Naturalists seek to observe animals in their natural habitat and so to learn the adaptive capabilities of different creatures. Primatologists observe the behavior of primates to see both how these animals adapt and to derive some idea of how the human being adapts as well. The Yellow Baboon--papio cynocephalus cynocephalus--has been observed by several different researchers and naturalists in recent years, and different idea about their behavior have bene offered in the literature as a result.
The Yellow Baboon is also known as the Savanna Baboon, or rather it is a subspecies of the Savanna Baboon, along with the olive Baboon, the Guinea Baboon, and the Chacma Baboon. The Yellow Baboon is a large monkey with a head like a dog, which is where the name cynocephalus is derived from "cyno" for dog and "cephalus" for head. The male weighs between 59 and 97 pounds, and the female between 31 and 37 pounds. The coat is coarse and short in the yellow baboon. The yellow baboon is the most widespread of the African primates and is found throughout the savanna and arid zones wherever they can find water and secure sleeping places in trees or cliffs. The species has extended its range recently because of the destruction of the primary forest, agricultural expansion, and local extinction of predators. The yellow baboon is found primarily in Kenya (Estes wildlife@exis.net).
Jeanne and Stuart Altmann have studied the baboons in their native habitat and have discovered a number of interesting facts about the social life of these creatures, much of which contradicts what was believed earlier about the social structure of groups of these creatures. for one thing, earlier research tended to focus on the males and to ignore the roles of the females. Early work on wild primates classified the creatures in terms of age sex classes like adult males, juvenile males, adult females, or juvenile females. The group studied by the Altmanns cons...