Focus on playful inventiveness in wild chacma baboons

We will study chacma baboons at the Tsaobis Baboon Project and focus on their inventive behaviours during play. This part of the research will be mostly observational.

The choice to study primates, and in particular chacma baboons at the Tsaobis Baboon Project is motivated by three considerations.
(1) Primates frequently exhibit new behaviours, allowing for quantitatively more observations of inventions than other lineages.
(2) Because of their long juvenescence, primates play a lot: the frequency and the diversity of playful behaviours primates display should facilitate observation.
(3 Both juvenile behaviour and innovation are foci of study at Tsaobis Baboon project, which has long-term protocols on these topics on which this research can draw.

We choose to focus on play for five reasons.
(1) In their life, play is chronologically the first activity in which individuals manifest invention.
(2) Play occurs in unstressful situations when animals can test new behaviours without running great risks.
(3) Play allows the observation of inventions that are not induced by environmental imperatives or by social pressures (even social play crosses the relations of dominance and roles are often even reversed).
(4) In play, the behaviours involved are highly flexible and thus unpredictable. Hence play is a good candidate to start studying inventiveness: there is a good chance that inventive behaviours can be observed in playful animals.
(5) Some researchers have argued that play has evolved for this precise function, because the play experience would allow the development of individual behavioural flexibility facilitating the manifestation of new behaviours in new circumstances and thus adaptability .

This research will build on an existing, general database of invention at the field site, and will take place over one year to capture a proportion (typically one quarter) of baboons’ juvenescence.

We will address the following questions: what were the inventions observed? who produced them (particular individuals more than others? what characteristics of these individuals?)? under what circumstances were they invented (locomotor play? social play? object play? what motivation?)? what is the difference between the different types of play? what is the stability of these inventions (do they happen only once or do they repeat themselves afterwards?)? how can this stabilisation be explained?