands. Overall, to sit/stand higher on the ground was/is a position fought over and claimed by the strongest, as such a position strengthens the holder.

Exactly the same logic falls under the phrase "look up to." You look up to them because they are above you, both literally and hierarchically. They have gained the higher position on the ground because of their success, to you look up to them (where they stand above you), and emulate them so that you too may be successful and control the higher ground.

The point is that much of our figurative language, art, and thought is actually quite literal, and can be directly tied to ancient behaviors which are very much alive in us today.

What is the symbol of microblogging? The symbol of Buzz is a multicolored quotation balloon. Twitter has that little bird with a 't' in a quotation bubble. Facebook makes use of quotation balloons so rampantly it is often difficult to find your way around the site. And Tumblr? Well, Tumblr is practically designed to be confusing, messy, and unaesthetic.

This is the fundamental problem: microblogging services want us to treat them as surrogates for spoken conversation, and we are easily drawn in and comply. But, microblogging is far too different from personal conversation. This divide is what makes costly errors so frequent in microblogging. 

A False Sense of Stability

What is a conversation? It is an interaction between two or more people, where everyone involved alternates between speaking and listening, all the while issuing feedback signals to everyone around. You know exactly who you're talking to and exactly how they react in real time. Microblogging removes the majority of natural feedback. you would receive throughout the course of a naturally paced conversation.

Most importantly, microblogging gives everyone an unknown audience. Audiences didn't exist in hunter-gatherer times. You had your family and friends which made up your entire community, the people who you spent your whole life with. They weren't a real audience, not by modern standards.

You could say whatever you want, and you could be sure that no one except your village will hear you because there's no one else out there for miles around. You knew exactly who you were dealing with and what kind of people they were. Microblogging provides the exact opposite: an audience of unknown size, made up of unknown individuals.

A Game of Numbers

Picture a scene of a hundred people filling a decent sized room, like a lecture hall. Now, wipe it out, and imagine two hundred people in a different, comparably sized room. How does the scene appear different to you? Try it again with 500, then a 1000. Work your way further up the chain if you feel like it.

In the above thought experiment, its important to really wipe your mind of your previous image. The use of a different setting helps with this. Humans are pretty good at saying two amounts are different in comparison, but when it comes to precisely generating internal images of large amounts, we're rubbish. Humans generally have very limited ability to discriminate between large numbers, intuitively.

The psychological sub-field of Numerical Cognition is all about this. When we evaluate small quantities in a blink of an eye, it is called subitizing. But you can't subitize quantities larger than a couple dozen. We thus have learned to count, but some fun studies with modern hunter-gatherer(H-G) cultures have revealed a few that don't really learn all the knacks. When presented with twenty hash marks, and asked to reproduce that number, these H-Gs would just scratch some marks next to it in order to indicate that the amount was "a lot."

In the H-G world, you're almost never going to see very many people organized in once place. If you do, all you need to know is, "that's a lot." Same with hunting herd animals, all you need to know is that the herd is big, and perhaps more importantly, healthy, which isn't a numerical judgment. Plus, these are external, concrete scenes, not mental images you've made yourself.

Yet, when we look at our follower base on a microblog, the emphasis is on a raw number. 23... 145... 2079. Each one is significantly larger than the last, but because these are just raw numbers, they're not strongly connected to the emotional and judgmental regions of the brain. Plus, quantities of that magnitude are barely discriminable within the number centers of the brain, for reasons stated above.

This setup is a recipe for disaster, as evidenced by mistakes made by so called professionals in much more natural situation than Twitter provides. Senator George Allen called some guy "macaca," probably by accident, and winds up losing an easy re-election race. Comedian Michael Richards got angry and made a racist comment while performing, video gets around everywhere, and Richards' almost loses his entire career (basically forced to go on hiatus for several years).

The circumstances were hardly natural from an absolute perspective, but at least these celebrities could see their audience, interpret the feedback, plus had years to adjust to the burdens of fame. Now think of microblogging. Its like these situations but worse in almost every respect.

Negative Feedback (or lack thereof)

When I microblog, I have this urge to just say crazy nonsensical stuff all the time because that's what I do in real life conversations. A lot of the time people get kicks out of it and laugh, providing me with the knowledge that I've hit on something. Other times I just get stares and pauses, the coldness of which indicate how poor my comments have been judged to be.

