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Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture
Director: Prof. Richard McElreath, Ph.D.
The Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture investigates the role of culture in human evolution and adaptation. The primary goal is to theorize, design, and conduct longitudinal studies of human adaptation and cultural dynamics in ecological context. By integrating cross-cultural fieldwork with mathematical models and advanced quantitative methods, we hope to contribute to the interdisciplinary study of human evolution and human social dynamics.
Please see the Projects and Fieldwork links on the right for much more information.
News
Risk-sensitive learning is a winning strategy for leading an urban invasion (2 April 2024)
In the unpredictable Anthropocene, a particularly pressing open question is how certain species invade urban environments. Sex-biased dispersal and learning arguably influence movement ecology, but their joint influence remains unexplored empirically, and might vary by space and time. We assayed reinforcement learning in wild-caught, temporarily captive core-, middle-, or edge-range great-tailed grackles—a bird species undergoing urban-tracking rapid range expansion, led by dispersing males. We show, across populations, both sexes initially perform similarly when learning stimulus-reward pairings, but, when reward contingencies reverse, male—versus female—grackles finish ‘relearning’ faster, making fewer choice-option switches. How do male grackles do this? Bayesian cognitive modelling revealed male grackles’ choice behaviour is governed more strongly by the ‘weight’ of relative differences in recent foraging payoffs—i.e., they show more pronounced risk-sensitive learning. Confirming this mechanism, agent-based forward simulations of reinforcement learning—where we simulate ‘birds’ based on empirical estimates of our grackles’ reinforcement learning—replicate our sex-difference behavioural data. Finally, evolutionary modelling revealed natural selection should favour risk-sensitive learning in hypothesised urban-like environments: stable but stochastic settings. Together, these results imply risk-sensitive learning is a winning strategy for urban-invasion leaders, underscoring the potential for life history and cognition to shape invasion success in human-modified environments. Read article here. Read press release here.
Human Behavioral Ecology (March 2024)
Book description: Human behavioral ecology (HBE) applies the principles of evolutionary theory and optimisation to the study of human behavioural and cultural diversity. Among other things, HBE attempts to explain variation in behaviour as adaptive solutions to the competing life-history demands of growth, development, reproduction, parental care, and mate acquisition. This book is a comprehensive introduction to the theoretical orientation and specific findings of HBE. It consolidates the insights of evolution and human behaviour into a single volume that reflects the current state and future of the field. It brings together leading scholars from across the evolutionary social sciences to provide a comprehensive and thought-provoking review of the state of the topic. Throughout, the authors explain the latest developments in theory and highlight critical debates in the literature, while also engaging readers with ethnographic insights and field-based studies that remain at the core of human behavioral ecology. More information on the CUP website.
Why cultural distance can promote – or impede – group-beneficial outcomes (11 March 2024)
Quantifying the distance between cultural groups has received substantial recent interest. A key innovation, borrowed from population genetics, is the calculation of cultural FST (CFST) statistics on datasets of human culture. Measuring the variance between groups as a fraction of total variance, FST is theoretically important in additive models of cooperation. Consistent with this, recent empirical work has confirmed that high values of pairwise CFST (measuring cultural distance) strongly predict unwillingness to cooperate with strangers in coordination vignettes. As applications for CFST increase, however, there is greater need to understand its meaning in naturalistic situations beyond additive cooperation. Focusing on games with both positive and negative frequency dependence and high-diversity, mixed equilibria, we derive a simple relationship between FST and the evolution of group-beneficial traits across a broad spectrum of social interactions. Contrary to standard assumptions, this model shows why FST can have both positive and negative marginal effects on the spread of group-beneficial traits under certain realistic conditions. These results provide broader theoretical direction for empirical applications of CFST in the evolutionary study of culture. Read article here.
The cultural evolution of collective property rights for sustainable resource governance (19 February 2024)
With commons encompassing approximately 65% of Earth’s surface and vast tracts of the ocean, a critical challenge for sustainability involves establishing effective institutions for governing these common-pool resources (CPR). While examples of successful governance exist, the circumstances and mechanisms behind their development have often faded from historical records and memories. Drawing on ethnographic work, we introduce a generic evolutionary multigroup modelling framework that examines the emergence, stability and temporal dynamics of collective property rights. Our research reveals a fundamental insight: when intergroup conflicts over resources exist, establishing and enforcing ‘access rights’ becomes an essential prerequisite for evolving sustainable ‘use rights’. These access rights, in turn, enable cultural group selection and facilitate the evolution of sustainable use rights through the imitation of successful groups. Moreover, we identify four crucial aspects within these systems: (1) seizures in CPR systems create individual-level incentives to enforce use and access rights; (2) support for collective property rights is frequency dependent and prone to oscillations; (3) the maximum sustainable yield (MSY) is a tipping point that alters the interplay between individual and group-level selection pressures; (4) success-biased social learning (imitation) of out-group members plays a vital role in spreading sustainable institutions and preventing the tragedy of the commons. Read article here. Read press release here.
Women’s subsistence strategies predict fertility across cultures, but context matters (12 February 2024)
While it is commonly assumed that farmers have higher, and foragers lower, fertility compared to populations practicing other forms of subsistence, robust supportive evidence is lacking. We tested whether subsistence activities—incorporating market integration—are associated with fertility in 10,250 women from 27 small-scale societies and found considerable variation in fertility. This variation did not align with group-level subsistence typologies. Societies labeled as “farmers” did not have higher fertility than others, while “foragers” did not have lower fertility. However, at the individual level, we found strong evidence that fertility was positively associated with farming and moderate evidence of a negative relationship between foraging and fertility. Markers of market integration were strongly negatively correlated with fertility. Despite strong cross-cultural evidence, these relationships were not consistent in all populations, highlighting the importance of the socioecological context, which likely influences the diverse mechanisms driving the relationship between fertility and subsistence. Read article here.
Women’s subsistence networks scaffold cultural transmission among BaYaka foragers in the Congo Basin (10 January 2024)
In hunter-gatherer societies, women’s subsistence activities are crucial for food provisioning and children’s social learning but are understudied relative to men’s activities. To understand the structure of women’s foraging networks, we present 230 days of focal-follow data in a BaYaka community. To analyze these data, we develop a stochastic blockmodel for repeat observations with uneven sampling. We find that women’s subsistence networks are characterized by cooperation between kin, gender homophily, and mixed age-group composition. During early childhood, individuals preferentially coforage with adult kin, but those in middle childhood and adolescence are likely to coforage with nonkin peers, providing opportunities for horizontal learning. By quantifying the probability of coforaging ties across age classes and relatedness levels, our findings provide insights into the scope for social learning during women’s subsistence activities in a real-world foraging population and provide ground-truth values for key parameters used in formal models of cumulative culture. Read article here.
Brain structure and function: a multidisciplinary pipeline to study hominoid brain evolution (8 January 2024)
o decipher the evolution of the hominoid brain and its functions, it is essential to conduct comparative studies in primates, including our closest living relatives. However, strong ethical concerns preclude in vivo neuroimaging of great apes. We propose a responsible and multidisciplinary alternative approach that links behavior to brain anatomy in non-human primates from diverse ecological backgrounds. The brains of primates observed in the wild or in captivity are extracted and fixed shortly after natural death, and then studied using advanced MRI neuroimaging and histology to reveal macro- and microstructures. By linking detailed neuroanatomy with observed behavior within and across primate species, our approach provides new perspectives on brain evolution. Combined with endocranial brain imprints extracted from computed tomographic scans of the skulls these data provide a framework for decoding evolutionary changes in hominin fossils. This approach is poised to become a key resource for investigating the evolution and functional differentiation of hominoid brains. Read article here.
Culturally determined interspecies communication between humans and honeyguides (7 December 2023)
Species interactions that vary across environments can create geographical mosaics of genetic coevolution. However, traits mediating species interactions are sometimes culturally inherited. Here we show that traditions of interspecies communication between people and wild birds vary in a culturally determined geographical mosaic. Honey hunters in different parts of Africa use different calls to communicate with greater honeyguides (Indicator indicator) that lead them to bees’ nests. We show experimentally that honeyguides in Tanzania and Mozambique discriminate among honey hunters’ calls, responding more readily to local than to foreign calls. This was not explained by variation in sound transmission and instead suggests that honeyguides learn local human signals. We discuss the forces stabilizing and diversifying interspecies communication traditions, and the potential for cultural coevolution between species. Read article here.
Deep ancestry of Bornean hunter-gatherers supports long-term local ancestry dynamics (28 November 2023)
- Northeast Bornean Punan communities show strong genetic ancestry connections
- These communities outgroup modern and ancient Austronesian genetic proxies
- Results support long-term occupation of Borneo by Punan-related peopl
Results are also inconsistent with recent subsistence reversion among Punan peoples
Borneo was a crossroad of ancient dispersals, with some of the earliest Southeast Asian human remains and rock art. The island is home to traditionally hunter-gatherer Punan communities, whose origins, whether of subsistence reversion or long-term foraging, are unclear. The connection between its past and present-day agriculturalist inhabitants, who currently speak Austronesian languages and have composite and complex genetic ancestry, is equally opaque. Here, we analyze the genetic ancestry of the northeastern Bornean Punan Batu (who still practice some mobile hunting and gathering), Tubu, and Aput. We find deep ancestry connections, with a shared Asian signal outgrouping modern and ancient Austronesian-ancestry proxies, suggesting a time depth of more than 7,500 years. They also largely lack the mainland Southeast Asian signals of agricultural Borneans, who are themselves genetically heterogeneous. Our results support long-term inhabitation of Borneo by some Punan ancestors and reveal unexpected complexity in the origins and dispersal of Austronesian-expansion-related ancestry. Read article here.
Chimpanzees show the capacity to communicate about concomitant daily life events (17 november 2023)
- Chimpanzees present key preconditions for the evolution of compound communication
- They use sequences across many daily life events, not just in alarm contexts
- Utterance length and diversity correlate with concomitant events and their diversity
- They have the potential to express concomitant daily events through vocal sequences
One universal feature of human language is its versatility in communicating about juxtapositions of everyday events. Versatile combinatorial systems of communication can be selected for if (a) several vocal units are flexibly combined into numerous and long vocal sequences and (b) vocal sequences relate to numerous daily life events. We propose (b) is more likely during simultaneous or serial (concomitant) events than single events. We analyzed 9,391 vocal utterances across the repertoire of wild chimpanzees and their events of production. Chimpanzees used vocal sequences across a range of daily life events and twice as often during concomitant than single events. Also, utterance diversity correlated positively with event diversity. Our results show the potential of chimpanzee vocal sequences to convey combined information about numerous daily life events, a step from which generalized combinatoriality could have evolved. Read article here.
Foraging and the importance of knowledge in Pemba, Tanzania: implications for childhood evolution (15 November 2023)
Childhood is a period of life unique to humans. Childhood may have evolved through the need to acquire knowledge and subsistence skills. In an effort to understand the functional significance of childhood, previous research examined increases with age in returns to foraging across food resources. Such increases could be due to changes in knowledge, or other factors such as body size or strength. Here, we attempt to unpack these age-related changes. First, we estimate age-specific foraging returns for two resources. We then develop nonlinear structural equation models to evaluate the relative importance of ecological knowledge, grip strength and height in a population of part-time children foragers on Pemba island, Tanzania. We use anthropometric measures (height, strength, n = 250), estimates of ecological knowledge (n = 93) and behavioural observations for 63 individuals across 370 foraging trips. We find slower increases in foraging returns with age for trap hunting than for shellfish collection. We do not detect any effect of individual knowledge on foraging returns, potentially linked to information sharing within foraging parties. Producing accurate estimates of the distinct contribution of specific traits to an individual’s foraging performance constitutes a key step in evaluating different hypotheses for the emergence of childhood. Read article here.
