This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast.

I'm Meredith Johnson.

Today we have the first in a collection of stories,

looking at human behavior and how it's been shaped by evolution.

Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney talk about the baboons they've known the way some couples talk about their old neighbors.

Everyone would say, oh, Sylvia, she was just not a very nice animal, and yet very high-ranking.

Baboon gossip's actually part of their job. They both work at the University of Pennsylvania, where Seyfarth is a professor of psychology, and Cheney is a professor of biology. Their research looks at the University of Pennsylvania, where Safearth is a professor of psychology,

and Cheney is a professor of biology. Their research looks at social behavior, communication,

and cognition in baboons. Through their work with baboons, they're finding out fascinating

things that give clues to the evolution of the human mind.

We've worked together since the mid-70s on a variety of different species of monkeys,

always in Africa, always with wild animals.

From 1992 through 2008, they worked in northwest Botswana,

in a place called the Okavango Delta,

figuring out what makes baboon social systems tick.

We're really interested in what baboons know about each other's relationships and

dominance ranks. And one of the intriguing things about human beings is that we can't help

but do this. We're just constantly consumed with other people's affairs and business. We look at all of these

lurid magazines. We care about the Kardashians. And it seems like baboons are also compelled,

almost, and fascinated by other individuals' relationships. It's a really complicated,

interesting society, because as with many mammals, the males, when they grow up and they become

fully adult-sized, they leave the groups where they were born, and they go off and join other

...