Buzz, Facebook, and Tumblr only allow you to "like" things. Twitter isn't even complex enough for that, but it allows you to retweet as a way of showing agreement. There is still no way to show your dislike. In Buzz and Facebook, you must leave a comment, and presumably explain yourself if you want to make your feedback negative. Even then, your input is only qualitative; you can't impact those "6 likes." already on the board.

All forms of feedback are a crucial part of personal interaction. So why not allow people to show their disdain as well as their favor?

This is nothing new, even to the online world. Digg and Slashdot both use positive and negative moderation to control the quality of what their users are presented with. This system works because it is anonymous. There is no good reason for a similar system not to be implemented in microblogging.

Furthermore, absence of feedback is still feedback. When someone reads a microblog post, they are going to have a reaction even if no one is present to see it. It might be tiny, but microexpressions (how fitting) are effectively inescapable in human interaction. However large the reaction is, it is effectively wasted. You can tell the poster later how you felt, or comment on the post, but you can never replicate that initial reaction, and that right there is crucial feedback. The poster's fast-acting cognitive architecture never receives this feedback, which sends a different message: there was no reaction, which is of course untrue. Higher order brain architectures will take into account subsequent feedback, but that primitive instantaneous system in our heads will always be providing a substantial bias based on false information. There's no good way around this problem, unfortunately.

Object Permanency

Another problem with me saying wacky stuff on a microblog is that its stuck there forever. Thanks to feed control, archiving, and caching, one information is out there, it can seldom be made to go away. When it can be gotten rid of, the greatest risk is that by the time you go through all the channels and waiting periods to get content removed, anyone who was looking could have copied it and saved it for their personal use. Then, its too late.

There isn't much one can do about this problem - I'm not one to advocate for less data accumulation in searches and archives. The removal process could use improvement, but unfortunately, this is something we're probably just going to have to knuckle down to and deal with.

Say what you will about how chat software and text messaging are destroying language; they've got similar problems. They have certainly have their downsides, but as technological advancements go, they are much more ethological than microblogging because as abtract as they might be, you know you're having a conversation.

Returning to the question posed earlier, why would we scatter out internal thoughts all over the internet, I can offer a two-piece answer. Firstly, because we don't understand just who and how many people we're telling, and secondly, those thousands or millions of followers don't let us know they're listening, because its simple and easy to do so.

My Recommendations

I've spent all this time outlining the problems, but I'd just be a whiner if I didn't explain what we can and ought to do about them. Microblogging's main flaws are in feedback. Human conversation relies on constant visual and auditory signals, virtually none of which are available in a microblog. 

• Microblogging ought to allow for both negative and positive feedback, and when someone leaves feedback, they ought to be able to do so anonymously.
• Enough with the conversation symbolism. Microblogging isn't speech, and it never will be. Microblog services need to use more accurate representations.
• For instance, since we've established microblogging is much closer to a stream of consciousness, use a thought bubble symbol, or a brain, or perhaps a combination of the two.
• Microblogging is a more unnatural technology than chat or traditionally blogging, and it should actually be treated more gingerly because of this.
• Service providers need to stop this opt-out privacy nonsense. The default ought to be ethological, and ethological means private.
• If you can use something other than microblogging to accomplish a task, try it out.
• For example, some people say microblogging is the next big thing in internal corporate communication. Yet some companies use internal Jabber servers for this purpose, and as a proper chat protocol, Jabber is more organized, more efficient, and comes naturally, like in a conversation.
• Force yourself to think about your microblog, even if "the point" is not to. Take your spur of the moment thought, let it mature a bit, then distill it into a core idea you can post.
• Not only will this filter out noise and bad ideas, but distilling your ideas like this is an extremely valuable skill to cultivate.
• This whole process might cost you a minute of extra time.
• Time! The system will get better as mobile devices become ubiquitous the way the personal computer has, and as users adapt to this new behavior. In the meantime, no one should rush into early adoption in order to get on the bandwagon. You gain very little by being one of the first Buzz users. Let the service providers provide a decent product before adopting it. So, time and skepticism.

So what do you guys think? Can you Digg it?

Misdirected Affection

In the continuing vein of "silly things baboons do around humans," I have another story about one of young tykes. But first a quick bit on instruction in the multifunctional rear end of the monkey.

Old world monkeys, including baboons, have these prominant hard spots on their butts called callosities. They're good for sitting on because they're basically what they sound like - giant calluses.