Modelling animal network data in R using STRAND (7 November 2023)
- There have been recent calls for wider application of generative modelling approaches in applied social network analysis. At present, however, it remains difficult for typical end users—for example, field researchers—to implement generative network models, as there is a dearth of openly available software packages that make application of such models as simple as other, permutation-based approaches.
- Here, we outline the STRAND R package, which provides a suite of generative models for Bayesian analysis of animal social network data that can be implemented using simple, base R syntax.
- To facilitate ease of use, we provide a tutorial demonstrating how STRAND can be used to model proportion, count or binary network data using stochastic block models, social relation models or a combination of the two modelling frameworks.
- STRAND facilitates the application of generative network models to a broad range of data found in the animal social networks literature. Read article here.
Demographic and hormonal evidence for menopause in wild chimpanzees (27 October 2023)
Among mammals, post-reproductive life spans are currently documented only in humans and a few species of toothed whales. Here we show that a post-reproductive life span exists among wild chimpanzees in the Ngogo community of Kibale National Park, Uganda. Post-reproductive representation was 0.195, indicating that a female who reached adulthood could expect to live about one-fifth of her adult life in a post-reproductive state, around half as long as human hunter-gatherers. Post-reproductive females exhibited hormonal signatures of menopause, including sharply increasing gonadotropins after age 50. We discuss whether post-reproductive life spans in wild chimpanzees occur only rarely, as a short-term response to favorable ecological conditions, or instead are an evolved species-typical trait as well as the implications of these alternatives for our understanding of the evolution of post-reproductive life spans. Read article here.
Modelling elephant corridors over two decades reveals opportunities for conserving connectivity across a large protected area network (13 Octobert 2023)
Protected area (PA) connectivity is pivotal for the persistence of wide-ranging wildlife species, but is challenged by habitat loss and fragmentation. We analyzed habitat suitability and connectivity for the African elephant (Loxodonta africana) across PAs in south-western Tanzania in 2000, 2010, and 2019. We quantified land-use changes through remote sensing data; estimated habitat suitability through aerial survey data, remotely sensed variables and ensemble species distribution models; modelled least-cost corridors; identified the relative importance of each corridor for the connectivity of the PA network and potential bottlenecks over time through circuit theory; and validated corridors through local ecological knowledge and ground wildlife surveys. From 2000 to 2019, cropland increased from 7% to 13% in the region, with an average expansion of 634 km2 per year. Distance from cropland influenced elephant distribution models the most. Despite cropland expansion, the locations of the modelled elephant corridors (n = 10) remained similar throughout the survey period. Based on local ecological knowledge, nine of the modelled corridors were active, whereas one modelled corridor had been inactive since the 1970s. Based on circuit theory, we prioritize three corridors for PA connectivity. Key indicators of corridor quality varied over time, whereas elephant movement through some corridors appears to have become costlier over time. Our results suggest that, over the past two decades, functional connectivity across the surveyed landscape has largely persisted. Beyond providing crucial information for spatial prioritization of conservation actions, our approach highlights the importance of modeling functional connectivity over time and verifying corridor models with ground-truthed data. Read article here.
Evidence for vocal signatures and voice-prints in a wild parrot (4 October 2023)
In humans, identity is partly encoded in a voice-print that is carried across multiple vocalizations. Other species also signal vocal identity in calls, such as shown in the contact call of parrots. However, it remains unclear to what extent other call types in parrots are individually distinct, and whether there is an analogous voice-print across calls. Here we test if an individual signature is present in other call types, how stable this signature is, and if parrots exhibit voice-prints across call types. We recorded 5599 vocalizations from 229 individually marked monk parakeets (Myiopsitta monachus) over a 2-year period in Barcelona, Spain. We examined five distinct call types, finding evidence for an individual signature in three. We further show that in the contact call, while birds are individually distinct, the calls are more variable than previously assumed, changing over short time scales (seconds to minutes). Finally, we provide evidence for voice-prints across multiple call types, with a discriminant function being able to predict caller identity across call types. This suggests that monk parakeets may be able to use vocal cues to recognize conspecifics, even across vocalization types and without necessarily needing active vocal signatures of identity. Read article here.
Lifestyle and patterns of physical activity in Hadza foragers (20 September 2023)
Physically active lifestyles are associated with several health benefits. Physical activity (PA) levels are low in post-industrial populations, but generally high throughout life in subsistence populations. The Hadza are a subsistence-oriented foraging population in Tanzania known for being physically active, but it is unknown how recent increases in market integration may have altered their PA patterns. In this study, we examine PA patterns for Hadza women and men who engage in different amounts of traditional foraging.
One hundred and seventy seven Hadza participants (51% female, 19–87 years) wore an Axivity accelerometer (dominant wrist) for ~6 days during dry season months. We evaluated the effects of age, sex, and lifestyle measures on four PA measures that capture different aspects of the PA profile.
Participants engaged in high levels of both moderate-intensity PA and inactivity. Although PA levels were negatively associated with age, older participants were still highly active. We found no differences in PA between participants living in more traditional “bush” camps and those living in more settled “village” camps. Mobility was positively associated with step counts for female participants, and schooling was positively associated with inactive time for male participants.
The similarity in PA patterns between Hadza participants in different camp types suggests that high PA levels characterize subsistence lifestyles generally. The sex-based difference in the effects of mobility and schooling on PA could be a reflection of the Hadza's gender-based division of labor, or indicate that changes to subsistence-oriented lifestyles impact women and men in different ways. Read article here.
Socio-economic predictors of Inuit hunting choices and their implications for climate change adaptation (18 September 2023)
In the Arctic, seasonal variation in the accessibility of the land, sea ice and open waters influences which resources can be harvested safely and efficiently. Climate stressors are also increasingly affecting access to subsistence resources. Within Inuit communities, people differ in their involvement with subsistence activities, but little is known about how engagement in the cash economy (time and money available) and other socio-economic factors shape the food production choices of Inuit harvesters, and their ability to adapt to rapid ecological change. We analyse 281 foraging trips involving 23 Inuit harvesters from Kangiqsujuaq, Nunavik, Canada using a Bayesian approach modelling both patch choice and within-patch success. Gender and income predict Inuit harvest strategies: while men, especially men from low-income households, often visit patches with a relatively low success probability, women and high-income hunters generally have a higher propensity to choose low-risk patches. Inland hunting, marine hunting and fishing differ in the required equipment and effort, and hunters may have to shift their subsistence activities if certain patches become less profitable or less safe owing to high costs of transportation or climate change (e.g. navigate larger areas inland instead of targeting seals on the sea ice). Our finding that household income predicts patch choice suggests that the capacity to maintain access to country foods depends on engagement with the cash economy. Read article here.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Climate change adaptation needs a science of culture’.
Climate change adaptation needs a science of culture (18 September 2023)
There is global consensus that we must immediately prioritize climate change adaptation—change in response to or anticipation of risks from climate change. Some researchers and policymakers urge ‘transformative change’, a complete break from past practices, yet report having little data on whether new practices reduce the risks communities face, even over the short term. However, researchers have some leads: human communities have long generated solutions to changing climate, and scientists who study culture have examples of effective and persistent solutions. This theme issue discusses cultural adaptation to climate change, and in this paper, we review how processes of biological adaptation, including innovation, modification, selective retention and transmission, shape the landscapes decision-makers care about—from which solutions emerge in communities, to the spread of effective adaptations, to regional or global collective action. We introduce a comprehensive portal of data and models on cultural adaptation to climate change, and we outline ways forward. Read article here.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Climate change adaptation needs a science of culture’.
Pathways to cultural adaptation: the coevolution of cumulative culture and social networks (25 August 2023)
Humans have adapted to an immense array of environments by accumulating culturally transmitted knowledge and skills. Adaptive culture can accumulate either via more distinct cultural traits or via improvements of existing cultural traits. The kind of culture that accumulates depends on, and coevolves with, the social structure of societies. Here, we show that the coevolution of learning networks and cumulative culture results in two distinct pathways to cultural adaptation: highly connected populations with high proficiency but low trait diversity vs. sparsely connected populations with low proficiency but higher trait diversity. Importantly, we show there is a conflict between group-level payoffs, which are maximised in highly connected groups that attain high proficiency, and individual level selection, which favours disconnection. This conflict emerges from the interaction of social learning with population structure and causes populations to cycle between the two cultural and network states. The same conflict creates a paradox where increasing innovation rate lowers group payoffs. Finally, we explore how populations navigate these two pathways in environments where payoffs differ among traits and can change over time, showing that high proficiency is favoured when payoffs are stable and vary strongly between traits, while frequent changes in trait payoffs favour more trait diversity. Our results illustrate the complex interplay between networks, learning and the environment, and so inform our understanding of human social evolution. Read article here.
Using repeatability of performance within and across contexts to validate measures of behavioral flexibility (17 August 2023)
Research into animal cognitive abilities is increasing quickly and often uses methods where behavioral performance on a task is assumed to represent variation in the underlying cognitive trait. However, because these methods rely on behavioral responses as a proxy for cognitive ability, it is important to validate that the task structure does, in fact, target the cognitive trait of interest rather than non-target cognitive, personality, or motivational traits (construct validity). Although it can be difficult, or impossible, to definitively assign performance to one cognitive trait, one way to validate that task structure is more likely to elicit performance based on the target cognitive trait is to assess the temporal and contextual repeatability of performance. In other words, individual performance is likely to represent an inherent trait when it is consistent across time and across similar or different tasks that theoretically test the same trait. Here, we assessed the temporal and contextual repeatability of performance on tasks intended to test the cognitive trait behavioral flexibility in great-tailed grackles (Quiscalus mexicanus). For temporal repeatability, we quantified the number of trials to form a color preference after each of multiple color reversals on a serial reversal learning task. For contextual repeatability, we then compared performance on the serial color reversal task to the latency to switch among solutions on each of two different multi-access boxes. We found that the number of trials to form a preference in reversal learning was repeatable across serial color reversals and the latency to switch a preference was repeatable across color reversal learning and the multi-access box contexts. This supports the idea that the reversal learning task structure elicits performance reflective of an inherent trait, and that reversal learning and solution switching on multi-access boxes similarly reflect the inherent trait of behavioral flexibility. Read article here.
Apolipoprotein-ε4 is associated with higher fecundity in a natural fertility population (9 August 2023)
In many populations, the apolipoprotein-ε4 (APOE-ε4) allele increases the risk for several chronic diseases of aging, including dementia and cardiovascular disease; despite these harmful effects at later ages, the APOE-ε4 allele remains prevalent. We assess the impact of APOE-ε4 on fertility and its proximate determinants (age at first reproduction, interbirth interval) among the Tsimane, a natural fertility population of forager-horticulturalists. Among 795 women aged 13 to 90 (20% APOE-ε4 carriers), those with at least one APOE-ε4 allele had 0.3 to 0.5 more children than (ε3/ε3) homozygotes, while those with two APOE-ε4 alleles gave birth to 1.4 to 2.1 more children. APOE-ε4 carriers achieve higher fertility by beginning reproduction 0.8 years earlier and having a 0.23-year shorter interbirth interval. Our findings add to a growing body of literature suggesting a need for studies of populations living in ancestrally relevant environments to assess how alleles that are deleterious in sedentary urban environments may have been maintained by selection throughout human evolutionary history. Read article here.
