Adversity animals face early in life can affect the well-being of the next generation, new research suggests.

Between 1976 and 2017, a team of researchers monitored the health and development of 169 baboon mothers and nearly 700 of their offspring in Kenya's Amboseli National Park.

The scientists found that the children of baboon mothers that experienced childhood trauma had shorter lifespans than the children of stress-free moms -- even if the young baboons enjoyed a carefree upbringing.

Baboons can experience hardship in a variety of ways. Young baboons can be orphaned or raised during times of scarcity. They can be birthed by mothers of low social standing or raised alongside competitive siblings.

An earlier study showed baboons that experience one or more types of adversity die 10 years earlier than baboons born into rosy circumstances. The offspring of the same trauma-tested baboons were less likely to make it to adulthood, especially if their moms had competed with a sibling close in age for attention and nutrition.

When mom's have a second infant before the first is done weaning, the consequences are significant.

"Up until the age of four months, baboon kids rarely venture more than a meter from their mother," Susan Alberts, chair of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, said in a news release.

"In the first year of life, a baboon's mom is everything," said Matthew Zipple, a doctoral student in biology at Duke and lead author of the new study, published this week in the journal eLife.

The researchers are now working the better understand how a mother's childhood hardships affect her behavior as a mother -- the suckling and cuddling of her infant. They hope their ongoing research will offer new insights into how environmental stress can trigger the development of disease later in life.

"The analysis suggests that early life adversity in female baboons can have intergenerational effects," scientists wrote in their paper. "More studies are needed to determine if this is also true of humans. If it is, such a result may help explain the persistence of poor health outcomes across generations and shed light on how best to intervene to interrupt this transmission."

Related Links
All About Human Beings and How We Got To Be Here

Tweet

Thanks for being here; We need your help. The SpaceDaily news network continues to grow but revenues have never been harder to maintain. With the rise of Ad Blockers, and Facebook - our traditional revenue sources via quality network advertising continues to decline. And unlike so many other news sites, we don't have a paywall - with those annoying usernames and passwords. Our news coverage takes time and effort to publish 365 days a year. If you find our news sites informative and useful then please consider becoming a regular supporter or for now make a one off contribution.
SpaceDaily Contributor $5 Billed Once credit card or paypal		SpaceDaily Monthly Supporter $5 Billed Monthly paypal only

One species, many origins
Jena, Germany (SPX) Sep 24, 2019
In a paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, a group of researchers argue that our evolutionary past must be understood as the outcome of dynamic changes in connectivity, or gene flow, between early humans scattered across Africa. Viewing past human populations as a succession of discrete branches on an evolutionary tree may be misleading, they said, because it reduces the human story to a series of "splitting times" which may be illusory. According to archaeologist Dr. Eleanor Scerri and ... read more