The butt is also known for the swellings which are these grotesque pink balloons that tell you when an female is ready for plunder. Well not you I hope, but the males. The females will often times dash up to the males and stick their behinds to in the males' faces, thus "presenting" the goods, in hopes of getting a quickie (the young females particularly like to do this because they are really desperate and none of the adult males want to have sex with them). Hence the term presentation hold a major place in our vocabulary as primatologists.

Over the years, species have come and gone, and presentation has become both a functional and ritualistic behavior. From yielding to the reproductive designs of the males, the behavior has taken on larger dominance/submissiveness connotations, so that presentation (and beyond that, mounting) becomes a sign of dominance removed from any actual intercourse. The adult females out of estrus do it, the males do it to one another, and the young juveniles and infants do it.

The last category is relevant to today's misadventure. I was chilling out with the usual pack of jokers, also know as the juveniles. They appeared to be interested in initiating one of the black infants, at that moment. They'd probably lose interest in about 10 minutes. Young playing baboons aren't exactly well-known for their attention spans.

Aforementioned "blackie" (as the young black infants are affectionately referred to) slowly began to approach my position, while I was none the wiser. I was a fair distance away, taking a breather, propped against a dead log. I took notice when the sprog bounded up to me like an excitedly puppy. She looked at me for a bit. I looked back, suspiciously. I looked around for the mother or some larger protecting male. Getting up might scare her, which wouldn't help me in my predicament at all.

The staring contest was cut short when the blackie took action. She awkwardly leaped up into the air, spun around, and landed, her backside fully presented to me.

I continued to stare in some amazement. As if to say, "I don't think you understood me, let me show you again," she returned to her original position, and then performed the same awkward flip into presentation. She repeated the acrobatic sequence a couple more times.

To be entirely honest, I was quite flattered. It was quite adorable to have a baby baboon display its submissiveness to me. The energy it put into the behavior was refreshing as well. She seemed all too happy to recognize me as being above her in the hierarchy.

That's probably nicest part about this - a feeling of inclusion is very difficult to obtain around baboons When they grow older than a year, and they notice you near by, the juveniles just stare at you like you're some kind of alien visitor from another planet. The youngest of the infants don't have brains developed enough to tell us apart from their own species. Or at least they're just confused enough to think us worthy the effort. This one was older, so she might have just been practicing on me, though that would require a complicated mental state that I'm not sure any baboon possesses. Either way, my own perception of the situation, correct or not, played an equally important role in the magic of the moment.

Displacement Aggression

A perfectly ordinary situation can explode almost instantaneously when among the baboons. The handy part aspect of this is that these internal cataclysms seldom affect us researchers. A throng of juveniles will scream their lungs out for five minutes, and I'll just roll my eyes and mutter to myself about melodrama. Just today, I was surrounded by three screaming infants, and while attempting to escape the harsh sounds in the only direction open, Aaron the alpha barrels right past me at full tilt, never slowing, never laying his eyes on me for a moment. I might as well have been a column of empty air.

But I chose the word "seldom" up there for good reason. Nothing is sacred, certainly not the person of a lowly field researcher.

Chester one of the older male baboons. He's a lucky old dude - a miniature company of infants follows him for much of the day. The rest of the day they spend with mom or Bertrand. Bertrand is also old, but not quite ancient, so he probably provides more protection while still being a genial grandfather figure.

The setup prominently featured one such small infant. Chester sat about two meters away from where the infant played in a bush. Damian was a greater distance off. I stood about fifteen meters from Chester, observing his behavior. Damian then entered the vicinity nonchalantly, stopping when he came within ten meters of both Chester and myself.

Barbary macaque males use the infants as a tool for social mediation. The males will sit together and handle/play with a single infant. After a while, they might let the infant go and interact directly, through grooming perhaps.

Coming from the baboon perspective, this is very surprising. Males don't interact except to indicate submissiveness to one another. They barely even look at each other, avoiding eye contact like the plague. And I have never seen two males groom.

Yet, baboons do appear to use infants in a similar fashion. They're just far more subtle about it.

At the approach of Damian, Chester stepped forward, and reached for the infant which dangled from a thin, leafy branch. The infant was having plenty of fun on its own, and didn't appear keen on being distracted from its play by a weird old man. The infant could not compete against the old male's superior strength and bulk, thus was pulled, squawking, from the bush and clutched to Chester's hairy chest.

