ABSTRACT
I write this about 140 kilometers and 37 years from the hillside where, in retrospect, I think I became a primatologist because Delta screamed at me. She was an adolescent baboon in A Troop at Gombe National Park, Tanzania, and had no obvious reason for being upset with me. I had been taking notes on the females of A Troop for weeks, doing an undergraduate project on the acquisition of rank by females as part of my Human Biology major at Stanford. Delta was thoroughly used to my presence, and I wasn’t even following her at the moment. Yet, she screamed. And it frightened me; not that she could do much harm, but the adult males were looking to see what the threat was, and with their 2–inch-long canine teeth they were decidedly another matter. And there was the injustice—I had done NOTHING to upset her! In the end, the males basically shrugged, she stopped, and I realized that I had seen her behave like this with older female baboons. The penny dropped: If I had been worried about how the males would react, maybe those females had worried too, and that worry had made them nervous enough to defer to Delta. Repeat that trick a few times, and maybe Delta could rise in rank. How doubly cool was that? She appeared to be using males as social tools, and she accepted me as an honorary baboon worthy of trying to dominate. I was hooked. I decided to apply to a graduate school where I could study adolescent female baboons from an evolutionary perspective. The only such program I knew of at the time was at Harvard, so I figured that when I was rejected I would go on, as planned, to study marine biology (intertidal invertebrates, to be precise). Baboons were a longshot diversion.
