Browse
Submit Data
Databases
API
Help

Dataset Information

0 Views

0 Connections

0 Citations

0 Reanalyses

0 Downloads

Omics score: 0

Who was helping? The scope for female cooperative breeding in early Homo.

ABSTRACT: Derived aspects of our human life history, such as short interbirth intervals and altricial newborns, have been attributed to male provisioning of nutrient-rich meat within monogamous relationships. However, many primatologists and anthropologists have questioned the relative importance of pair-bonding and biparental care, pointing to evidence that cooperative breeding better characterizes human reproductive and child-care relationships. We present a mathematical model with empirically-informed parameter ranges showing that natural selection favors cooperation among mothers over a wide range of conditions. In contrast, our analysis provides a far more narrow range of support for selection favoring male coalition-based monogamy over more promiscuous independent males, suggesting that provisioning within monogamous relationships may fall short of explaining the evolution of Homo life history. Rather, broader cooperative networks within and between the sexes provide the primary basis for our unique life history.

SUBMITTER: Bell AV

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3867437 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Json Xml

Publications

Who was helping? The scope for female cooperative breeding in early Homo.

Bell Adrian Viliami AV Hinde Katie K Newson Lesley L

PloS one 20131218 12

Derived aspects of our human life history, such as short interbirth intervals and altricial newborns, have been attributed to male provisioning of nutrient-rich meat within monogamous relationships. However, many primatologists and anthropologists have questioned the relative importance of pair-bonding and biparental care, pointing to evidence that cooperative breeding better characterizes human reproductive and child-care relationships. We present a mathematical model with empirically-informed ...[more]

PMID: 24367605

Similar Datasets

Experimental evidence that group size generates divergent benefits of cooperative breeding for male and female ostriches.

Project description:Cooperative breeding allows the costs of parental care to be shared, but as groups become larger, such benefits often decline as competition increases and group cohesion breaks down. The counteracting forces of cooperation and competition are predicted to select for an optimal group size, but variation in groups is ubiquitous across cooperative breeding animals. Here, we experimentally test if group sizes vary because of sex differences in the costs and benefits of cooperative breeding in captive ostriches, Struthio camelus, and compare this to the distribution of group sizes in the wild. We established 96 groups with different numbers of males (1 or 3) and females (1, 3, 4, or 6) and manipulated opportunities for cooperation over incubation. There was a clear optimal group size for males (one male with four or more females) that was explained by high costs of competition and negligible benefits of cooperation. Conversely, female reproductive success was maximised across a range of group sizes due to the benefits of cooperation with male and female group members. Reproductive success in intermediate sized groups was low for both males and females due to sexual conflict over the timing of mating and incubation. Our experiments show that sex differences in cooperation and competition can explain group size variation in cooperative breeders.

| S-EPMC9531942 | biostudies-literature

Reverse audience effects on helping in cooperatively breeding marmoset monkeys.

Project description:Cooperatively breeding common marmosets show substantial variation in the amount of help they provide. Pay-to-stay and social prestige models of helping attribute this variation to audience effects, i.e. that individuals help more if group members can witness their interactions with immatures, whereas models of kin selection, group augmentation or those stressing the need to gain parenting experience do not predict any audience effects. We quantified the readiness of adult marmosets to share food in the presence or absence of other group members. Contrary to both predictions, we found a reverse audience effect on food-sharing behaviour: marmosets would systematically share more food with immatures when no audience was present. Thus, helping in common marmosets, at least in related family groups, does not support the pay-to-stay or the social prestige model, and helpers do not take advantage of the opportunity to engage in reputation management. Rather, the results appear to reflect a genuine concern for the immatures' well-being, which seems particularly strong when solely responsible for the immatures.

| S-EPMC5897615 | biostudies-literature

Market forces influence helping behaviour in cooperatively breeding paper wasps.

Project description:Biological market theory is potentially useful for understanding helping behaviour in animal societies. It predicts that competition for trading partners will affect the value of commodities exchanged. It has gained empirical support in cooperative breeders, where subordinates help dominant breeders in exchange for group membership, but so far without considering one crucial aspect: outside options. We find support for a biological market in paper wasps, Polistes dominula. We first show that females have a choice of cooperative partners. Second, by manipulating entire subpopulations in the field, we increase the supply of outside options for subordinates, freeing up suitable nesting spots and providing additional nesting partners. We predicted that by intensifying competition for help, our manipulation would force dominants to accept a lower price for group membership. As expected, subordinates reduce their foraging effort following our treatments. We conclude that to accurately predict the amount of help provided, social units cannot be viewed in isolation: the surrounding market must also be considered.

| S-EPMC5286204 | biostudies-literature

Helping in cooperatively breeding long-tailed tits: a test of Hamilton's rule.

Project description:Inclusive fitness theory provides the conceptual framework for our current understanding of social evolution, and empirical studies suggest that kin selection is a critical process in the evolution of animal sociality. A key prediction of inclusive fitness theory is that altruistic behaviour evolves when the costs incurred by an altruist (c) are outweighed by the benefit to the recipient (b), weighted by the relatedness of altruist to recipient (r), i.e. Hamilton's rule rb > c. Despite its central importance in social evolution theory, there have been relatively few empirical tests of Hamilton's rule, and hardly any among cooperatively breeding vertebrates, leading some authors to question its utility. Here, we use data from a long-term study of cooperatively breeding long-tailed tits Aegithalos caudatus to examine whether helping behaviour satisfies Hamilton's condition for the evolution of altruism. We show that helpers are altruistic because they incur survival costs through the provision of alloparental care for offspring. However, they also accrue substantial benefits through increased survival of related breeders and offspring, and despite the low average relatedness of helpers to recipients, these benefits of helping outweigh the costs incurred. We conclude that Hamilton's rule for the evolution of altruistic helping behaviour is satisfied in this species.

| S-EPMC3982671 | biostudies-other

Elephants know when they need a helping trunk in a cooperative task.

