Why Baboons Get Creepier the More You Know Them

You already know what a baboon looks like: the red rump, the dog-like face, the zoo clown behind the glass. Most people stop there. Science didn't.

In this documentary, we look past the cartoon image to what researchers have actually found. Baboons carry canines longer than a German shepherd's, their troops mob and sometimes kill leopards, and they raid homes on South Africa's Cape Peninsula with methodical precision. Raiding isn't desperation. It's learned, taught, and passed down from one generation to the next.

Then we go deeper, into the baboon mind. It's a political system where every individual knows every rank, where deception is a strategy, and where a new male's rise to power can cost infants their lives. Decades of research by Robert Sapolsky, Dorothy Cheney, Robert Seyfarth and others show how social rank is literally written into a baboon's blood, and how one Kenyan troop's culture changed forever after its most aggressive males died.

The baboon is not evil. It is exactly what millions of years of competition on open ground produce. And as our cities push deeper into its world, it is learning more about us every day.

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