Question: How do you know what the baboons are saying?

Suzanne Harvey answered on 18 Jun 2013:

We have two ways of working it out – firstly we record all the sounds and what the baboons are doing when they make them, like if every time they bark there is a predator nearby, we might guess that it’s a warning call. We have hundreds of examples, so we can use statistics to work out when each call is made.

Then to test our ideas we can do experiments, by playing back the sounds on a big speaker (we have to hide it in the undergrowth or they’ll work out what we’re doing!). If we play back something we think is a warning call, we’d expect the group to react as though there’s a predator nearby, and if they don’t we may have got it wrong!