Friendly baboons live longer, according to research

A team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have discovered that a baboon's personality can affect its health and life-expectancy, similarly to a humans.

The study showed that those baboons with a better personality had more friends, which generally would lead to a healthier monkey and longer life-expectancy.

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, follow 17 years of observations by staff and students at the university of a groups of baboons living in the Moremi Game Reserve in Botswana.

Studies into the biological roots of the monkeys' social dynamics showed that baboon females actively work to maintain close social bonds but, like humans, some baboons were better at it than others.

The scientists measured how many grooming partners each female baboon had, as well as her tendency to be either friendly or aggressive towards others, to gather their research.

Their findings suggested that these traits were also closely linked to fitness and reproductive success but were not strengthened by the female's rank or size of the family they were born into.

Those baboons with less social success had the highest stress levels, which correlated with lower offspring survival and shorter lifespans.

Professor Dorothy Cheney, joint-conductor of the study, said: "Even when a female has a lot of relatives sometimes she's a loner, but some females do just fine. It suggests that you have to be both lucky and skilled to have these networks."