Six@Six – Growing up Baboon

Growing up Baboon: How drought, invasive species, and adversity affect physical and social development in young baboons.

Join the Scripps Howard Center for Civic Engagement for our fifteenth anniversary season! Our second lecture of the series is Growing up Baboon, with Dr. Monica Wakefield.

Human childhood is a unique life history stage between infancy and adolescence where the child is weaned from the mother, but still very dependent on the mother and others for survival. During this time children learn how take care of themselves for survival, but just as important, learn how to properly interact in society and form social relationships. To understand the evolution of human childhood, we turn to our closest living relatives, the non-human primates, like monkeys and apes - known as the anthropoids.

In this presentation Dr. Monica Wakefield will discuss her research on physical and social development in juvenile baboons. She will consider factors influencing age at menarche (first menstruation) for female baboons and the social development among both male and female juveniles. Both processes are influenced by the human induced changing landscape in their range allowing us to conduct a “natural experiment” by documenting the effect. This research allows us to apply the comparative method to understand the evolution of childhood in humans.