Mmmmm, musky.

The infant clearly wasn't enjoying this. Chester was quite intent on maintaining his hold, at least while Damian was around. For a few moments, the three sat in stalemate, not altering their behavior. As a bystander at the time, I was barely aware of the strong undercurrents of tension flowing around and about the trio.

In animal behavior, "displacement aggression" is visible everywhere you look. Classic human example: an angry student is cheesed off at a professor for some odd reason, but he can't very well hit the prof, so he takes his anger out on a pillow or a door. He displaces the aggression onto a different object. Primates do this a lot - someone chases them away from food, and they respond by chasing a conspecific lower in the hierarchy.

Or sometimes they displace onto a different species of primate.

Damian was no closer than a decameter, but we were at the edge of the group, with no one else nearby. Damian was just sitting there, aware of the infant and Chester but not really looking at them, since they prefer to rely on the grand power of subtext. But he looked at me after I mis-stepped towards him and cracked a twig.

Damian responded by bounding towards me, firing up the engine of his roar-grunt, the male vocal precursor to the fearsome wahoo. Please note: this is always the beginning of an Oh Shit moment.

I followed the guidelines. I turned away from him, and slowly walked away. I could hear the sound getting closer, but I did not run or alter my behavior in any other way. After a few more seconds, when I could no longer feel his presence behind me, I ventured a glance, and saw Damian swaggering away, down the hill. I did what I did because that's what is known to work. An overload of adrenaline is an unfortunate and unavoidable side effect, but its worth it ever now and then (...he says in hindsight).

In the future, all I need to for protection is a whiny monkey infant on hand which I can thrust in the face of any aggressive baboon. As to why infants become pawns of the male hierarchy, we haven't the faintest clue, except what we know from the closest relevant behavior - male-infant-male sociability in barbary macaques. Maybe some other baboonists have picked up on these behaviors while watching, or maybe we're the only one's who have ever noticed. Maybe it only happens in this population or region. Maybe I'm completely wrong. It's cutting edge, after all.

More Late Breaking Bonobo News

... Because I only check some of my RSS feeds on a regular basis.

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'Peter Pan' apes never seem to learn selfishness

ScienceDaily (2010-02-01) -- Sharing is a behavior on which day care workers and kindergarten teachers tend to offer young humans a lot of coaching. But for our ape cousins the bonobos, sharing just comes naturally. ... > read full article

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Very similar story to last time. I heard about food sharing among bonobos a little while back, which I do not think has been observed in captive studies. Whenever food sharing happens among primates, its a pretty big deal and researchers immediately want to determine the adaptability of such behaviors. Some baboon-ists joke about making their key breakthrough by discovering food sharing in baboons. Hare and Wrangham are pressing towards some highly interesting conclusions.

Troop Mind Journal 01/28

The troop sat at the edge of a grove, barely shielded from the mid-morning sun the shadows of the canopy. A lazy day. They would probably go to the feeding ground in anywhere from ten minutes to three hours.

Suddenly, screams filled the air. Then a wahoo. A female, lips curled back, tail in the air, and shrieking, bounded past. She was moving too quickly for me to identify her. A male ran by, and I would have mistaken him, as well, except for that brief second when he turned his head toward me as passed, never slowing. Those intense yet stoic eyes told me it could only be Aaron, the alpha.

Aaron herded this single female around for almost five minutes without a break. At the end, she could barely keep running; it was the equivalent of a human jog which was actually no quicker than a walk. Aaron slowed his pace to match, but did not catch her - he had already done so twice, and the newly opened wound on her face would mark her for a couple weeks at least.

When the chase reached this point, I realized that he seemed to have brought her full circle, back to the core of the troop. Not quite. What actually happened was that the female core (and me accompanying them) had slowly shifted in the direction of Aaron and the female he was chasing. The whole troop has moved about 30 meters in this five minutes.

This was a case where the male appeared not to be directing the movements of the troop. He was involved with this lone female for reasons not apparent to me. Meanwhile, rest of the troop moved. The most obvious reasons would be because they wanted to stay near the male for his protection. The females like to be around the adult males, the alpha in particular. They seemed drawn to him, but followed of their own choice.

However, appearences are highly suspect (and this isn't how all herding goes down). The male might know that the effect of chasing the female will be that the others will respond accordingly. The chasing of the single female could be a highly complex social signal which told all of them to "move and follow." The females would obey, the infants would follow their mothers, and the juveniles would follow their junior playmates, and the remaining guys would have barely anyone left behind to interact with, and would thus be forced to fall in line.

