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. 2019 Sep 24;8:e47433. doi: 10.7554/eLife.47433

Table 1. Early adverse conditions and the frequencies with which they occur in maternal and offspring generations of our dataset.

Adverse Condition* Criterion Frequency
Maternal Generation Offspring Generation
Drought During the first year of life, the focal individual experienced less than 200 mm of rainfall (i.e., drought conditions; Beehner et al., 2006). 0.09 0.15
High Social Density The individual was born into a group with a high social density (>35 adults), indicating high levels of within-group competition. 0.06 0.32
Maternal Loss The mother of the focal individual died within four years of the individual’s birth. 0.21 0.25
Low Maternal Rank The focal individual was born to a mother with a low social rank (mother’s rank fell in the bottom quartile of the group’s dominance hierarchy, rank < 0.25). 0.17 0.23
Close-In-Age Younger Sibling The focal individual had a younger sibling born to its mother within 18 months of the focal’s birth. 0.20 --

*These criteria were used in a previous analysis in our population (Tung et al., 2016), with the exception of maternal rank, which is evaluated here as a proportional measure rather than an ordinal one as in the previous analysis.

Proportional rank is the proportion of other adult females in a group that an individual’s mother outranks. The reduced frequency with which low maternal rank appears in the maternal generation is a likely a result of offspring of low-ranking mothers surviving less well (Silk et al., 2003), and therefore not surviving to appear as mothers in our dataset.

We excluded the birth of a close-in-age younger sibling for the offspring generation to avoid including a potential reverse-causal factor in our model: the closest-in-age siblings in our dataset occur as a result of the focal offspring’s death, because female baboons (who are not seasonal reproducers) accelerate their next conception after the death of a dependent offspring.