For more than five decades, Shirley C. Strum has lived alongside baboons in the wilds of Kenya. What she discovered overturned long-held scientific assumptions and revealed a truth that feels surprisingly close to home: baboons build their societies not on dominance and violence, but on cooperation, reciprocity, and relationships.

Strum’s work shows that these animals — without language, symbols, or written rules — still manage to practice something that looks remarkably like the Golden Rule. They treat one another as they wish to be treated, relying on trust and negotiation to navigate daily life. In doing so, they remind us that some of the social skills we prize as uniquely human have far deeper evolutionary roots.

Her perspective is also shaped by her personal history. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Strum set out to study primates to understand the origins of human aggression. What she found instead were baboons modeling alternatives to aggression — options that expand how we think about our own species and the choices available to us.

In this conversation, Strum reflects on the lessons baboons can teach us about power, gender, and community.

Your new book, Echoes of Our Origins chronicles your 50+ years studying baboons in Kenya. When you first entered the field, scientists believed baboons lived in a male-dominated society marked by constant battles between the males. But you write, “improbable as it seemed, it looked to me like baboons were practicing a version of the classic Golden Rule…They treated others as they wished to be treated, using bodies and behavior in an elaborated system of negotiated reciprocity.” What does that mean for our understanding of evolution and humanity?

Shirley Strum: Baboons don’t have language or symbols, yet they manage to create a social contract that is like the Golden Rule, one communicated by behaviors and bodies that every baboon understands. This suggests that the Golden Rule existed before humans, and all humans did was embed it in their unique culture. Indeed, many human skills were practiced before humans “invented” them, and social sophistication existed in baboons long before humans appeared on the scene. I don’t believe that baboons, or any other species, can be used as a model for early humans — but understanding their social interactions helps us see humans in a new light.

Both of your parents were Holocaust survivors, and you were led to study primates partly by your desire to understand the human capacity for aggression. Can you explain?

Shirley: My parents never spoke about the camps, but my child’s imagination conjured up horrific images. By the time I went to university, I wanted to understand the evolutionary origins of aggression in primates, including humans. 

Baboons form complex societies where aggression plays an important and readily observable role, so they were an obvious choice for me. I discovered right away that males don’t have a stable hierarchy, as was assumed. Instead, females form the core of the group, replete with female-centric and family hierarchies. More surprising was that both males and females use alternatives that I call “social strategies” to avoid aggression. And because these social strategies depend on others to work, baboons have to build relationships before they can use them. 

Baboons taught me that aggression isn’t the only option and showed what other options exist. I continued to study baboons because humans seem too complicated in the ways they embed aggression into culture. After 50 years of watching baboons, I have little to say about humans except that there must be alternatives to aggression.

How did human sexism affect the early study of primates and the understanding of the roles females played in their groups? Are there still biases that affect how we view primates today?

Shirley: The baboon model that influenced how scientists saw all nonhuman primates in the 1960s and early 1970s revolved around males. Males did everything: they protected the group, policed transgressions, were the object of troop attention, and the dominant one(s) had the most matings. These conclusions aren’t surprising if you consider that these early studies only identified males. In contrast, I found that females formed the core of the group, as did two other studies then. 

By the 1990s, women scientists started to question the male bias in primate studies, and today more women than men study primates, reversing the earlier trend. Female primates became a focus of study in their own right, so today we know the behavior of females across species. There are still biases, but they’re about methods of study and how easily scientists and the public connect nonhuman primate behaviors to human traits that we might not be so proud of. We see baboons in particular as embodiments of our worst traits, denying and dismissing their agency, intelligence, and their complex social networks.

Which baboon behaviors would be helpful for humans to emulate, especially in terms of social interaction?

Shirley: I often joke that I would rather have a baboon as president than a human. This is because baboons can’t deceive easily; they can’t say one thing and mean another. So that’s one way I wish humans were more like baboons. I would also like to see humans emulate baboons in their other aspects of socialness. Baboons need each other for company and to solve things together that no one can solve alone. A benefit of the COVID-19 pandemic was to make humans realize how important family and friends are. These are baboon lessons that we too quickly forget, enabled by our cultures, language that lets us lie, and ideologies that motivate us to do things we know aren’t right.