If you see a field full of rabbits, for example, you can’t tell sex, age, kinship, dominance – all of which is crucial to understanding what they are doing. This only comes alive once you follow individuals over significant periods of their lives.
- Tim Clutton-Brock
All animals live in a form of society, and the structures of these societies have been as important for the course of evolution as their physical environment because they steer the drive to reproduce, says Professor Tim Clutton-Brock, author of the first major synthesis of mammalian social behaviour.
While Darwin initially recognised the importance of social behaviour in his 1871 masterpiece The Descent of Man, biologists focused on anatomy rather than behaviour for many decades. In his new book Mammal Societies, Clutton-Brock argues that the “true century of Darwin was delayed for nearly 100 years” as a consequence.
Field studies of animal behaviour began with the ringing of birds in the 1930s. But it was the arrival of cheap air travel in the 1960s that fuelled behavioural fieldwork of mammals, says Clutton-Brock, as it enabled scientists to conduct long-term studies of natural populations of the larger, long-lived mammals in Africa and Asia – from gorillas to big cats.
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Image: Members of a chacma baboon troop, studied as part of the long-term Tsaobis Baboon Project.
Credit: Alecia Carter
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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