Résumé
Immatures’ social development may be fundamental to understanding
important biological processes, such as social information transmission
through groups, that can vary with age and sex. Our aim was to determine
how social networks change with age and differ between sexes in wild
immature baboons, group-living primates that readily learn socially. Our
results show that immature baboons inherited their mothers’ networks and
differentiated from them as they aged, increasing their association with
partners of similar age and the same sex. Males were less bonded to their
matriline and became more peripheral with age compared to females. Our
results may pave the way to further studies testing a new hypothetical
framework: in female-philopatric societies, social information
transmission may be constrained at the matrilineal level by age- and
sex-driven social clustering.