Social learning and memory (7 August 2023)
The adaptability of human populations to changing environments is often attributed to the human capacity for social learning, innovation, and culture. In rapidly changing environments, it has been shown that maintaining high levels of cultural variation is beneficial because it allows for efficient adaptation. However, in many theoretical models, a high level of cultural variation also implies that a large amount of useless and perhaps detrimental information must be maintained and used, leading to lower population fitness in general. Here, we begin to investigate this often conflicting relationship between adaptation and cultural variation. We explicitly allow for the interplay between social learning and environmental variability, alongside the capacity for “memory,” i.e., the storage, retrieval, and forgetting of information. Here, memory allows individuals to retain unexpressed cultural variation, which does not directly impact adaptation. We show that this capacity for memory facilitates the evolution of social learning across a broader range of circumstances than previously thought. Results from this analysis may help to establish whether and when memory should be incorporated into cultural evolutionary models focused on questions of adaptation. Read article here.
The interplay between age structure and cultural transmission (13 July 2023)
Empirical work has shown that human cultural transmission can be heavily influenced by population age structure. We aim to explore the role of such age structure in shaping the cultural composition of a population when cultural transmission occurs in an unbiased way. In particular, we are interested in understanding the effect induced by the interplay between age structure and the cultural transmission process by allowing cultural transmission from individuals within a limited age range only. To this end we develop an age-structured cultural transmission model and find that age-structured and non age-structured populations evolving through unbiased transmission possess very similar cultural compositions (at a single point in time) at the population and sample level if the copy pool consists of a sufficiently large fraction of the population. If, however, an age constraint—a structural constraint restricting the pool of potential role models to individuals of a limited age range— exists, the cultural compositions of age-structured and non age-structured population show stark differences. This may have drastic consequences for our ability to correctly analyse cultural data sets. Rejections of tests of neutrality, blind to age structure and, importantly, the interaction between age structure and cultural transmission, are only indicative of biased transmission if it is known a priori that there are no or only weak age constraints acting on the pool of role models. As this knowledge is rarely available for specific empirical case studies we develop a generative inference approach based on our age-structured cultural transmission model and machine learning techniques. We show that in some circumstances it is possible to simultaneously infer the characteristics of the age structure, the nature of the transmission process, and the interplay between them from observed samples of cultural variants. Our results also point to hard limits on inference from population-level data at a single point in time, regardless of the approach used. Read article here.
Meta-Research: The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the gender gap in research productivity within academia (6 July 2023)
Using measures of research productivity to assess academic performance puts women at a disadvantage because gender roles and unconscious biases, operating both at home and in academia, can affect research productivity. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on research productivity has been the subject of a number of studies, including studies based on surveys and studies based on numbers of articles submitted to and/or published in journals. Here, we combine the results of 55 studies that compared the impact of the pandemic on the research productivity of men and women; 17 of the studies were based on surveys, 38 were based on article counts, and the total number of effect sizes was 130. We find that the gender gap in research productivity increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the largest changes occurring in the social sciences and medicine, and the changes in the biological sciences and TEMCP (technology, engineering, mathematics, chemistry and physics) being much smaller. Read article here.
Parochial altruism: What it is and why it varies (6 July 2023)
Parochial altruism (PA), or ingroup favoritism paired with outgroup hostility, is sometimes treated as a synonym for human intergroup relations. However, empirical data suggest that PA is highly variable—across individuals, across situations, and across groups. Here, we review theory and data on PA to explore the candidate sources for this variability. Along the way, we unpack assumptions (e.g., what constitutes a group?), identify precursors to PA behavior (e.g., context and internal states), and review evidence for the pairing of ingroup favoritism with outgroup hostility. We discuss phenomena with measurable impact on downstream behavior, including resource access and cultural institutions, but also flag how researcher expectations and methodological design impact reported variability in PA. We close by making recommendations for how researchers can reduce noise in the study of PA by checking assumptions and being deliberate in research design; this is key, as the PA literature is part of sensitive public discourse. Read article here.
Do honey badgers and greater honeyguide birds cooperate to access bees' nests? Ecological evidence and honey-hunter accounts (29 June 2023)
In parts of Africa, greater honeyguides (Indicator indicator) lead people to bees' nests, after which people harvest the honey, and make beeswax and larvae accessible to the honeyguide. In scientific and popular literature, a similar cooperative relationship is frequently described between honeyguides and honey badgers (Mellivora capensis), yet the evidence that this occurs is unclear. Such a partnership may have implications for the origins of our own species' cooperation with honeyguides and for the ecology and conservation of both honey badgers and honeyguides. Here, we review the evidence that honey badgers and honeyguides cooperate to access bees' nests, drawing from the published literature, from our own observations whilst studying both species, and by conducting 394 interviews with honey-hunters in 11 communities across nine African countries. We find that the scientific evidence relies on incomplete and second-hand accounts and does not convincingly indicate that the two species cooperate. The majority of honey-hunters we interviewed were similarly doubtful about the interaction, but many interviewees in the Hadzabe, Maasai, and mixed culture communities in Tanzania reported having seen honey badgers and honeyguides interact, and think that they do cooperate. This complementary approach suggests that the most likely scenario is that the interaction does occur but is highly localized or extremely difficult to observe, or both. With substantial uncertainty remaining, we outline empirical studies that would clarify whether and where honeyguides and honey badgers cooperate, and emphasize the value of integrating scientific and cultural knowledge in ecology. Read article here.
The interdependence of relational and material wealth inequality in Pemba, Zanzibar (26 June 2023)
The extent of inequality in material wealth across different types of societies is well established. Less clear, however, is how material wealth is associated with relational wealth, and the implications of such associations for material wealth inequality. Theory and evidence suggest that material wealth both guides, and is patterned by, relational wealth. While existing comparative studies typically assume complementarity between different types of wealth, such associations may differ for distinct kinds of relational wealth. Here, we first review the literature to identify how and why different forms of relational wealth may align. We then turn to an analysis of household-level social networks (food sharing, gender-specific friendship and gender-specific co-working networks) and material wealth data from a rural community in Pemba, Zanzibar. We find that (i) the materially wealthy have most relational ties, (ii) the associations between relational and material wealth—as well as relational wealth more generally—are patterned by gender differences, and (iii) different forms of relational wealth have similar structural properties and are closely aligned. More broadly, we show how examining the patterning of distinct types of relational wealth provides insights into how and why inequality in material wealth remains muted in a community undergoing rapid economic change.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary ecology of inequality’. Read article here.
Gender disparities in material and educational resources differ by kinship system (26 June 2023)
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Contemporary inequality exists at an unprecedented scale. Social scientists have emphasized the role played by material wealth in driving its escalation. Evolutionary anthropologists understand the drive to accumulate material wealth as one that is coupled ultimately to increasing reproductive success. Owing to biological caps on reproduction for women, the efficiency of this conversion can differ by gender, with implications for understanding the evolution of gender disparities in resource accumulation. Efficiency also differs according to the type of resources used to support reproductive success. In this paper, we review evolutionary explanations of gender disparities in resources and investigate empirical evidence to support or refute those explanations among matrilineal and patrilineal subpopulations of ethnic Chinese Mosuo, who share an ethnolinguistic identity, but differ strikingly in terms of institutions and norms surrounding kinship and gender. We find that gender differentially predicts income and educational attainment. Men were more likely to report income than women; amounts earned were higher for men overall, but the difference between men and women was minimal under matriliny. Men reported higher levels of educational attainment than women, unexpectedly more so in matrilineal contexts. The results reveal nuances in how biology and cultural institutions affect gender disparities in wealth.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary ecology of inequality’. Read article here.
Energetic costs of testosterone in two subsistence populations (26 June 2023)
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Testosterone plays a role in mediating energetic trade-offs between growth, maintenance, and reproduction. Investments in a high testosterone phenotype trade-off against other functions, particularly survival-enhancing immune function and cellular repair; thus only individuals in good condition can maintain both a high testosterone phenotype and somatic maintenance.
While these effects are observed in experimental manipulations, they are difficult to demonstrate in free-living animals, particularly in humans. We hypothesize that individuals with higher testosterone will have higher energetic expenditures than those with lower testosterone. Read article here.
Reproductive inequality in humans and other mammals (22 May 2023)
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To address claims of human exceptionalism, we determine where humans fit within the greater mammalian distribution of reproductive inequality. We show that humans exhibit lower reproductive skew (i.e., inequality in the number of surviving offspring) among males and smaller sex differences in reproductive skew than most other mammals, while nevertheless falling within the mammalian range. Additionally, female reproductive skew is higher in polygynous human populations than in polygynous nonhumans mammals on average. This patterning of skew can be attributed in part to the prevalence of monogamy in humans compared to the predominance of polygyny in nonhuman mammals, to the limited degree of polygyny in the human societies that practice it, and to the importance of unequally held rival resources to women’s fitness. The muted reproductive inequality observed in humans appears to be linked to several unusual characteristics of our species—including high levels of cooperation among males, high dependence on unequally held rival resources, complementarities between maternal and paternal investment, as well as social and legal institutions that enforce monogamous norms. Read article here.
Not just for programmers: How GitHub can accelerate collaborative and reproducible research in ecology and evolution (21 April 2023)
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1. Researchers in ecology and evolutionary biology are increasingly dependent on computational code to conduct research. Hence, the use of efficient methods to share, reproduce, and collaborate on code as well as document research is fundamental. GitHub is an online, cloud-based service that can help researchers track, organize, discuss, share, and collaborate on software and other materials related to research production, including data, code for analyses, and protocols. Despite these benefits, the use of GitHub in ecology and evolution is not widespread.
2. To help researchers in ecology and evolution adopt useful features from GitHub to improve their research workflows, we review 12 practical ways to use the platform.
3. We outline features ranging from low to high technical difficulty, including storing code, managing projects, coding collaboratively, conducting peer review, writing a manuscript, and using automated and continuous integration to streamline analyses. Given that members of a research team may have different technical skills and responsibilities, we describe how the optimal use of GitHub features may vary among members of a research collaboration.
4. As more ecologists and evolutionary biologists establish their workflows using GitHub, the field can continue to push the boundaries of collaborative, transparent, and open research.Read article here.
Brain volume, energy balance, and cardiovascular health in two nonindustrial South American populations (20 March 2023)
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Little is known about brain aging or dementia in nonindustrialized environments that are similar to how humans lived throughout evolutionary history. This paper examines brain volume (BV) in middle and old age among two indigenous South American populations, the Tsimane and Moseten, whose lifestyles and environments diverge from those in high-income nations. With a sample of 1,165 individuals aged 40 to 94, we analyze population differences in cross-sectional rates of decline in BV with age. We also assess the relationships of BV with energy biomarkers and arterial disease and compare them against findings in industrialized contexts. The analyses test three hypotheses derived from an evolutionary model of brain health, which we call the embarrassment of riches (EOR). The model hypothesizes that food energy was positively associated with late life BV in the physically active, food-limited past, but excess body mass and adiposity are now associated with reduced BV in industrialized societies in middle and older ages. We find that the relationship of BV with both non-HDL cholesterol and body mass index is curvilinear, positive from the lowest values to 1.4 to 1.6 SDs above the mean, and negative from that value to the highest values. The more acculturated Moseten exhibit a steeper decrease in BV with age than Tsimane, but still shallower than US and European populations. Lastly, aortic arteriosclerosis is associated with lower BV. Complemented by findings from the United States and Europe, our results are consistent with the EOR model, with implications for interventions to improve brain health. Read article here.
