Baboons walk in single file not for safety or strategy but simply to stay close to their friends — and researchers say the pattern it produces serves no purpose at all

Baboons walk in single file not for safety or strategy but simply to stay close to their friends — and researchers say the pattern it produces serves no purpose at all

When a troop of chacma baboons moves across the Cape Peninsula, they do it in a line. The same individuals tend to walk in the same positions relative to each other, day after day, across weeks of observation. The ordering looks purposeful. It looks like it should mean something: a dominant animal in front, the vulnerable in the centre, the subordinate at the rear, a logic of risk and rank playing out in the procession. That interpretation has b…