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      Monogamy, strongly bonded groups, and the evolution of human social structure

      Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews
      Wiley

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          Abstract

          Human social evolution has most often been treated in a piecemeal fashion, with studies focusing on the evolution of specific components of human society such as pair-bonding, cooperative hunting, male provisioning, grandmothering, cooperative breeding, food sharing, male competition, male violence, sexual coercion, territoriality, and between-group conflicts. Evolutionary models about any one of those components are usually concerned with two categories of questions, one relating to the origins of the component and the other to its impact on the evolution of human cognition and social life. Remarkably few studies have been concerned with the evolution of the entity that integrates all components, the human social system itself. That social system has as its core feature human social structure, which I define here as the common denominator of all human societies in terms of group composition, mating system, residence patterns, and kinship structures. The paucity of information on the evolution of human social structure poses substantial problems because that information is useful, if not essential, to assess both the origins and impact of any particular aspect of human society.

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          Most cited references81

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          A theory of human life history evolution: Diet, intelligence, and longevity

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            Origins of Human Communication

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              Stepwise evolution of stable sociality in primates.

              Although much attention has been focused on explaining and describing the diversity of social grouping patterns among primates, less effort has been devoted to understanding the evolutionary history of social living. This is partly because social behaviours do not fossilize, making it difficult to infer changes over evolutionary time. However, primate social behaviour shows strong evidence for phylogenetic inertia, permitting the use of Bayesian comparative methods to infer changes in social behaviour through time, thereby allowing us to evaluate alternative models of social evolution. Here we present a model of primate social evolution, whereby sociality progresses from solitary foraging individuals directly to large multi-male/multi-female aggregations (approximately 52 million years (Myr) ago), with pair-living (approximately 16 Myr ago) or single-male harem systems (approximately 16 Myr ago) derivative from this second stage. This model fits the data significantly better than the two widely accepted alternatives (an unstructured model implied by the socioecological hypothesis or a model that allows linear stepwise changes in social complexity through time). We also find strong support for the co-evolution of social living with a change from nocturnal to diurnal activity patterns, but not with sex-biased dispersal. This supports suggestions that social living may arise because of increased predation risk associated with diurnal activity. Sociality based on loose aggregation is followed by a second shift to stable or bonded groups. This structuring facilitates the evolution of cooperative behaviours and may provide the scaffold for other distinctive anthropoid traits including coalition formation, cooperative resource defence and large brains.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews
                Evol. Anthropol.
                Wiley
                10601538
                March 2013
                March 2013
                April 12 2013
                : 22
                : 2
                : 52-65
                Article
                10.1002/evan.21345
                23585378
                5eeb6072-8fa6-48d4-b5e4-b5e762052ce1
                © 2013

                http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/tdm_license_1.1

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