Baboon bonds: new study reveals that friendships make up for a bad start in life

Evidence suggests that strong social ties may be one way to make up for adversity in early life

Childhoods can predict a great deal about how adult lives might play out. For instance, research has shown that people whose childhoods involve poverty, abuse and neglect have poorer health and shorter lives than those who have happy, stable childhoods.

Is there a way to overcome a bad start? The evidence suggests that strong social ties may be one way to make up for adversity in early life. People (and other animals such as killer whales, hyraxes and baboons) with strong adult friendships are healthier and live longer than those without such bonds.

I am a biologist working on how social environments affect development and lifespan. I recently collaborated with statisticians and other biologists to understand whether harsh conditions in early life led to weak social relationships and poor health, or if close friendships could develop in adulthood in spite of a tough childhood. We also wondered if having close friends could potentially even make up for a poor early life.

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To answer these questions, we studied a population of wild baboons in Kenya. Scientists often use animal models to test hypotheses that are difficult to study in humans. Baboons are a useful proxy for humans because they are similar in their life cycle, social relationships, physiology and behaviour. And research has shown that the effects of early adversity and social bonds on lifespan in humans are paralleled in baboons.

The most important result of our research is that early life adversity and adult social relationships have independent effects on survival. That is, both early life environments and adult social bonds have strong effects, but they don’t depend on each other.

This has been an important question for social scientists, because one possibility is that the effects of adult social bonds on survival are solely a result of the fact that early life adversity tends to lead to poor social bonds in adulthood and also to poor survival. In that scenario, the two effects are not independent. Everything is driven by early life adversity.