Almost Human: A Journey into the World of Baboons - Hardcover

Vividly written and filled with fascinating insights, Almost Human chronicles thirty years of Shirley Strum's fieldwork with a troop of olive baboons nicknamed the Pumphouse Gang. From the first paragraph, the reader is drawn along with Strum into the world of the baboons, learning about the tragedies and triumphs of their daily lives-and of her own voyage of courageous scientific discovery.

In the same way that Jane Goodall's pioneering study of chimpanzees revealed their likeness to humans, Strum's work shows how, contrary to the popular image and the scientific evidence of the time, the more distantly related baboons are just as socially savvy. Almost Human includes her groundbreaking discovery that social finesse, rather than male dominance and aggression, plays a crucial role in baboon society, and Strum relates the drama of a daring translocation experiment with the Pumphouse Gang that ultimately ensured their survival when their habitat was threatened by destruction.

This edition includes a new introduction that places Strum's research in the context of the current global conservation crisis and an epilogue that tells us what has happened to the Pumphouse Gang since the book was first published.

When Shirley C. Strum first set out in 1972 to do graduate work with baboons in Kenya, conventional wisdom had it that primate society, epitomized by monkeys such as baboons, was based on aggression and ruled by the males, their brute force and their dominance hierarchy. But her absorbing chronicle of fifteen years spent observing a troop of baboons has revealed remarkable new aspects of animal behavior.