4 ideas
As the sun set, the troop stopped foraging and play, fell silent, and sat gazing west, and some individuals made mournful sounds. Marais argued this nightly depression was a primitive form of human melancholy. He took it as a psychic cost of an animal that remembers and anticipates danger rather than acting only on present stimuli.
Marais held that as a species' capacity to learn from individual experience grows, its reliance on fixed inherited behaviour shrinks. Young baboons must learn from elders what is edible, which scorpions to de-sting and which places are dangerous. This flexibility makes them adaptable, but it also leaves them uncertain and anxious where instinct would have given certainty.
The troop moved and fed under a structured watch system. Adult males posted themselves as lookouts on high ground, gave distinct alarm calls, and positioned themselves between danger and the females and young. Order and leadership came from this protective role and from senior males disciplining the others, not from constant fighting.
Marais lived beside a free troop for about three years. He came daily, carried no threat, and let the baboons set the distance until they ignored or accepted him. This let him record natural behaviour, such as grief, fear and politics, that captive or hunted animals never show, and it treats trust and time as the observer's main instruments.