Unlike other primates, young mountain gorillas who faced being orphaned, life-or-death sibling rivalry, or other negative events lived just as long as their peers who enjoyed less challenging upbringings.
. Stacy Rosenbaum, a biological anthropologist at the University of Michigan, wanted to know whether this effect held true for other primates.
“To be perfectly frank, I thought we would find basically the same thing [in gorillas] as had been found in baboons earlier,” Rosenbaum says. “But that was not how it turned out at all.” “It’s really quite surprising that there’s basically no effects later in life,” says behavioral ecologist Sam Patterson of New York University, who studies early life adversity in primates. “They seem to have a large enough data set to ask this question and analyze it, so it does seem to be the case that these [animals] just aren’t as affected in the long term.”
Fernando Campos, a biological anthropologist at the University of Texas at San Antonio who studies the Amboseli National Park baboons, says the food availability explanation has merit. Adversity can often cause a youngster to go hungry, stunting early development and thus affecting an animal all its life. Simply having enough food could be enough to prevent such trouble.
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