Humans are the only primates in which the male thus actively deals with the growth of the offspring (avoid easy jokes): in all our relatives, it is almost always the female who takes a large part of the work – when not everything. A study published on Proceedings of the Royal Society Bhowever, suggests that We have a little underestimated the role of the fathersat least in the case of the baboons: not that their males make much, but what little they do has positive effects on their daughters, who last all life.
A life behind the Santa. The study, conducted by a team of the University of Notre Dame, in the Indiana, involved 216 female yellow baboons who live in the wild in Kenya. The exclusive choice of females was dictated by the fact that males soon abandon the family unit to go in search of another social group: this makes it more difficult to follow them during their lives, and discover how long they live and in what state of health they are.
The team then focused exclusively on femaleswhich in the baboons are the “stable” part of the social group. The 216 specimens, daughters of a total of 102 different fathers, have been followed for all their childhood and adolescence (more or less four years), calculating how long they spent with their father and how much the latter devoted themselves to grooming and other gestures of care and affection. After that, the females have also been followed for their entire adult life, which can last twenty years of age.
A dad stretches your life. The results demonstrate unequivocally that spending time with the father is good for the baboons. The females who lived more in contact with the parent for the first four years of their life have proven to be healthier and above all more long -lived, coming to live up to four years more than those that were neglected by the parent. Living four more years, for an animal that lives on average 18, means having the chance of get into the world another child: This could be the key to everything.
More chance to reproduce. The male baboons, in fact, aging weaken, and and a certain point stop competing with each other for the females. Not being able to have children anymore, it is possible that they dedicate themselves to the daughters, protecting them and taking care of them, in the hope of lengthening their lives, e then pass their genes indirectly to an extra generation.
This is at least the hypothesis made by the team, which however will be verified, and it is also possible that the explanation is much simpler: a female growing with her father is happier, and this has a positive effect on her health.