Does it matter if the male chases a female back towards the troop, or away from the troop's center? Are they distinct behaviors? If they followed him regardless of where he chased, it could be evidence to say they are just following the male. What if the chaser wasn't the alpha, but a different male? Males before and after their prime could yield different results. Tricky - I think looking for a behavior where aggression is not involved would be a better way to determine if the male (and which male) is perceived as the "leader."

I'm going to keep my eyes open for a clear example of when the male clearly is not purposefully directing the group. Given our inability to understand the mental states of baboons, it might not be possible for me to be certain that I've found a scenario where the male definitely isn't considering the troop (and his females as a whole) when he is making a directed movement. But, I shall make the attempt, and possibly construct a variety complementary situations.

The Quest

There are a few questions which transcend science and capture the imagination and thoughts of the greater population. One such question sits at the nexus of the fields of anthropology, sociobiology, ethology, psychology, evolutionary/population genetics, primatology, and archaeology there sits a question which is the Holy Grail of biological inquiries. Progressive hypotheses have been posed for hundreds of years, hopefully been getting closer and closer to the truth. But we're still not there. It is a topic which has influenced religion, literature, philosophy; thousands of books and stories have hinged on this question, some of the most notable recent examples include Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, the Chrono series, and even the modern reinterpretation of Battlestar Galactica.

Simply put, the question is, "Why are we here?" However, with our existing knowledge of physics and the biology of natural selection, we can focus the question into "How did we get here?" Well, where exactly is here? We know how we got to this planet - astrophysics and primordial soup. So where have we gone that other life hasn't? Well, we appear to defy many "rules" of nature, and we've created complex cultures and vast civilizations, spanning the entire globe. No other creature has come close to extending as far as our species has. "How did we get to where we are today?"

My actions at this very moment rely on a collection of unique human accomplishments: writing this blog post about human understanding of natural science on the internet for a global community. Your pet snake and my monkey friends will never see one of their species capable of understanding even one of these concepts. So, the question has now reached the form, "How were humans able to become civilized and advanced beyond any other animal?"

The question is not, "How are humans different form other animals?" This question has been addressed for years, and our understanding of the answer is quite concrete. To be certain, this information is important to understanding my question, but alone it is not a solution. If you're interested in the answer to this other question, I recommend Human, by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, a modern overview of the known difference between man and the other apes.

The real question, the true Grail, concerns events which happened tens of thousands of years ago. Humans weren't always able to do these neat things we take for granted in the modern age. So when and did these developments start? For hundreds of thousands of years, we lived as hunter-gatherers (H-G), and for millions of years past our emergence, our authrolopithecine ancestors lived this way as well. The prehistoric hunter-gatherer lifestyle is actually quite similar to how modern chimpanzees live. Even my friends, the baboons, gather their food in much the same way our cro-magnon ancestors did.

Then something happened. It transpired tens of thousands of years ago, and may have been a transition which itself took thousands of years.

Agriculture used to be a big deal in terms of fundamental human achievements. Don't take this the wrong way, the invention of agriculture was huge, but it wasn't what set us apart. Something happened before agriculture, something which allowed us to develop massive living groups.

A hundred thousand years ago and earlier, our ancestors lived as simple hunter-gatherers. Between simple hunter-gatherers and agricultural based towns is an intermediate step: complex hunter-gatherers. Complex hunter-gatherers lived in a larger groups, used more complex tools, and practiced the gathering tactic of radiating mobility.

Simple hunter-gatherers are characterized by their circular mobility and lack of permanent settlements. They would travel from place to place, using some of the local resources and then moving on before completely draining the area. They would follow game to satisfy their need for protein, and gather as they would go, altering their movements seasonally to accommodate migration and ripening of fruit. The baboons do almost exactly what I'm describing, except without the hunting.

Complex tools and sophisticated hunting and gathering techniques are no big deal. We're part of the branch of primates (chimpanzees) which excels at technology. It makes decent sense for us to be able to do the seemingly insane things we do with technology, both modern and ancient.

It is the large group size which is the confusing part of this situation. Chimps can maintain group sizes of 70 at the most. Complex hunter-gatherers managed to push this number up into the hundreds and beyond. Simple hunter-gatherering humans didn't live this way. They still don't. Contemporary African bushmen camps contain about a dozen tiny stick huts populated by approximately 40 people.