Reliable Network Inference From Unreliable Data: A Tutorial on Latent Network Modeling Using STRAND (10 March 2023)
![Redhead_et_al_2023.jpg](/fileadmin/content_files/ecology/images/Homepage/Redhead_et_al_2023.jpg)
Social network analysis provides an important framework for studying the causes, consequences, and structure of social ties. However, standard self-report measures—for example, as collected through the popular “name-generator” method—do not provide an impartial representation of such ties, be they transfers, interactions, or social relationships. At best, they represent perceptions filtered through the cognitive biases of respondents. Individuals may, for example, report transfers that did not really occur, or forget to mention transfers that really did. The propensity to make such reporting inaccuracies is both an individual-level and item-level characteristic—variable across members of any given group. Past research has highlighted that many network-level properties are highly sensitive to such reporting inaccuracies. However, there remains a dearth of easily deployed statistical tools that account for such biases. To address this issue, we provide a latent network model that allows researchers to jointly estimate parameters measuring both reporting biases and a latent, underlying social network. Building upon past research, we conduct several simulation experiments in which network data are subject to various reporting biases, and find that these reporting biases strongly impact fundamental network properties. These impacts are not adequately remedied using the most frequently deployed approaches for network reconstruction in the social sciences (i.e., treating either the union or the intersection of double-sampled data as the true network), but are appropriately resolved through the use of our latent network models. To make implementation of our models easier for end-users, we provide a fully documented R package, STRAND, and include a tutorial illustrating its functionality when applied to empirical food/money sharing data from a rural Colombian population. Read article here.
Understanding ‘it depends’ in ecology: a guide to hypothesising, visualising and interpreting statistical interactions (1 March 2023)
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Ecologists routinely use statistical models to detect and explain interactions among ecological drivers, with a goal to evaluate whether an effect of interest changes in sign or magnitude in different contexts. Two fundamental properties of interactions are often overlooked during the process of hypothesising, visualising and interpreting interactions between drivers: the measurement scale – whether a response is analysed on an additive or multiplicative scale, such as a ratio or logarithmic scale; and the symmetry – whether dependencies are considered in both directions. Overlooking these properties can lead to one or more of three inferential errors: misinterpretation of (i) the detection and magnitude (Type-D error), and (ii) the sign of effect modification (Type-S error); and (iii) misidentification of the underlying processes (Type-A error). We illustrate each of these errors with a broad range of ecological questions applied to empirical and simulated data sets. We demonstrate how meta-analysis, a widely used approach that seeks explicitly to characterise context dependence, is especially prone to all three errors. Based on these insights, we propose guidelines to improve hypothesis generation, testing, visualisation and interpretation of interactions in ecology. Read article here.
Variability in molar crown morphology and cusp wear in two Western chimpanzee populations (21 February 2023)
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Objectives
Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) possess a relatively generalized molar morphology allowing them to access a wide range of foods. Comparisons of crown and cusp morphology among the four subspecies have suggested relatively large intraspecific variability. Here, we compare molar crown traits and cusp wear of two geographically close populations of Western chimpanzees, P. t. verus, to provide further information on intraspecific dental variability.
Materials and Methods
Micro-CT reconstructions of high-resolution replicas of first and second molars of two Western chimpanzee populations from Ivory Coast (Taï National Park) and Liberia, respectively were used for this study. First, we analyzed projected tooth and cusp 2D areas as well as the occurrence of cusp six (C6) on lower molars. Second, we quantified the molar cusp wear three-dimensionally to infer how the individual cusps alter with advancing wear.
Results
Both populations are similar in their molar crown morphology, except for a higher appearance rate of a C6 in Taï chimpanzees. In Taï chimpanzees, lingual cusps of upper molars and buccal cusps of lower molars possess an advanced wear pattern compared to the remaining cusps, while in Liberian chimpanzees this wear gradient is less pronounced.
Discussion
The similar crown morphology between both populations fits with previous descriptions for Western chimpanzees and provides additional data on dental variation within this subspecies. The wear pattern of the Taï chimpanzees are in concordance with their observed tool rather than tooth use to open nuts/seeds, while the Liberian chimpanzees may have consumed hard food items crushed between their molars. Read article here.
Sourcing high tissue quality brains from deceased wild primates with known socio-ecology (23 January 2023)
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- The selection pressures that drove dramatic encephalisation processes through the mammal lineage remain elusive, as does knowledge of brain structure reorganisation through this process. In particular, considerable structural brain changes are present across the primate lineage, culminating in the complex human brain that allows for unique behaviours such as language and sophisticated tool use. To understand this evolution, a diverse sample set of humans' closest relatives with varying socio-ecologies is needed. However, current brain banks predominantly curate brains from primates that died in zoological gardens. We try to address this gap by establishing a field pipeline mitigating the challenges associated with brain extractions of wild primates in their natural habitat.
- The success of our approach is demonstrated by our ability to acquire a novel brain sample of deceased primates with highly variable socio-ecological exposure and a particular focus on wild chimpanzees. Methods in acquiring brain tissue from wild settings are comprehensively explained, highlighting the feasibility of conducting brain extraction procedures under strict biosafety measures by trained veterinarians in field sites.
- Brains are assessed at a fine-structural level via high-resolution MRI and state-of-the-art histology. Analyses confirm that excellent tissue quality of primate brains sourced in the field can be achieved with a comparable tissue quality of brains acquired from zoo-living primates.
- Our field methods are noninvasive, here defined as not harming living animals, and may be applied to other mammal systems than primates. In sum, the field protocol and methodological pipeline validated here pose a major advance for assessing the influence of socio-ecology on medium to large mammal brains, at both macro- and microstructural levels as well as aiding with the functional annotation of brain regions and neuronal pathways via specific behaviour assessments. Read article here.
Fitness consequences of cousin marriage: a life-history assessment in two populations (29 November 2022)
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Cousin marriage, a spousal union between close kin, occurs at high frequencies in many parts of the world. The rates of cousin marriage in humans are concordant with empirical studies that challenge the traditionally held view that reproduction with kin is generally avoided in animals. Similarly, some theoretical models in animal behavior show that inbreeding avoidance is more constrained than previously thought. Such studies highlight the importance of quantifying the costs and benefits of reproduction among close kin over the whole life-course. Here, we use genealogical data from two human populations with high frequencies of cousin marriage (the Dogon from Mali, and the Ancien Régime nobility from Europe) to estimate these potential costs and benefits. We compare age-specific fertility and survival curves, as well as the projected growth rates, of sub-populations of each marriage type. Fitness costs of cousin marriage are present in terms of reduced child survival (in both populations), while benefits exist as increased fertility for men (in the Dogon) and for women (in the Ancien Régime nobility). We also find some differences in the projected growth rates of lineages as a function of marriage type. Finally, we discuss the trade-offs that might shape marriage decisions in different ecological conditions. Read article here.
Toys as Teachers: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Object Use and Enskillment in Hunter–Gatherer Societies (28 November 2022)
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Studies of cultural transmission—whether approached by archaeological or ethnographic means—have made great strides in identifying formal teaching and learning arrangements, which in turn can be closely aligned with models of social learning. While novices and apprentices are often in focus in such studies, younger children and their engagement with material culture have received less attention. Against the backdrop of a cross-cultural database of ethnographically documented object use and play in 54 globally distributed foraging communities, we here discuss the ways in which children make and use tools and toys. We provide a cross-cultural inventory of objects made for and by hunter–gatherer children and adolescents. We find that child and adolescent objects are linked to adult material culture, albeit not exclusively so. Toys and tools were primarily handled outside of explicit pedagogical contexts, and there is little evidence for formalised apprenticeships. Our data suggests that children’s self-directed interactions with objects, especially during play, has a critical role in early-age enskillment. Placed within a niche construction framework, we combine ethnographic perspectives on object play with archaeological evidence for play objects to offer an improved cross-cultural frame of reference for how social learning varies across early human life history and what role material culture may play in this process. While our analysis improves the systematic understanding of the role and relevance of play objects among hunter–gatherer societies, we also make the case for more detailed studies of play objects in the context of ethnographic, archival and archaeological cultural transmission research. Read article here.
The social learning and development of intra- and inter-ethnic sharing norms in the Congo Basin: A registered report protocol (15 November)
Compared to other species, the extent of human cooperation is unparalleled. Such cooperation is coordinated between community members via social norms. Developmental research has demonstrated that very young children are sensitive to social norms, and that social norms are internalized by middle childhood. Most research on social norm acquisition has focused on norms that modulated intra-group cooperation. Yet around the world, multi-ethnic communities also cooperate, and this cooperation is often shaped by distinct inter-group social norms. In the present study, we will investigate whether inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic social norm acquisition follows the same, or distinct, developmental trajectories. Specifically, we will work with BaYaka foragers and Bandongo fisher-farmers who inhabit multi-ethnic villages in the Republic of the Congo. In these villages, inter-ethnic cooperation is regulated by sharing norms. Through interviews with adult participants, we will provide the first descriptive account of the timing and mechanism by which BaYaka and Bandongo learn to share with out-group members. Children (5–17 years) and adults (17+ years) will also participate in a modified Dictator Game to investigate the developmental trajectories of children’s intra- and inter-ethnic sharing choices. Based on our ethnographic knowledge of the participating communities, we predict that children’s intra-ethnic sharing choices in the Dictator Game will match those of adults at an earlier age than their inter-ethnic sharing choices. We will analyze our data using logistic Bayesian modelling. Read article here.
Female bone physiology resilience in a past Polynesian Outlier community (7 November 2022)
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Remodelling is a fundamental biological process involved in the maintenance of bone physiology and function. We know that a range of health and lifestyle factors can impact this process in living and past societies, but there is a notable gap in bone remodelling data for populations from the Pacific Islands. We conducted the first examination of femoral cortical histology in 69 individuals from ca. 440–150 BP Taumako in Solomon Islands, a remote ‘Polynesian Outlier’ island in Melanesia. We tested whether bone remodelling indicators differed between age groups, and biological sex validated using ancient DNA. Bone vascular canal and osteon size, vascular porosity, and localised osteon densities, corrected by femoral robusticity indices were examined. Females had statistically significantly higher vascular porosities when compared to males, but osteon densities and ratios of canal-osteon (~ 8%) did not differ between the sexes. Our results indicate that, compared to males, localised femoral bone tissue of the Taumako females did not drastically decline with age, contrary to what is often observed in modern populations. However, our results match findings in other archaeological samples—a testament to past female bone physiology resilience, also now observed in the Pacific region. Read article here.
Distinguishing Intergroup and Long-Distance Relationships (1 October 2022)
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Intergroup and long-distance relationships are both central features of human social life, but because intergroup relationships are emphasized in the literature, long-distance relationships are often overlooked. Here, we make the case that intergroup and long-distance relationships should be studied as distinct, albeit related, features of human sociality. First, we review the functions of both kinds of relationship: while both can be conduits for difficult-to-access resources, intergroup relationships can reduce intergroup conflict whereas long-distance relationships are especially effective at buffering widespread resource shortfalls. Second, to illustrate the importance of distinguishing the two relationship types, we present a case study from rural Bolivia. Combining ethnography and two different experimental techniques, we find that the importance of intergroup relationships—and the salience of group membership itself—varies across populations and across methods. Although ethnography revealed that participants often rely on long-distance relationships for resource access, we were unable to capture participant preferences for these relationships with a forced-choice technique. Taken together, our review and empirical data highlight that (1) intergroup and long-distance relationships can have different functions and can be more or less important in different contexts and (2) validating experimental field data with ethnography is crucial for work on human sociality. We close by outlining future directions for research on long-distance relationships in humans. Read article here.
