Years of studies have shown that traumatic experiences as a child, such as growing up with an alcoholic parent or a chaotic home, increase your chances of poor health and a decreased chance of survival. But growing evidence suggests that building strong social ties can help reduce these effects. And not only for people, but also for our cousins. Drawing on 36 years of data, a new study of nearly 200 baboons in southern Kenya suggests that adversity early in life may shave years off their lifespan, but strong social bonds with other baboons in adulthood may bring them back. can help.
“It’s like the King James Apocrypha saying, ‘A faithful friend is the medicine of life,'” said senior author Susan Alberts, professor of biology and evolutionary anthropology at Duke University. Baboons with challenging childhoods were able to regain a two-year life expectancy by forming strong friendships. The findings appear in the journal Science Advances.
Research has consistently found that people who go through more bad experiences growing up—things like abuse, neglect, and a parent with mental illness—are more likely to face an early grave down the line. But figuring out how one leads to the other has been hard to do. Alberts said, while the negative sides of a difficult upbringing are well documented, “the underlying mechanisms have been more difficult to pinpoint.”
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A limitation of prior research was the reliance on people’s self-reported memories of their past, which can be subjective and imprecise. Alberts said long-term research on wild primates — which share more than 90 percent of our DNA — comes in handy. Since 1971, researchers have observed individual baboons near Amboseli National Park in Kenya on a near-daily basis, noting how they socialized with the animals and how they studied them as part of the Amboseli Baboon Research Project. How did you perform during your lifetime?
In the new study, the researchers wanted to know: How does adversity early in life ultimately lead to premature death years later? One hypothesis is that trauma survivors often grow up to have troubled relationships as adults, and as a result of this lack of social support, their lives are cut short. But the new findings paint a different picture of the causal pathway involved in baboons and offer some hope.
In the study, researchers looked at how early life experiences and adult social relationships affected long-term survival in 199 female baboons who were closely monitored at Amboseli between 1983 and 2019.
Baboons do not grow up in dilapidated or dysfunctional homes, but they are no strangers to hardship. For each woman, the team increased their exposure to six potential sources of early adversity. They looked at whether her mother was low-class or socially isolated, or whether her mother died before reaching maturity. They also noted whether she was born in a dry year, was born in a large group, or had a sibling close to her age, which could mean greater competition for resources or maternal attention.
The results suggest that stressful experiences are common for langurs growing up in the semi-arid and unpredictable landscape of Amboseli. Of the baboons in the study, 75 percent suffered from at least one strain, and 33 percent had two or more.
The analyzes also confirmed previous findings that the greater a woman’s difficulties, the shorter her life span. But it wasn’t just because baboons who experienced more upheaval early in life were more socially isolated as adults than they were, Alberts said.
Rather, the researchers were able to show that the 90% drop in survival was due to the direct effects of early adversity, not the weakened social bonds they inevitably experience in adulthood.
Effects add up. Each additional hardship translated to 1.4 years of life, no matter how strong or weak, their bond with other baboons. Baboons who suffered four bad experiences died about 5.6 years earlier than those who suffered none—a huge drop considering that the average female baboon only lives to about 18.
But that doesn’t mean that baboons with an unfortunate start in life are sentenced to life. “Women who have a bad early life are not doomed,” said first author Elizabeth Lang, assistant professor at SUNY Oswego. far from it. The researchers also discovered that baboons who formed strong social bonds – how often they groomed with close friends – added 2.2 years to their lives, no matter what they had done when they were younger.
Baboons whose mothers died before reaching maturity but then formed strong friendships in adulthood were able to bounce back. The flip side is also true, Alberts said. “Strong social bonds can reduce the impact of early life adversity, but conversely, weak social bonds can increase it.” The researchers can’t yet say whether the results generalize to humans. But if so, the researchers say, it suggests that early intervention is not the only effective way to reverse the effects of childhood trauma.
“We found that both early life adversity and adult social interaction independently affect survival,” said Lang. “This means that interventions that occur throughout life can improve survival.” In other words, focusing on adults, especially their ability to form and maintain relationships, may also help. Alberts said, “If you had early life adversity, whatever you do, try to make friends.”