Question: What made you choose to study baboons and not another animal?

Suzanne Harvey answered on 24 Jun 2013:

Good question! It’s really important to explain why we are studying baboons in any publications that come from this work, so I am actually writing about this quite often 🙂

There are a few reasons, but probably the most important is that they are a good model for early hominids (ancient types of humans like neanderthals) because they live in similar environments and social groups. This means that in terms of evolution, we can learn about how humans evolved by studying the behaviour of a similar group in a similar environment. We can also learn about humans by comparing the abilities of other species – this is what I’m doing with the baboon communications studies. Besides communication, another good example is tool use. We know that in our evolutionary tree, chimps and humans split around 4 million years ago, but baboons and humans split around 30 million years ago. Chimps and humans can make and use tools, and baboons can’t, so we know that our ability to use tools evolved during that time and can understand more about how we evolved.

Another good reason to study baboon communication is that not many people have in the past, and it’s always exciting to be the first to discover something!