Practical guide to coproduction in conservation science (30 September 2022)
We considered a series of conservation-related research projects on the island of Pemba, Tanzania, to reflect on the broad significance of Beier et al.’s recommendations for linking conservation science with practical conservation outcomes. The implementation of just some of their suggestions can advance a successful coproduction of actionable science by small research teams. Key elements include, first, scientists and managers working together in the field to ensure feedback in real time; second, questions jointly identified by managers and researchers to facilitate engaged collaboration; third, conducting research at multiple sites, thereby broadening managers’ abilities to reach multiple stakeholders; and fourth, establishing a multidisciplinary team because most of the concerns of local managers require input from multiple disciplines. Read article here.
Individual stochasticity in the life history strategies of animals and plants (23 September 2022)
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The life histories of organisms are expressed as rates of development, reproduction, and survival. However, individuals may experience differential outcomes for the same set of rates. Such individual stochasticity generates variance around familiar mean measures of life history traits, such as life expectancy and the reproductive number R0. By writing life cycles as Markov chains, we calculate variance and other indices of variability for longevity, lifetime reproductive output (LRO), age at offspring production, and age at maturity for 83 animal and 332 plant populations from the Comadre and Compadre matrix databases. We find that the magnitude within and variability between populations in variance indices in LRO, especially, are surprisingly high. We furthermore use principal components analysis to assess how the inclusion of variance indices of different demographic outcomes affects life history constraints. We find that these indices, to a similar or greater degree than the mean, explain the variation in life history strategies among plants and animals. Read article here.
A Causal Framework for Cross-Cultural Generalizability (21 September 2022)
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Behavioral researchers increasingly recognize the need for more diverse samples that capture the breadth of human experience. Current attempts to establish generalizability across populations focus on threats to validity, constraints on generalization, and the accumulation of large, cross-cultural data sets. But for continued progress, we also require a framework that lets us determine which inferences can be drawn and how to make informative cross-cultural comparisons. We describe a generative causal-modeling framework and outline simple graphical criteria to derive analytic strategies and implied generalizations. Using both simulated and real data, we demonstrate how to project and compare estimates across populations and further show how to formally represent measurement equivalence or inequivalence across societies. We conclude with a discussion of how a formal framework for generalizability can assist researchers in designing more informative cross-cultural studies and thus provides a more solid foundation for cumulative and generalizable behavioral research. Read article here.
Girls in early childhood increase foodreturns of nursing women duringsubsistence activities of the BaYakain the Republic of Congo (1 September 2022)
![JangJanmaatKandzaBoyette2022.jpg](/fileadmin/_processed_/2/b/csm_JangJanmaatKandzaBoyette2022_56e281490c.jpg)
Nursing mothers face an energetic trade-off between infant care and work.Under pooled energy budgets, this trade-off can be reduced by assistancein food acquisition and infant care tasks from non-maternal carers. Acrosscultures, children also often provide infant care. Yet the question of whohelps nursing mothers during foraging has been understudied, especiallythe role of children. Using focal follow data from 140 subsistence expeditionsby BaYaka women in the Republic of Congo, we investigated how potentialsupport from carers increased mothers’foraging productivity. We found thatthe number of girls in early childhood (ages 4–7 years) in subsistence groupsincreased food returns of nursing women with infants (kcal collected perminute). This effect was stronger than that of other adult women, andolder girls in middle childhood (ages 8–13 years) and adolescence (ages14–19 years). Child helpers were not necessarily genetically related to nur-sing women. Our results suggest that it is young girls who provide infantcare while nursing mothers are acquiring food—by holding, monitoringand playing with infants—and, thus, that they also contribute to theenergy pool of the community during women’s subsistence activities. Ourstudy highlights the critical role of children as carers from early childhood. Read article here.
The effect of dominance rank on female reproductive success in social mammals (30 August 2022)
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Life in social groups, while potentially providing social benefits, inevitably leads to conflict among group members. In many social mammals, such conflicts lead to the formation of dominance hierarchies, where high-ranking individuals consistently outcompete other group members. Given that competition is a fundamental tenet of the theory of natural selection, it is generally assumed that high-ranking individuals have higher reproductive success than lower-ranking individuals. Previous reviews have indicated large variation across populations on the potential effect of dominance rank on reproductive success in female mammals. Here, we perform a meta-analysis based on 444 effect sizes from 187 studies on 86 mammal species to investigate how life-history, ecology and sociality modulate the relationship between female dominance rank and fitness. As predicted, we found that (1) dominance rank is generally positively associated with reproductive success, independent of the approach different studies have taken to answer this question; and that (2) the relationship between rank and reproductive success is conditional on life-history mechanisms, with higher effects of dominance rank on reproductive output than on survival, particularly in species with high reproductive investment. Contrary to our predictions, (3) the fitness benefits to high-ranking females appear consistent across ecological conditions rather than increasing when resources decrease. Instead, we found that the social environment consistently mitigates rank differences on reproductive success by modulating female competition, with, as predicted, (4) dominant females showing higher reproductive success than subordinates in two different types of societies: first, effect sizes are highest when females live in cooperatively breeding groups composed of a single dominant female and one or more subordinate females; second, they are also elevated when females form differentiated relationships which occurs when groups are composed of unrelated females. Our findings indicate that obtaining a high ranking position in a social group consistently provides female mammals with fitness benefits, even though future studies might show lower effects given various biases in the literature we were able to access, including, but not restricted to, a publication bias. They further draw a complex landscape of the level of social inequality across mammalian societies, reflected by variation in the benefits of social dominance, which appears to be shaped by reproductive and social competition more than by ecological competition. Read article here.
Great-tailed Grackles (Quiscalus mexicanus) as a tolerant host of avian malaria parasites (23 August 2022)
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Great-tailed Grackles (Quiscalus mexicanus) are a social, polygamous bird species whose populations have rapidly expanded their geographic range across North America over the past century. Before 1865, Great-tailed Grackles were only documented in Central America, Mexico, and southern Texas in the USA. Given the rapid northern expansion of this species, it is relevant to study its role in the dynamics of avian blood parasites. Here, 87 Great-tailed grackles in Arizona (a population in the new center of the range) were screened for haemosporidian parasites using microscopy and PCR targeting the parasite mitochondrial cytochrome b gene. Individuals were caught in the wild from January 2018 until February 2020. Haemosporidian parasite prevalence was 62.1% (54/87). A high Plasmodium prevalence was found (60.9%, 53/87), and one grackle was infected with Haemoproteus (Parahaemoproteus) sp. (lineage SIAMEX01). Twenty-one grackles were infected with P. cathemerium, sixteen with P. homopolare, four with P. relictum (strain GRW04), and eleven with three different genetic lineages of Plasmodium spp. that have not been characterized to species level (MOLATE01, PHPAT01, and ZEMAC01). Gametocytes were observed in birds infected with three different Plasmodium lineages, revealing that grackles are competent hosts for some parasite species. This study also suggests that grackles are highly susceptible and develop chronic infections consistent with parasite tolerance, making them competent to transmit some generalist haemosporidian lineages. It can be hypothesized that, as the Great-tailed Grackle expands its geographic range, it may affect local bird communities by increasing the transmission of local parasites but not introducing new species into the parasite species pool. Read article here.
Human total, basal and activity energy expenditures are independent of ambient environmental temperature (19 August 2022)
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Lower ambient temperature (Ta) requires greater energy expenditure to sustain body temperature. However, effects of Ta on human energetics may be buffered by environmental modification and behavioral compensation. We used the IAEA DLW database for adults in the USA (n = 3213) to determine the effect of Ta (10 to +30C) on TEE, basal (BEE) and activity energy expenditure (AEE) and physical activity level (PAL). There were no significant relationships (p > 0.05) between maximum, minimum and average Ta and TEE, BEE, AEE and PAL. After adjust-ment for fat-free mass, fat mass and age, statistically significant (p < 0.01) relationships between TEE, BEE and Ta emerged in females but the effect sizes were not biologically meaningful. Temperatures inside buildings are regulated at 18–25C independent of latitude. Hence, adults in the US modify their environments to keep TEE constant across a wide range of external ambient temperatures. Read article here.
Social integration predicts survival in female white-faced capuchin monkeys (3 June 2022)
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Across multiple species of social mammals, a growing number of studies have found that individual sociality is associated with survival. In long-lived species, like primates, lifespan is one of the main components of fitness. We used 18 years of data from the Lomas Barbudal Monkey Project to quantify social integration in 11 capuchin (Cebus capucinus) groups and tested whether female survivorship was associated with females’ tendencies to interact with three types of partners: (1) all group members, (2) adult females, and (3) adult males. We found strong evidence that females who engaged more with other females in affiliative interactions and foraged in close proximity experienced increased survivorship. We found some weak evidence that females might also benefit from engaging in more support in agonistic contexts with other females. These benefits were evident in models that account for the females’ rank and group size. Female interactions with all group members also increased survival, but the estimates of the effects were more uncertain. In interactions with adult males, only females who provided more grooming to males survived longer. The results presented here suggest that social integration may result in survival-related benefits. Females might enjoy these benefits through exchanging grooming for other currencies, such as coalitionary support or tolerance. Read article here. (photograph by Susan Perry)
Forest income and livelihoods on Pemba: A quantitative ethnography (19 May 2022)
This paper offers a systematic approach to quantifying the socio-economic role of forests for 'forest-dependent' communities. Focusing on the island of Pemba (Zanzibar, Tanzania), we investigate how forest income contributes to livelihood portfolios, local inequality, and households' insurance against shocks. We also examine how forest income is affected by local institutions and household socio-demographics. We use a series of non-parametric measures in conjunction with multi-level Bayesian models supported by directed acyclic graphs to address these questions. On average, we find that 27% of household income comes from forests, with 83% of that value deriving from fuel products, and that 62% of the total value of forest products are harvested from the agroforestry scrub matrix. At the same time, forest income scales positively with income, forest-dependency scales negatively. Top income earners control ∼ 4 times more forest income than low earners. However, when we consider forestry against other economic sectors, forest income reduces overall income inequality on the island. Despite forests being critical for the poor, we find it offers little insurance against shocks, especially for the vulnerable. In fact, in contrast to expectations, we find that the well-insured are the most likely to increase forest use in response to shocks. Regarding institutions, most forest products come from either government land or land owned by other private individuals, indicating weak tenure institutions on the island. Finally, young, poorly educated male-headed households, which are not integrated into markets, are the most likely to have high forest income. However, female-headed households are generally more dependent due to a lack of alternative income sources. Our results are encouraging as the use of tools from formal causal inference and detailed Bayesian modelling, in conjunction with a quantitative ethnography, build upon previous findings while improving our understanding of local socio-ecological systems. Read article here.
Expanding the understanding of majority‑bias in children’s social learning (25 April 2022)
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Prior experiments with children across seven different societies have indicated U‑shaped age patterns in the likelihood of copying majority demonstrations. It is unclear which learning strategies underlie the observed responses that create these patterns. Here we broaden the understanding of children’s learning strategies by: (1) exploring social learning patterns among 6–13‑year‑olds (n = 270) from ethnolinguistically varied communities in Vanuatu; (2) comparing these data with those reported from other societies (n = 629), and (3) re‑analysing our and previous data based on a theoretically plausible set of underlying strategies using Bayesian methods. We find higher rates of social learning in children from Vanuatu, a country with high linguistic and cultural diversity. Furthermore, our results provide statistical evidence for modest U‑shaped age patterns for a more clearly delineated majority learning strategy across the current and previously investigated societies, suggesting that the developmental mechanisms structuring majority bias are cross‑culturally highly recurrent and hence a fundamental feature of early human social learning. Read article here.
