🐒 🙊 🙉 🙈 This is a story I read about years ago and for some reason I find myself thinking about it a lot lately.
It is a true story of the Keekorok baboon troop studied by Dr. Robert Sapolsky, an academic and neuroscientist.
Keekorok baboon troop lived in Kenya.
In the words of Dr. Robert Sapolsky they were a pretty bog-standard primate community. The males were, however, quite aggressive in the Keekorok .
The alpha males of the troop regularly foraged for food in the dumpster of a popular resort. It was an easy and plentiful source of food requiring minimal effort.
Unfortunately, however, for some of the more aggressive males, one trip to the resort dumpster found them escaping with meat tainted with tuberculosis.
As the aggressive males, the leaders of this troop, tended to eat first and MORE, these domineering males got the largest share of the tainted meat.
More than half of the male population died as a result acquiring tuberculosis.
In the years before the outbreak, the troop favoured a certain kind of male behaviour, that was being aggressive, not particularly society connected, and not engaged with the grooming and care of others.
These hyper aggressive males died out during the tuberculosis outbreak. Every single alpha male in the troop was gone.
The result was a completely transformed troop, with females making up more than half of its population.
The surviving males in the troop, to use Dr. Robert Sapolsky's words, "were good guys. They weren't aggressive jerks, they were nice to the females, they were very socially affiliative, and it completely transformed the atmosphere of the troop."
When new adolescent males joined this troop it would take them 6 months to learn that this troop wouldn't tolerate aggression and abusive conduct.
The expectation was that the males would spend more time grooming, they did not take out their aggression on females, and, in Dr. Sapolsky's words, they were educated not to "act like jerks."
The culture in this group remained 20 years later, according to Dr. Sapolsky.
The baboons learned a different way to be in community and developed a new kind of culture through the ravages of disease outbreaks and rebuilding community in its aftermath.
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