Paper short abstract:

This explores the role of historians in conservation. It looks at the relationship between two fellow primates whose lives are entangled at the southern tip of Africa. In essence, I argue that animal cultures and shared human-animal cultures need to be considered in conservation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper asks what historians can do in the global crises of the Anthropocene, with its attendant multi-species calamity: the sixth extinction.It adopts the lens of the relationship between the two fellow primates who live closely with each other – baboons and humans. In examining how this relationship changed over millennia, it tries to reconstruct a ‘more than human history’ as ‘useable past’, . Environmental histories of southern Africa have neglected the longue durée, so this chapter tries to suggest possible new approaches to draw on cognate disciplines like ethnoprimatology, palaeontology, palaeoecology, archaeology and the study of rock art, hitherto largely overlooked by historians. In using these new sources it does two things: it offers a sample-card of possibilities for other environmental histories of human-animal relations, especially over long time periods, and it argues that history can be useful in conservation efforts in the Anthropocene. It In presenting a synthesis of human socio-cultural history and baboon ethology/ecology, it builds a conceptual bridge between conservation biologists and environmental historians, crossing disciplinary boundaries. In essence, it argues that animal cultures and shared human-animal cultures need to be considered in conservation.