Baboons, space, time, and energy

Abstract

How are social organization and ecology related to each other? Yellow baboons, hamadryas baboons, and gelada monkeys are all large, terrestrial African primates, but they have three different patterns of social organization, and they live in three, markedly different habitats: savannah, steppe-desert, and alpine heather-meadowland, respectively. An attempt is made to provide testable hypotheses and heuristic principles that can relate these two classes of phenomena. © 1974 by the American Society of Zoologists.