So how'd we do it? We lived as simple hunter gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years. Why the sudden change to larger groups? Animal behavior is adaptive, which means we wouldn't have done it unless it helped us out somehow. In hindsight, the advantages of agriculture over complex H-G over simple H-G are obvious, and our vast population expansion which occurred over the last ten thousand years is further proof of our unique accomplishments. But why should we have managed to succeed when in the millions of years of hominid history, no one else figured it out?

Scientists have ideas. Lots of them. Yet, whatever happened, it happened so long ago that little evidence remains. This is the biggest impediment we face in our attempts to tackle the question. We must work with extremely limited remains of tools, shelters, and bodies. Human remains provide limited genetic data, which may be the most useful data at our disposal.

My main purpose in writing this is so I have the neccessary background info readily at hand for discussions of the various theories which seek to answer the question. There are a slew of papers, some old, most new, which seek to give answer(s). They're interesting to read and this is "kind of a big deal" so I think they are worth the attention. Although, I'll also say right here and now that I don't believe any of these papers have it right, which makes the debate all the more fun.

Why am I personally interested? Well, we're basically talking about figuring out the most important  development in human history! That sounds pretty exciting to me. Its also controversial, and I can't help myself, I'm drawn towards a good struggle. Plus, I have the advantage of having already read many of these papers, and I believe there are some conclusions being misrepresented, and something I can add from there...

Troop Mind Journal 01/12

The troop came down from the trees at the break of dawn, and started their day off with a strenuous session of waiting. They sat in the sun and shade, laying, playing, and grooming. All good things must come to an end, however, though not always as one expects.

Very soon after descended from the firs, Damian and Lauren began edging away from the group, toward the mountain. Prime feeding grounds are located near this sleeping site, just across a field of fynbos, which the baboons pass through almost every day.

Every ten minutes or so, Lauren would get up from some grooming combination among Damien's threesome and walk towards the trees north of the field. There's nothing in the trees, except maybe the baboons of another troop.

It turned out there weren't, though. Lauren's been acting funny lately, she keeps looking for the other group. Usually she wanders in the right direction but gives up after a while. Other times she's found them, and dragged Damian and sometimes the whole troop along with her.

Which brings us back to this particular day. Damian followed her, and eventually the whole troop was diverted to the north, around the feeding grounds. Aaron sure seemed to want to go feed. The others probably did as well. Why was this chain of events a success?

Was the troop following Damian, and Damian following Lauren? Were they all following that single female baboon? Lauren was making contact barks, usually only emitted when an animal is lost. Was this added stimulus enough to alter the "good sense" of the rest of the troop?

If the bark hypothesis is correct, it would imply there are deep complexities in how strongly a baboon wishes to move toward a particular goal. This seems likely, but how effectively can other baboons interpret these feelings? As researchers, we can hear the barks, but we can't tell exactly what they mean in context, and furthermore, the subtle visual communication between baboons adds another whole level of complexity.

Groom to fight, fight to groom

Primates' social intelligence overestimated: Primates groom others if afraid they'd lose fight
from ScienceDaily:

"The grooming behavior displayed by primates is due to less rational behavior than often thought. According to a computer model, one basic rule explains all possible grooming patterns: individuals will groom others if they're afraid they'll lose from them in a fight."

...um, so I've gone ahead and read the actual article to this one because I needed to figure out if I was missing something deeper in the text that would explain how this assertion isn't very misguided. In summary, I didn't find anything.

Firstly, their model is based entirely on macaque data... no new world monkeys, no apes, certainly no baboons. This isn't inherently broken, but it simply is not satisfying when one considers that social grooming is ubiquitous in primates, and a crucial device.

Second, I've seen baboons violate this rule on many an occasion. Since males and females do groom each other, and the model does not appear to exclude such behavior, I have a bit of an issue.

Intergender grooming is a bit problem for this model. It happens. It doesn't follow these rules. Let us stipulate that a fully adult male can beat any female in a fight. This is a fact. On many occasions, I've seen a male, even the alpha male. Plop his shaggy form down next to some female who is sitting, minding her own business. If there is any behavior which say "groom me," its this. Yet, a lot of the time the female will just walk away.

