by New research on Monday contradicted the generally occupied idea that men dominate women among primates and reveal far more nuanced performance dynamics in the relationships of our close relatives.
“We have had a completely binary view of this problem for a long time: We thought that a kind of either men or women was dominated – and that this was a fixed feature,” said Elise Huchard, primatologist at the University of Montpellier in France.
“Lately, this idea has been questioned by studies that show that the truth is much more complicated,” said the main author of a new study published in the magazine PNAS.
The French-German research team has enforced the scientific literature for interactions between male and female primates that revealed their hierarchical relationships.
This included aggression, threats and signs of dominant or submissive behavior, e.g.
The team collected data from 253 populations in 121 primate species for over five years, including a number of monkeys, lemurs, Tarsier and Loris.
They found that confrontations between members of the opposite sex were much more common than previously assumed. On average, more than half of these interactions within a group included a man and a woman.
Men clearly dominate women who were defined as a profit of more than 90 percent of these confrontations, only observed in 17 percent of the populations. Among this minority were Paviane and chimpanzees who are the closest relatives for humans.
A clear female rule was recorded in 13 percent of primate populations, including Lemurs and Bonobos.
This meant that 70 percent of primates could either be men or women at the top.
– Battle of the sexes –
If the male rule was particularly pronounced, it was usually in one way in which men have a clear physical advantage, such as: B. larger bodies or teeth.
Even in floor -bound species, it was more common in which women are less able to run and hide than their relatives living in the trees.
In the meantime, women dominated to dominate societies when they practiced control over reproduction.
For example, the genitals of female pavians swell when they have ovulation. Males protect females in these few days of their menstrual cycle and make sure that other competitors cannot mate with them.
In Bonobos, however, this sexual swelling is less obvious.
“Males never know when they have ovulation or not. As a result, (the female bonobos) with what they want, and more and more easily, with the one they want, mate,” said Huchard.
The dominance of women is also more common when women compete with each other and when men provide more for the boys.
In these species, women are often lonely or live only in couples with men and women. This means that the monogamy is closely connected to the dominance of women.
Can these results be extrapolated on our own species? Huchard emphasized Huchard.
But on the whole we would fall into the middle category in which neither men nor women always have a strict dominance over the other.
“These results confirm pretty well with what we know about male relationships between hunters and collectors who were more egalitarian than in the agricultural societies that were later created,” said Huchard.
Ber/dl/giv
