Baboons for Christmas

I’ve been thinking of what to post as a holiday message that also relates to the concerns of this blog, and while listening to NPR I was given the answer. I think.

It’s a story told by Barbara Smuts, a primatologist who spent years following and observing baboons for eleven hours a day, seven days a week. She did this in Kenya, where Robert Sapolsky, author of the wonderful book A Primate’s Memoir, also studied baboons. I don’t know if they ever worked together, but he mentions her book Sex and Friendship in Baboons in his own.

One day, while following her baboon troop, Smuts saw something no one had ever observed before.

All of a sudden, Smuts says, “without any signal perceptible to me,” every one of the baboons, the adults, the little ones, all of them, stopped walking and sat down on the edge of a pool of water. They not only stopped walking; they stopped talking. “Even the little kids, and you know kids are always making noises, but even they got quiet.”

The quiet was total. “I really wondered what was going on,” says Smuts. The baboons didn’t focus on any one thing. They all, or most of them, gazed down into the little pool right below them and hardly moved. There was no fidgeting, no touching or grooming, no discernible activity, just a communal “almost sacramental” contemplation. Smuts calls it a “sacred” quiet.

Were the baboons having a a spiritual moment? A kind of Quaker prayer meeting of communion and reflection? Given the range of their behavior and emotional lives, as described in Sapolsky, I wouldn’t rule it out.