Social distancing measures implemented to slow the spread of COVID-19 have triggered a worldwide craving for social contact, leading to surges in anxiety and depression. This social desire is deeply rooted in our evolutionary history: most of our closest nonhuman primate relatives live in groups in which they form differentiated relationships with conspecifics. After a devastating hurricane destroyed over 60% of the vegetation on a small Caribbean island, instead of being more competitive, resident rhesus macaques became more tolerant of each other and expanded their social networks. Five years later, monkeys were still more tolerant of conspecifics in their vicinity compared to before the storm, and social tolerance predicted individual survival in this severely transformed landscape. Importantly, social tolerance did not predict survival before the hurricane, suggesting that natural disasters can alter the benefits individuals gain from social relationships, leading to flexible adjustments in how they interact with others. These results support the hypothesis that flexibility in social structure promotes resilience to extreme and unpredictable climatic events, which are predicted to increase in frequency and force with the imminent climate crisis. What are the neurobiological underpinnings of macaques’ ability to socially connect and flexibly adjust their social relationships in times of need? In this same free-ranging rhesus macaque population before the storm, I found that natural variation in social connectedness predicted the volume of specific structures –the mid–superior temporal sulcus (mSTS) and ventral-dysgranular insula– implicated in social decision-making and empathy, respectively. Moreover, single-unit recordings in the inferotemporal and prefrontal cortex of freely-moving, socially-interacting rhesus macaques reveal a highly-distributed neural record of social dynamics, from the identity of neighboring monkeys, to social support during aggressive encounters and reciprocity in strong stable relationships. Overall, this body of work contributes to the foundations of a true primate neuroethology, linking primate’s complex and flexible sociality in the wild to its neural basis.