Coevolution of relative brain size and life expectancy in parrots (24 March 2022)
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Previous studies have demonstrated a correlation between longevity and brain size in a variety of taxa. Little research has been devoted to understanding this link in parrots; yet parrots are well-known for both their exceptionally long lives and cognitive complexity. We employed a large-scale comparative analysis that investigated the influence of brain size and life-history variables on longevity in parrots. Specifically, we addressed two hypotheses for evolutionary drivers of longevity: the cognitive buffer hypothesis, which proposes that increased cognitive abilities enable longer lifespans, and the expensive brain hypothesis, which holds that increases in life-span are caused by prolonged developmental time of, and increased parental investment in, large-brained offspring. We estimated life expectancy from detailed zoo records for 133 818 individuals across 244 parrot species. Using a principled Bayesian approach that addresses data uncertainty and imputation of missing values, we found a consistent correlation between relative brain size and life expectancy in parrots. This correlation was best explained by a direct effect of relative brain size. Notably, we found no effects of developmental time, clutch size or age at first reproduction. Our results suggest that selection for enhanced cognitive abilities in parrots has in turn promoted longer lifespans. Read article here.
Effect of Anthropogenic Activities on the Population of Moor Macaques (Macaca maura) in South Sulawesi, Indonesia (22 February 2022)
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Forest loss due to anthropogenic activities is one of the main causes of plant and animal species decline. Studying the species’ population status (i.e., density, abundance, and geographic distribution) on a regular basis is one of the main tools to assess the effect of anthropogenic activities on wildlife, to monitor population dynamics and to intervene with effective conservation strategies when the population of an endangered species declines. On Sulawesi Island, Indonesia, anthropogenic activities, such as agriculture, are decreasing the remaining natural habitats available for several endemic and endangered species. The effect of this forest loss on the threatened moor macaques (Macaca maura) in South Sulawesi is unknown, and data on the population status of this species are needed to design effective conservation strategies. To assess the population status of the moor macaques, we walked linear transects (N = 29, survey effort = 114 km) at six sites between November 2019 and March 2020 to estimate macaque population density and encounter rate. We tested the effect of anthropogenic activities on macaque encounter rate. Our global density estimate (24 individuals/km2) was lower than the overall estimate from the most detailed survey conducted on this species, which covered its whole geographic distribution (36.1 individuals/km 2). However, these results should be interpreted with caution because the previous density estimate falls within the confidence intervals of our estimate. Furthermore, we found regional declines in moor macaque encounter rates in at least two sites compared with previous studies. We found a high presence of anthropogenic activity in the forests inhabited by macaques. Moor macaques were less abundant in open areas with no forest (i.e., clear cuttings) than in forested areas, and in the presence of nonspecies-specific hunting traps (i.e., wire-loop traps). Moreover, moor macaques were more abundant in areas with a higher presence of humans and domestic animals. Overall, our data suggest that the population of this species may be declining in certain regions but further surveys are needed to corroborate whether this is occurring across the entire geographic distribution. Read article here.
Are the More Flexible Great-Tailed Grackles Also Better at Behavioral Inhibition? (1 February 2022)
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Behavioral flexibility should, theoretically, be positively related to behavioral inhibition because one should need to inhibit a previously learned behavior to change their behavior when the task changes (flexibility). However, several investigations show no or mixed support of this hypothesis, which challenges the assumption that inhibition is involved in making flexible decisions. We tested the hypothesis that flexibility (reversal learning and solution switching on a multi-access box by Logan et al., 2022) is associated with inhibition (go/no go on a touchscreen and detour) by measuring all variables in the same individuals. Because touchscreen experiments had never been conducted in this species, we validated that they are functional for wild-caught grackles who learned to use it and completed go/no go on it. Performance on go/no go and detour tasks did not correlate, indicating they did not measure the same trait. Individuals who were faster to reverse took more time to attempt a new option on the multi-access box and were either faster or slower at go/no go depending on whether one individual, Taquito (accidentally tested beyond 200 trial cap), was included in the GLM. While the relationship between trials to reverse and trials to pass go/no go was strongly influenced by Taquito, the more comprehensive Bayesian flexibility model supported the positive relationship irrespective of whether Taquito was included. Performance on detour did not correlate with either flexibility measure, suggesting that they may measure separate traits. We conclude that flexibility is associated with certain types of inhibition, but not others, in great-tailed grackles. Read article here.
Investigating Sex Differences in Genetic Relatedness in Great-tailed Grackles in Tempe, Arizona to Infer Potential Sex Biases in Dispersal (1 February 2022)
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In most bird species, females disperse prior to their first breeding attempt, while males remain close to the place they hatched. While explanations for such female bias in natal dispersal have focused on the resource-defense based monogamous mating system that is prevalent in most birds, the factors shaping dispersal decisions are often more complex. Studying species with different social and mating systems can help illuminate the various factors shaping sex biased dispersal. Here, we use genetic approaches to determine whether females and/or males disperse in great-tailed grackles (Quiscalus mexicanus), which have a mating system where the males hold breeding territories that multiple females might choose to place their nest in, but females forage independently of these breeding territories across a wider area. We find that for individuals caught at a single site in Arizona, (i) the average relatedness among all female dyads, but not of males, is higher than average relatedness among other individuals at the site; (ii) that female close relatives are found within shorter distances from each other than pairs of unrelated females, but male close relatives at larger distances than pairs of unrelated males; and (iii) we find a decline in relatedness with increasing spatial distances for females, but not for males. Our findings show that great-tailed grackles offer opportunities to understand how divergent social and mating systems might shape natal philopatry and dispersal, given their reversal of the usual sex-bias in dispersal with females associating with genetic relatives while males are not. Read article here.
Social hierarchies and social networks in humans (19 January 2022)
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Across species, social hierarchies are often governed by dominance relations. In humans, where there are multiple culturally valued axes of distinction, social hierarchies can take a variety of forms and need not rest on dominance relations. Consequently, humans navigate multiple domains of status, i.e. relative standing. Importantly, while these hierarchies may be constructed from dyadic interactions, they are often more fundamentally guided by subjective peer evaluations and group perceptions. Researchers have typically focused on the distinct elements that shape individuals’ relative standing, with some emphasizing individual-level attributes and others outlining emergent macro-level structural outcomes. Here, we synthesize work across the social sciences to suggest that the dynamic interplay between individual-level and meso-level properties of the social networks in which individuals are embedded are crucial for understanding the diverse processes of status differentiation across groups. More specifically, we observe that humans not only navigate multiple social hierarchies at any given time but also simultaneously operate within multiple, overlapping social networks. There are important dynamic feedbacks between social hierarchies and the characteristics of social networks, as the types of social relationships, their structural properties, and the relative position of individuals within them both influence and are influenced by status differentiation.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘The centennial of the pecking order: current state and future prospects for the study of dominance hierarchies’. Read article here.
Do the more flexible individuals rely more on causal cognition? Observation versus intervention in causal inference in great-tailed grackles (1 December 2021)
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Behavioral flexibility, the ability to change behavior when circumstances change based on learning from previous experience, is thought to play an important role in a species ability to successfully adapt to new environments and expand its geographic range. It is alternatively or additionally possible that causal cognition, the ability to understand relationships beyond their statistical covariations, could play a significant role in rapid range expansions via the ability to learn faster: causal cognition could lead to making better predictions about outcomes through exerting more control over events. We aim to determine whether great tailed grackles(Quiscalus mexicanus), a species that is rapidly expanding its geographic range, use causal inference and whether this ability relates to their behavioral flexibility (flexibility measured in these individuals by Logan et al. (2019): reversal learning of a color discrimination and solution switching on a puzzle box). Causal cognition was measured using a touchscreen where individuals learned about the relationships between a star, a tone, a clicking noise, and food. They were then tested on their expectations about which of these causes the food to become available. We found that eight grackles showed no evidence of making causal inferences when given the opportunity to intervene on observed events using a touchscreen apparatus, and that performance on the causal cognition task did not correlate with behavioral flexibility measures. This could indicate that our test was inadequate to assess causal cognition. Because of this, we are unable to speculate about the potential role of causal cognition in a species that is rapidly expanding its geographic range. We suggest further exploration of this hypothesis using larger sample sizes and multiple test paradigms. Read article here.
Chimpanzee vowel-like sounds and voice quality suggest formant space expansion through the hominoid lineage (30 November 2021)
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The origins of human speech are obscure; it is still unclear what aspects are unique to our species or shared with our evolutionary cousins, in part due to a lack of a common framework for comparison. We asked what chimpanzee and human vocal production acoustics have in common. We examined visible supra-laryngeal articulators of four major chimpanzee vocalizations (hoos, grunts, barks, screams) and their associated acoustic structures, using techniques from human phonetic and animal communication analysis. Data were collected from wild adult chimpanzees, Taï National Park, Ivory Coast. Both discriminant and principal component classification procedures revealed classification of call types. Discriminating acoustic features include voice quality and formant structure, mirroring phonetic features in human speech. Chimpanzee lip and jaw articulation variables also offered similar discrimination of call types. Formant maps distinguished call types with different vowel-like sounds. Comparing our results with published primate data, humans show less F1 – F2 correlation and further expansion of the vowel space, particularly for [i] sounds. Unlike recent studies suggesting monkeys achieve human vowel space, we conclude from our results that supra-laryngeal articulatory capacities show moderate evolutionary change, with vowel space expansion continuing through hominoid evolution. Studies on more primate species will be required to substantiate this.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part II)’. Read article here.
Limited Scope for Group Coordination in Stylistic Variations of Kolam Art (28 October 2021)
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In large, complex societies, assorting with others with similar social norms or behaviors can facilitate successful coordination and cooperation. The ability to recognize others with shared norms or behaviors is thus assumed to be under selection. As a medium of communication, human art might reflect fitness-relevant information on shared norms and behaviors of other individuals thus facilitating successful coordination and cooperation. Distinctive styles or patterns of artistic design could signify migration history, different groups with a shared interaction history due to spatial proximity, as well as individual-level expertise and preferences. In addition, cultural boundaries may be even more pronounced in a highly diverse and socially stratified society. In the current study, we focus on a large corpus of an artistic tradition called kolam that is produced by women from Tamil Nadu in South India (N = 3, 139 kolam drawings from 192 women) to test whether stylistic variations in art can be mapped onto caste boundaries, migration and neighborhoods. Since the kolam art system with its sequential drawing decisions can be described by a Markov process, we characterize variation in styles of art due to different facets of an artist's identity and the group affiliations, via hierarchical Bayesian statistical models. Our results reveal that stylistic variations in kolam art only weakly map onto caste boundaries, neighborhoods, and regional origin. In fact, stylistic variations or patterns in art are dominated by artist-level variation and artist expertise. Our results illustrate that although art can be a medium of communication, it is not necessarily marked by group affiliation. Rather, artistic behavior in this context seems to be primarily a behavioral domain within which individuals carve out a unique niche for themselves to differentiate themselves from others. Our findings inform discussions on the evolutionary role of art for group coordination by encouraging researchers to use systematic methods to measure the mapping between specific objects or styles onto groups. Read article here.
Estimating the reproducibility of social learning research published between 1955 and 2018 (1 October 2021)
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Reproducibility is integral to science, but difficult to achieve. Previous research has quantified low rates of data availability and results reproducibility across the biological and behavioural sciences. Here, we surveyed 560 empirical publications, published between 1955 and 2018 in the social learning literature, a research topic that spans animal behaviour, behavioural ecology, cultural evolution and evolutionary psychology. Data were recoverable online or through direct data requests for 30% of this sample. Data recovery declines exponentially with time since publication, halving every 6 years, and up to every 9 years for human experimental data. When data for a publication can be recovered, we estimate a high probability of subsequent data usability (87%), analytical clarity (97%) and agreement of published results with reproduced findings (96%). This corresponds to an overall rate of recovering data and reproducing results of 23%, largely driven by the unavailability or incompleteness of data. We thus outline clear measures to improve the reproducibility of research on the ecology and evolution of social behaviour. Read article here.