This alone would not be enough to discount their findings. However, on several occasions, after his failed attempt to solicit grooming, the male will follow after the female and begin grooming her. Sometimes its a different female. However, the key is that by all accounts, he has initiated the grooming behavior, not the female. He is not afraid of losing to her in a fight.

So why does he groom her? Well, this paper is trying to discount much of the complex social jockeying and diplomacy that researchers believe grooming to be crucial to. Diplomacy is a damn good reason to groom. I'm not at all convinced of the authors' conclusions. Maybe in some monkeys, this is the case, but saying "all primates" is pushing the boundaries... a lot.

Troop Mind

A slice of like scientists and lay people tend to easily throw around the term "Hive Mind." At a glance, the wikipedia disambiguation page reveals the popular associations this slice makes. It comes as no surprise that science-fiction is given the most entries, by far. But look, there's even a little note for usage in animal behavior. Of course, it redirects one to the topic of social insects.

Entomology was, and remains, a massive sub-field within ethology. Queen-centric insects like bees and wasps contributed the word "hive" to the term, and along with termites, ants, and some other colony insects, these hive creatures defined our initial conception of the hive mind.

Thus, in order to have a hive mind, you kind of need to actually have a hive and queen and drones and workers. It part of the definition. However, big social groups have been theorized to have collective consciousnesses of their own, similar to that found in the hives.

So where am I going with this? Well, when you spend your days watching baboons, particularly big groups of baboons, you will inevtiably to wonder how they figure out what to do and where to go every day. It turns out this is a hip issue in primatology, and once again, who better to study it in than the gregarious baboons?

Simply put, a baboon's life consists of moving between a set of safe sleeping sites over the course of a day, while eating. Some form of "troop mind" manipulates the baboons so that they eventually end up at a clear destination, and usually the route they take will pass through some bountiful feeding areas.

What comprises this troop mind? The answer, of course, is that no one knows. But I've seen a few things and have a couple ideas.

The obvious assumption one would make is that the alpha male leads the group. The alpha will certainly exert his will, but its far from being so clear cut. For instance, an alpha male is little more than a donkey following a carrot when he's stalking a female in heat, his head bobbing in rapture a meter behind the female's bright red swelling. During those times, the alpha is hardly the one doing the leading. The female may exert considerable control over when, where, and how often they copulate, and the effectively controls the alpha if he wants to get the sex.

There are of course the other males in the troop as well. Unusually, the cape is home to many old males, who will of course influence the movements of the troop in part. Sometimes I'll see old Chester, off by himself, while Aaron sits in the middle of the troop watching over his females. Chester will slowly saunter ahead a little ways, bit by bit. He could be anticipating the movements of the troop, or he could be guiding them. He is an experienced and wise male, probably a strong alpha ten years ago. He doesn't get many chances to copulate anymore (if he's even interested in sex at his age), so its in interest to look out for the troop as a whole. Afterall, who knows how many of the females and sub-adult males are his children?

Those sub-adult males are a force to be reckoned with as well. When they hear another troop nearby, they'll all meander towards the edge of the group, and if they can, they'll pull the whole troop with them so they can get as close as possible to the excitement of that unknown group.

Similarly, a big fight among females might send a half dozen of them chasing each other a hundred meters away from the center of the group. The troop might be pulled in that direction, and once the whole group is reunited, what then? Do they resume their prior course, or can the momentum be shifted another way?

Troops definitely have goals they seek throughout the day, some more goals being more desirable than others. If a troop is aware of a tasty fruit orchard growing two hills over, they will all wish to head that way and feast. If the monkeys live somewhere more desolate or if the fruit is simply out of season, then the decisions become more complicated.

And when it gets this complicated, my gut observations cease to useful in distilling a root behavior. Big time research needs to be done... and some of its underway... There are benefits from being at very least tangentially involved in this stuff, you see. Much of the existing research looks at how baboons range under different conditions, but that doesn't even to begin to answer the question of who is leading the troop and just how much the baboons listen to particular individuals.

But there's always my gut to fall back on. Sure, the females can manipulate the dudes when they're in estrous, but most of the time, its the males herding and chasing the females wherever and whenever they please. The alpha female might hold the same sway as an average sub-adult male, but the strong males appear to possess what I might call veto power.

This is the great part about this kind of research: you can be gathering all kinds of quantitative data throughout the data, and still be learning more things on the side. A million social interactions happen out there which are too subtle for me to pick up, but there are still a thousand which I can wrap my brain around just by watching with my inferior human visual system.