We're all stuck in a hierarchy where the strongest rules, right?

Might is right, ignorance is strength and if you disagree I'll punch your lights out.

For millennia people have lives in a subservient way bowing down to some superior or other.

People need to be ruled, they cannot imagine a life without it, force is good.

Violence protects, people respect violence -  that's why we should all carry guns, the ultimate leveller.

Now every noodle armed choirboy can be as violent as the toughest muscle bound thug that kicks sand in our face and tells us we need his protection.

Or else.

The law of the jungle.

Or is it?

About 20 years ago in Kenya, there was a terrible outbreak of tuberclosis that selectively killed of the biggest, most violent and tyrannical males in a colony of savanna baboons.

These territorial minded alpha males fought with one another for the right of access to a rubbish dump at a nearby tourist centre, where they were exposed to meat contaminated with bovine tubercolosis.

They quickly died.

Those males that remained were those used to being subservient, not used to or skilled at fighting, along with the females and the young.

Something extraordinary then happened.

Grooming and affection became the norm among the troop, the same practises that enabled the beta males to gain access to food and sex was now the dominant behaviour.

Out went the snarls, the bared teeth and biting, the clawed swipes and screaming.

And in came the 'hippy nice', love and peace baboon equivalent of beatniks.

But it couldn't last.

After all, like most primates, males tend to leave the home troop and seek acceptance or try to dominate other troops while the females tend to stay put, in the troop that they were born into.

So aggressive outside males would move in and quickly establish a new pecking order.

But oddly enpugh this wasn't what actually happened.

The outside males, often bigger and meaner, soon learned the behaviour of the troop that had been earlier devastated by disease.

In short, they complied with the customs of their adopted troop.

But there was more.

Less infighting meant that more males survived, their stress levels were reduced and everyone seemed to get more sex because nobody really fought over it.

In short they seemed happier.

Who wouldn't be?

This study isn't isolated however.

Other primates when raised in peaceful cultures also willingly adapted to the new ethos, and grew to become peace loving creatures rather than belligerent, selfish, self-serving primate pugilists.

This isn't the first time that culture has been witnessed to be passed on of course.

But twenty years later, the Kenyan baboons show no sign of changing their peaceable, fun loving (and I mean loving!) lives.

The only problems is that to reach this state of nirvana, the alpha males need to be knocked out first.

What can we learn from Baboons?

A lot it might seem.

yechydda,