Some things I learned this week

In my Primate behavior class we're learning about the major life history patterns in each stage of life. My professor, Adrienne Zhilman, compared elephants to primates for an example of adaptation in times of desperation. Apparently during the ivory poaching times, all the adults in a certain elephant social group had died out due to human activity. Since juveniles and infants don't have tusks yet and therefore were not hunted, they were the only ones left in this social group. Now elephants do not become adults and begin to reproduce until they are around 14 years of age. However, in this case, the only female juvenile in the group was 5 years old and, in order for her species to survive, she became pregnant at 5! I think that is so fascinating. Nature, in general is fascinating. These young elephants changed their natural life patterns in order to survive. There were consequences to this event however. Since there were no adults around to teach the young and pass down traditions, the young elephants did not learn the correct foods to eat and social queues. Some of the juvenile males had to be "put down" since they were fighting and causing immense disruption on the reservation.

In addition to the fact that they changed the natural life pattern, I find the importance of parents in their children's lives very interesting. I'm trying to imagine how my life would have turned out if I had grown up in isolation or only with other children. In both of these imagined cases I would probably be a social pariah if I eventually entered into regular society. There is a famous case where a girl was locked in a room for a majority of her life by her parents. When authorities discovered the isolated girl and brought her into society she did not know the proper way to interact with people and didn't even know how to talk. Heres a video about it:

This case, as well as the elephant one, shows how important social interaction is to survival. Social interaction provides the guidelines to survive along side others. Why even live with others, you ask? Because groups provide protection from predators, mates for reproduction and survival of the species, others to share food with, and teachers to know how & where to get the right foods. We constantly need social groups in every generation to pass down information to the next and contribute to survival of our species: humans. Its all so fascinating. I love anthropology :)