What Old Monkeys and Old Humans Have in Common

Humans spend less time monkeying around as they get older, and according to a study published Thursday, so do monkeys.anyone who has ever hung out with a grandparent, observed a retiring parent, or grown old themselves may know, many get pickier with age.

Some go to the same restaurants on same days every week, some get cranky around too many strangers and instead of playing outside with the grandkids, some watch TV silently. While it’s pretty clear that monkeys aren’t humans, we’re distant relatives, separated by 25 million years of evolution,monkeys too, tend to become less social with age.



Dr. Freund said she sees the same behavior patterns in humans.
The dominant psychological theory to explain this in people is that we become more choosy with age in order to maximize the use of the time we have left with death in sight. While monkeys have excellent memories, there is no evidence that they are aware of their impending deaths. So if both humans and monkeys act similarly, perhaps this theory is just a way of rationalizing a natural behavior with biological roots, said Dr. Fischer.

Perhaps monkeys and humans just lose stamina with age, and maybe the monkeys are too tired to deal with relationships that are ambivalent or negative, she added. Or maybe, as the researchers are now trying to investigate, aging monkeys are less socially interactive because they tend to take fewer risks, which is what appears to happen in humans according to some research .

Whatever the reason behind the behavior of these distantly related species is, there’s a take home message for humans: “Our behaviors that seem very much the result of our deliberation and choice,” said Dr. Freund, “might be more similar to our primate ancestors than we might think.”







Source: Nytimes

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