Data from: Social affiliation matters: both same-sex and opposite-sex relationships predict survival in wild female baboons

Social integration and support can have profound effects on human
survival. The extent of this phenomenon in non-human animals is largely
unknown, but such knowledge is important to understanding the evolution of
both lifespan and sociality. Here, we report evidence that levels of
affiliative social behaviour (i.e. ‘social connectedness’) with both
same-sex and opposite-sex conspecifics predict adult survival in wild
female baboons. In the Amboseli ecosystem in Kenya, adult female baboons
that were socially connected to either adult males or adult females lived
longer than females who were socially isolated from both sexes—females
with strong connectedness to individuals of both sexes lived the longest.
Female social connectedness to males was predicted by high dominance rank,
indicating that males are a limited resource for females, and females
compete for access to male social partners. To date, only a handful of
animal studies have found that social relationships may affect survival.
This study extends those findings by examining relationships to both sexes
in by far the largest dataset yet examined for any animal. Our results
support the idea that social effects on survival are evolutionarily
conserved in social mammals.