Reproductive consequences of material use in avian nest construction (30 September 2021)
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Birds’ nests represent a rich behavioural ‘fingerprint’, comprising several important decisions—not the least of which is the selection of appropriate material. Material selection in nest-building birds is thought to reflect, in part, builder-birds’ use of the ‘best’ material—in terms of physical properties (e.g., rigidity)—refined across generations. There is, however, little experimental evidence to link the physical properties of nest material to both birds’ nest-building and breeding performance. We examined individual-level material-use consequences for breeding zebra finches by manipulating the kind of material available to laboratory-housed pairs: stiff or flexible same-length string. We show that higher fledgling numbers were related to: (i) fewer pieces used in nest construction by stiff-string builders; and conversely, (ii) more pieces used in nest construction by flexible-string builders. Together, these data suggest that physical differences in nest material can affect avian reproduction (here, the trade-off between nest-construction investment and fledgling success), highlighting the adaptive significance of nest-building birds’ material selectivity. Read article here.
APOE4 is associated with elevated blood lipids and lower levels of innate immune biomarkers in a tropical Amerindian subsistence population (29 September 2021)
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In post-industrial settings, apolipoprotein E4 (APOE4) is associated with increased cardiovascular and neurological disease risk. However, the majority of human evolutionary history occurred in environments with higher pathogenic diversity and low cardiovascular risk. We hypothesize that in high-pathogen and energy-limited contexts, the APOE4 allele confers benefits by reducing innate inflammation when uninfected, while maintaining higher lipid levels that buffer costs of immune activation during infection. Among Tsimane forager-farmers of Bolivia (N = 1266, 50% female), APOE4 is associated with 30% lower C-reactive protein, and higher total cholesterol and oxidized LDL. Blood lipids were either not associated, or negatively associated with inflammatory biomarkers, except for associations of oxidized LDL and inflammation which were limited to obese adults. Further, APOE4 carriers maintain higher levels of total and LDL cholesterol at low body mass indices (BMIs). These results suggest that the relationship between APOE4 and lipids may be beneficial for pathogen-driven immune responses and unlikely to increase cardiovascular risk in an active subsistence population. Read article here.
How small-scale societies achieve large-scale cooperation (28 August 2021)
For most of our species’ history, humans have lived in relatively small subsistence communities, often called small-scale societies. While these groups lack centralized institutions, they can and often do maintain large-scale cooperation. Here, we explore several mechanisms promoting cooperation in small-scale societies, including (a) the development of social norms that encourage prosocial behavior, (b) reciprocal exchange relationships, (c) reputation that facilitates high-cost cooperation, (d) relational wealth, and (e) risk buffering institutions. We illustrate these with ethnographic and psychological evidence from contemporary small-scale societies. We argue that these mechanisms for cooperation helped past and present small-scale communities adapt to diverse ecological and social niches. Read article here.
DieTryin: An R package for data collection, automated data entry, and post-processing of network-structured economic games, social networks, and other roster-based dyadic data (2 August 2021)
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Researchers studying social networks and inter-personal sentiments in bounded or small-scale communities face a trade-off between the use of roster-based and free-recall/name-generator-based survey tools. Roster-based methods scale poorly with sample size, and can more easily lead to respondent fatigue; however, they generally yield higher quality data that are less susceptible to recall bias and that require less post-processing. Name-generator-based methods, in contrast, scale well with sample size and are less likely to lead to respondent fatigue. However, they may be more sensitive to recall bias, and they entail a large amount of highly error-prone post-processing after data collection in order to link elicited names to unique identifiers. Here, we introduce an R package, DieTryin, that allows for roster-based dyadic data to be collected and entered as rapidly as name-generator-based data; DieTryin can be used to run network-structured economic games, as well as collect and process standard social network data and round-robin Likert-scale peer ratings. DieTryin automates photograph standardization, survey tool compilation, and data entry. We present a complete methodological workflow using DieTryin to teach end-users its full functionality. Read article here.
Animal culture research should include avian nest construction (14 July 2021)
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Material culture—that is, group-shared and socially learned object-related behaviour(s)—is a widespread and diverse phenomenon in humans. For dec-ades, researchers have sought to confirm the existence of material culture in non-human animals; however, the main study systems of interest—namely, tool making and/or using non-human primates and corvids—cannot provide such confirmatory evidence: because long-standing ethical and logistical con-straints handicap the collection of necessary experimental data. Synthesizing evidence across decades and disciplines, here, I present a novel framework for (mechanistic, developmental, behavioural, and comparative) study on animal material culture: avian nest construction. Read full article here.
Explaining Cross-Cultural Variation in Mirror Self-Recognition: New Insights Into the Ontogeny of Objective Self-Awareness (25 June 2021)
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Mirror self-recognition (MSR) is considered to be the benchmark of objective self-awareness—the ability to think about oneself. Cross-cultural research showed that there are systematic differences in toddlers’ MSR abilities between 18 and 24 months. Understanding whether these differences result from systematic variation in early social experiences will help us understand the processes through which objective self-awareness develops. In this study, we examined 57 18- to 22-month-old toddlers (31 girls) and their mothers from two distinct sociocultural contexts: urban Canada (58% of the subsample were Canadian-born native English-speakers) and rural Vanuatu, a small-scale island society located in the South Pacific. We had two main goals: (a) to identify the social-interactional correlates of MSR ability in this cross-cultural sample, and (b) to examine whether differences in passing rates could be attributed to confounding factors. Consistent with previous cross-cultural research, ni-Vanuatu toddlers passed the MSR test at significantly lower rates (7%) compared to their Canadian counterparts (68%). Among a suite of social interactive variables, only mothers’ imitation of their toddlers’ behavior during a free play session predicted MSR in the entire sample and maternal imitation partially mediated the effects of culture on MSR. In addition, low passing rates among ni-Vanuatu toddlers could not be attributed to reasons unrelated to self-development (i.e., motivation to show mark-directed behavior, understanding mirror-correspondence, representational thinking). This suggests that differences in MSR passing rates reflect true differences in self-recognition, and that parental imitation may have an important role in shaping the construction of visual self-knowledge in toddlers. Read full article here.
Coalitions and conflict: A longitudinal analysis of men’s politics (5 May 2021)
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To negotiate conflict and navigate status hierarchy, individuals in many species form coalitions. We describe inter-personal conflicts and assess theories of coalition formation in a small-scale human society. Based on longitudinal and cross-sectional social network analysis of men in two communities of Tsimane forager–horticulturalists, we find evidence of reciprocity in coalitional support, as well as evi-dence of transitivity: an ally of my ally is likely to become my ally. We find mixed support for coalition formation between individuals who share a common adversary. Coalition formation was also predicted by food- and labour-sharing and especially by kinship. Physically formidable men and men higher in infor-mal status were more likely to provide coalitional support over time; evidence was mixed that they receive more coalitional support. The highest status men are hubs of a dense coalitional support network that indirectly link all men in the community. These findings suggest that male coalition formation is multiply motivated, and in general reveals the political dynamics that structure men’s lives in small, relatively egali-tarian communities. Read article here.
Children's fingernail cortisol among BaYaka foragers of the Congo Basin: associations with fathers' roles (3 May 2021)
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Children and mothers’ cortisol production in response to family psychosocial conditions, including parenting demands, family resource availability and parental conflict, has been extensively studied in the United States and Europe. Less is known about how such family dynamics relate to family members' cortisol in societies with a strong cultural emphasis on cooperative caregiving. We studied a cumulative indicator of cortisol production, measured from fingernails, among BaYaka forager children (77 samples, n = 48 individuals) and their parents (78 samples, n = 49) in the Congo Basin. Men ranked one another according to locally valued roles for fathers, including providing resources for the family, sharing resources in the community and engaging in less marital conflict. Children had higher cortisol if their parents were ranked as having greater parental conflict, and their fathers were seen as less effective providers and less generous sharers of resources in the community. Children with lower triceps skinfold thickness (an indicator of energetic condition) also had higher cortisol. Parental cortisol was not significantly correlated to men's fathering rankings, including parental conflict. Our results indicate that even in a society in which caregiving is highly cooperative, children's cortisol production was nonetheless correlated to parental conflict as well as variation in locally defined fathering quality.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Multidisciplinary perspectives on social support and maternal–child health’. Read article here.
Chest beats as an honest signal of body size in male mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) (8 April 2021)
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Acoustic signals that reliably indicate body size, which usually determines competitive ability, are of particular interest for understanding how animals assess rivals and choose mates. Whereas body size tends to be negatively associated with formant dispersion in animal vocalizations, non-vocal signals have received little attention. Among the most emblematic sounds in the animal kingdom is the chest beat of gorillas, a non-vocal signal that is thought to be important in intra and inter-sexual competition, yet it is unclear whether it reliably indicates body size. We examined the relationship among body size (back breadth), peak frequency, and three temporal characteristics of the chest beat: duration, number of beats and beat rate from sound recordings of wild adult male mountain gorillas. Using linear mixed models, we found that larger males had significantly lower peak frequencies than smaller ones, but we found no consistent relationship between body size and the temporal characteristics measured. Taken together with earlier findings of positive correlations among male body size, dominance rank and reproductive success, we conclude that the gorilla chest beat is an honest signal of competitive ability. These results emphasize the potential of non-vocal signals to convey important information in mammal communication. Read article here.
A refitting experiment on long bone identification (13 March 2021
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Refitting is an important analytical tool in archaeology that can yield valuable information on site formation processes and on the range of activities practiced at a site, including tool production, tool curation, and discard behavior, among others. In the present paper, we use refit data from a control assemblage of red deer (Cervus elaphus) long bones to assess problems of specimen identification and representation in an experiment where bones were processed for marrow. Three goals motivated this experiment: (i) to assess how different methods of NISP (number of identified specimens) calculation affect comparisons of the relative abundances of long bone regions, (ii) to evaluate whether long bone shaft regions vary with respect to the probability of identification, and (iii) to ascertain the potential refit rate for a well-preserved and fully-collected sample of faunal specimens. Our results show no statistical differences in terms of patterns of skeletal representation between the two methods of NISP calculation (single vs. multiple NISP counts) that we assessed. Our data also indicate that the shape, particularly the cross-section, of fragments clearly impacts the probability of identification and refitting. Moreover, the refitting experiment reveals that, in ideal conditions, a majority of specimens (>95%) from the NISP sample can be refitted, which leads to largely reconstructed skeletal elements. Thus, the comparatively very low refit rates recorded in archaeological sites, including samples that are well preserved, suggest that the often limited extent of excavations, along with offsite discard and/or extensive sharing of parts, substantially reduce the possibility of finding refits in a faunal sample. Read article here.
How can evolutionary and biological anthropologists engage broader audiences? (09 March 2021)
Objectives
With our diverse training, theoretical and empirical toolkits, and rich data, evolutionary and biological anthropologists (EBAs) have much to contribute to research and policy decisions about climate change and other pressing social issues. However, we remain largely absent from these critical, ongoing efforts. Here, we draw on the literature and our own experiences to make recommendations for how EBAs can engage broader audiences, including the communities with whom we collaborate, a more diverse population of students, researchers in other disciplines and the development sector, policymakers, and the general public. These recommendations include: (1) playing to our strength in longitudinal, place-based research, (2) collaborating more broadly, (3) engaging in greater public communication of science, (4) aligning our work with open-science practices to the extent possible, and (5) increasing diversity of our field and teams through intentional action, outreach, training, and mentorship.
Conclusions
We EBAs need to put ourselves out there: research and engagement are complementary, not opposed to each other. With the resources and workable examples we provide here, we hope to spur more EBAs to action. Read article here.
Entropy trade-offs in artistic design: A case study of Tamil kolam (1 March 2021)
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From an evolutionary perspective, art presents many puzzles. Humans invest substantial effort in generating apparently useless displays that include artworks. These vary greatly from ordinary to intricate. From the perspective of signalling theory, these investments in highly complex artistic designs can reflect information about individuals and their social standing. Using a large corpus of kolam art from South India (N = 3139 kolam from 192 women), we test a number of hypotheses about the ways in which social stratification and individual differences affect the complexity of artistic designs. Consistent with evolutionary signalling theories of constrained optimisation, we find that kolam art tends to occupy a ‘sweet spot’ at which artistic complexity, as measured by Shannon information entropy, remains relatively constant from small to large drawings. This stability is maintained through an observable, apparently unconscious trade-off between two standard information-theoretic measures: richness and evenness. Although these drawings arise in a highly stratified, caste-based society, we do not find strong evidence that artistic complexity is influenced by the caste boundaries of Indian society. Rather, the trade-off is likely due to individual-level aesthetic preferences and differences in skill, dedication and time, as well as the fundamental constraints of human cognition and memory. Read article here.
The Potential to Infer the Historical Pattern of Cultural Macroevolution (1 March 2021)
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Phylogenetic analyses increasingly take centre-stage in our understanding of the processes shaping patterns of cultural diversity and cultural evolution over time. Just as biologists explain the origins and maintenance of trait differences among organisms using phylogenetic methods, so anthropologists studying cultural macroevolutionary processes use phylogenetic methods to uncover the history of human populations and the dynamics of culturally transmitted traits. In this paper we revisit concerns with the validity of these methods. Specifically, we use simulations to reveal how properties of the sample (size, missing data), properties of the tree (shape), and properties of the traits (rate of change, number of variants, transmission mode) might influence the inferences that can be drawn about trait distributions across a given phylogeny and the power to discern alternative histories. Our approach shows that in two example datasets specific combinations of properties of the sample, of the tree, and of the trait can lead to potentially high rates of Type I and Type II errors. We offer this simulation tool to help assess the potential impact of this list of persistent perils in future cultural macroevolutionary work. Read full article here.
Taking charge and stepping in: Individuals who punish are rewarded with prestige and dominance (23 February 2021)
A hallmark of human societies is the scale at which we cooperate with many others, even when they are not closely genetically related to us. One proposed mechanism that helps explain why we cooperate is punishment; cooperation may pay and proliferate if those who free ride on the cooperation of others are punished. Yet this ‘solu-tion’ raises another puzzle of its own: Who will bear the costs of punishing? While the deterrence of free‐riders via punishment serves collective interests, presumably any single individual—who has no direct incentive to punish—is better off letting others pay the costs of punishment. However, emerging theory and evidence indicate that, while punishment may at times be a costly act, certain individuals are better able to ‘afford’ to pay the price of punishment and are often consequentially rewarded with fitness‐enhancing reputation benefits. Synthesizing across these latest lines of research, we propose a novel frame-work that considers how high status individuals—that is, individuals with greater prestige or dominance—enjoy lower punishment costs. These individuals are thus more willing to punish, and through their punitive action can in turn reap reputational rewards by further gaining more prestige or dominance. These reputational gains, which work in concert to promote the social success of punishers, recoup the costs of punishing. Together, these lines of work suggest that while punishment is often assumed to be altruistic, it need not always depend on altruism, and mo-tivations to punish may at times be self‐interested and driven (whether consciously or unconsciously) by reputa-tional benefits. Read article here.
Using touchscreen equipped operant chambers to study animal cognition. Benefits, limitations, and advice (19 February 2021)
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Operant chambers are small enclosures used to test animal behavior and cognition. While traditionally reliant on simple technologies for presenting stimuli (e.g., lights and sounds) and recording responses made to basic manipulanda (e.g., levers and buttons), an increas-ing number of researchers are beginning to use Touchscreen-equipped Operant Chambers (TOCs). These TOCs have obvious advantages, namely by allowing researchers to present a near infinite number of visual stimuli as well as increased flexibility in the types of responses that can be made and recorded. We trained wild-caught adult and juvenile great-tailed grackles (Quiscalus mexicanus) to complete experiments using a TOC. We learned much from these efforts, and outline the advantages and disadvantages of our protocols. Our training data are summarized to quantify the variables that might influence participation and success, and we discuss important modifications to facilitate animal engagement and participation in various tasks. Finally, we provide a “training guide” for creating experiments using PsychoPy, a free and open-source software that was incredibly useful during these endeavors. This article, therefore, should serve as a resource to those interested in switch-ing to or maintaining a TOC, or who similarly wish to use a TOC to test the cognitive abilities of non-model species or wild-caught individuals. Read full article here.
Very Low Prevalence and Incidence of Atrial Fibrillation among Bolivian Forager-Farmers (16 February 2021)
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Background: Atrial fibrillation is the most common arrhythmia in post-industrialized populations. Older age, hypertension, obesity, chronic inflammation, and diabetes are significant atrial fibrillation risk factors, suggesting that modern urban environments may promote atrial fibrillation.
Objective: Here we assess atrial fibrillation prevalence and incidence among tropical horticulturalists of the Bolivian Amazon with high levels of physical activity, a lean diet, and minimal coronary atherosclerosis, but also high infectious disease burden and associated inflammation.
Methods: Between 2005–2019, 1314 Tsimane aged 40–94 years (52% female) and 534 Moseten Amerindians aged 40–89 years (50% female) underwent resting 12-lead electrocardiograms to assess atrial fibrillation prevalence. For atrial fibrillation incidence assessment, 1059 (81% of original sample) Tsimane and 310 Moseten (58%) underwent additional ECGs (mean time to follow up 7.0, 1.8 years, respectively).
Findings:Only one (male) of 1314 Tsimane (0.076%) and one (male) of 534 Moseten (0.187%) demonstrated atrial fibrillation at baseline. There was one new (female) Tsimane case in 7395 risk years for the 1059 participants with >1 ECG (incidence rate = 0.14 per 1,000 risk years). No new cases were detected among Moseten, based on 542 risk years.
Conclusion: Tsimane and Moseten show the lowest levels of atrial fibrillation ever reported, 1/20 to ~1/6 of rates in high-income countries. These findings provide additional evidence that a subsistence lifestyle with high levels of physical activity, and a diet low in processed carbohydrates and fat is cardioprotective, despite frequent infection-induced inflammation. Findings suggest that atrial fibrillation is a modifiable lifestyle disease rather than an inevitable feature of cardiovascular aging. Read article here.
Manipulative and Technological Skills Do Not Require a Slow Life History (9 February 2021)
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A recent developmental study reveals that—at least in primates—a slow life history might be a prerequisite for skilled manipulation and technological behavior. This supposition, however, demands critical evaluation because other taxa with a much shorter lifespan also exhibit dexterous object handling and material technology. By examining object-handling and nest-building data from, respectively, mice and birds, we show that a slow life history does not govern the evolution of manipulative and technological ability. More generally, we highlight the need for a comparative, cross-taxa approach to understand drivers—such as differences in life history, ecology, task complexity, and brain size—of seemingly sophisticated behavior. Read article here.
Demonstrating the Utility of Egocentric Relational Event Modeling Using Focal Follow Data from Congolese BaYaka Children and Adolescents Engaging in Work and Play (20 January 2021)
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Temporal aspects of child and adolescent time allocation in diverse cultural settings have been difficult to model using conventional statistical techniques. A new statistical approach, Egocentric Relational Event Modelling (EREM), allows for the simultaneous modelling of activity frequency, duration, and sequencing. Here, EREM is applied to a focal follow dataset of Congolese BaYaka forager child and adolescent play and work activities. Results show that, as children age, they engage in less frequent and extended play bouts and more frequent and extended work bouts. Bout frequency and duration were a more sensitive measure for early sex differences than overall time allocation. Sequential patterns of work and play suggest that these activities have short-term energetic trade-offs. This article demonstrates that EREM can reveal stable and variable patterns in child development.
Observational studies of children’s time allocation demonstrate that age, sex, family circumstance, and culture influence activity budgets (Blurton Jones 1972; Bock and Johnson 2004; Gosso 2010; Munroe et al. 1984; Whiting and Whiting 1975). However, temporal aspects of behavior have been difficult to model using conventional statistical techniques. Here, we demonstrate the applicability of the Egocentric Relational Event Model (EREM) using a focal follow dataset of BaYaka child and adolescent play and work activities (Butts 2008; Marcum and Butts 2015). While EREM is not the only statistical framework to accommodate sequential data, it is unique in the flexibility with which it can simultaneously model the probability and duration of multiple events. Read article here.
Socialization, Autonomy, and Cooperation: Insights from Task Assignment Among the Egalitarian BaYaka (20 January 2021)
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Across diverse societies, task assignment is a socialization practice that gradually builds children's instrumental skills and integrates them into the flow of daily activities in their community. However, psychosocial tensions can arise when cooperation is demanded from children. Through their compliance or noncompliance, they learn cultural norms and values related to autonomy and obligations to others. Here, we investigate task assignment among BaYaka foragers of the Republic of the Congo, among whom individual autonomy is a foundational cultural schema. Our analysis is based on systematic observations, participant observation, and informal interviews with adults about their perspectives on children's learning and noncompliance, as well as their own learning experiences growing up. We find that children are assigned fewer tasks as they age. However, children's rate of noncompliance remains steady across childhood, indicating an early internalization of a core value for autonomy. Despite demonstrating some frustration with children's noncompliance, adults endorse their autonomy and remember task assignment being critical to their own learning as children. We argue that cross-cultural variation in children's compliance with task assignments must be understood within a larger framework of socialization as constituted by many integrated and bidirectional processes embedded in a social, ecological, and cultural context. Read article here.
Local convergence of behavior across species (15 January 2021)
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Behavior is a way for organisms to respond flexibly to the environmental conditions they encounter. Our own species occurs in a variety of habits, sharing these with a large number of other species, but it remains unclear to what degree a shared environment constrains behavior. Here, we show that foraging human populations and non-human mammal and bird species who live in a given environment show high levels of similarity in their foraging, reproductive, and social behavior. Our findings suggest that local conditions may select for similar behaviors in both humans and non-human animals. Read full article here.
Human behavioral ecology and niche construction (7 January 2021)
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We examine the relationship between niche construction theory (NCT) and human behavioral ecology (HBE), two branches of evolutionary science that are important sources of theory in archeology. We distinguish between formal models of niche con-struction as an evolutionary process, and uses of niche construction to refer to a kind of human behavior. Formal models from NCT examine how environmental modifica-tion can change the selection pressures that organisms face. In contrast, formal models from HBE predict behavior assuming people behave adaptively in their local setting, and can be used to predict when and why people engage in niche construction. We emphasize that HBE as a field is much broader than foraging theory and can incorpo-rate social and cultural influences on decision-making. We demonstrate how these approaches can be formally incorporated in a multi-inheritance framework for evolu-tionary research, and argue that archeologists can best contribute to evolutionary the-ory by building and testing models that flexibly incorporate HBE and NCT elements. Read article here.