Project description:Elephants are widely assumed to be among the most cognitively advanced animals, even though systematic evidence is lacking. This void in knowledge is mainly due to the danger and difficulty of submitting the largest land animal to behavioral experiments. In an attempt to change this situation, a classical 1930s cooperation paradigm commonly tested on monkeys and apes was modified by using a procedure originally designed for chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) to measure the reactions of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus). This paradigm explores the cognition underlying coordination toward a shared goal. What do animals know or learn about the benefits of cooperation? Can they learn critical elements of a partner's role in cooperation? Whereas observations in nature suggest such understanding in nonhuman primates, experimental results have been mixed, and little evidence exists with regards to nonprimates. Here, we show that elephants can learn to coordinate with a partner in a task requiring two individuals to simultaneously pull two ends of the same rope to obtain a reward. Not only did the elephants act together, they inhibited the pulling response for up to 45 s if the arrival of a partner was delayed. They also grasped that there was no point to pulling if the partner lacked access to the rope. Such results have been interpreted as demonstrating an understanding of cooperation. Through convergent evolution, elephants may have reached a cooperative skill level on a par with that of chimpanzees.

| S-EPMC3064331 | biostudies-literature

Direct benefits explain interspecific variation in helping behaviour among cooperatively breeding birds.

Project description:Kin selection theory provides one important explanation for seemingly altruistic helping behaviour by non-breeding subordinates in cooperative breeding animals. However, it cannot explain why helpers in many species provide energetically costly care to unrelated offspring. Here, I use comparative analyses to show that direct fitness benefits of helping others, associated with future opportunities to breed in the resident territory, are responsible for the widespread variation in helping effort (offspring food provisioning) and kin discrimination across cooperatively breeding birds. In species where prospects of territory inheritance are larger, subordinates provide more help, and, unlike subordinates that cannot inherit a territory, do not preferentially direct care towards related offspring. Thus, while kin selection can underlie helping behaviour in some species, direct benefits are much more important than currently recognised and explain why unrelated individuals provide substantial help in many bird species.

| S-EPMC5653647 | biostudies-literature

Kin selection, not group augmentation, predicts helping in an obligate cooperatively breeding bird.

Project description:Kin selection theory has been the central model for understanding the evolution of cooperative breeding, where non-breeders help bear the cost of rearing young. Recently, the dominance of this idea has been questioned; particularly in obligate cooperative breeders where breeding without help is uncommon and seldom successful. In such systems, the direct benefits gained through augmenting current group size have been hypothesized to provide a tractable alternative (or addition) to kin selection. However, clear empirical tests of the opposing predictions are lacking. Here, we provide convincing evidence to suggest that kin selection and not group augmentation accounts for decisions of whether, where and how often to help in an obligate cooperative breeder, the chestnut-crowned babbler (Pomatostomus ruficeps). We found no evidence that group members base helping decisions on the size of breeding units available in their social group, despite both correlational and experimental data showing substantial variation in the degree to which helpers affect productivity in units of different size. By contrast, 98 per cent of group members with kin present helped, 100 per cent directed their care towards the most related brood in the social group, and those rearing half/full-sibs helped approximately three times harder than those rearing less/non-related broods. We conclude that kin selection plays a central role in the maintenance of cooperative breeding in this species, despite the apparent importance of living in large groups.

| S-EPMC3415917 | biostudies-literature

First evidence for heritable variation in cooperative breeding behaviour.

Project description:Understanding the evolution of complex social behaviours, such as cooperative breeding, is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology, which has attracted much theoretical and empirical interest. Variation within and between species in the frequency of helping behaviour has been typically associated with variation in direct costs and benefits due to ecological constraints, or with indirect fitness payoffs (i.e. kin selection). Here, we provide the first evidence that individual variation in cooperative behaviour within a natural population also has a heritable component. Using a seven-generation pedigree in a wild population of western bluebirds (Sialia mexicana), we show significant heritable variation for the propensity to help rather than breed, as well as for the probability of having a helper at the nest. We also document a strong positive relationship between a bird's lifespan and its prospect of receiving help when breeding, in accordance with earlier comparative studies across species. These findings provide useful insights into the possible mechanisms which have led to the evolution of cooperative breeding and other social systems.

| S-EPMC2493572 | biostudies-literature

Climate and the distribution of cooperative breeding in mammals.

Project description:Cooperative breeding systems, in which non-breeding individuals provide care for the offspring of dominant group members, occur in less than 1% of mammals and are associated with social monogamy and the production of multiple offspring per birth (polytocy). Here, we show that the distribution of alloparental care by non-breeding subordinates is associated with habitats where annual rainfall is low. A possible reason for this association is that the females of species found in arid environments are usually polytocous and this may have facilitated the evolution of alloparental care.

| S-EPMC5319355 | biostudies-literature

Cooperative breeding in oscine passerines: does sociality inhibit speciation?

Project description:Cooperative breeding in birds is much more prevalent than has been previously realized, occurring in 18.5% of oscine passerines known to have biparental care, and is the predominant social system of some ancient oscine clades. Cooperation is distributed unevenly in clades that contain both cooperative and pair breeders, and is usually confined to a few related genera in which it can be ubiquitous. Cooperative clades are species poor compared with pair-breeding clades, because pair breeders evolve migratory habits, speciate on oceanic islands and are more likely to have distributions spread across more than one biogeographic region. These differences reflect the increased capacity for colonization by pair breeders because their young disperse. Thus cooperative breeding has macroevolutionary consequences by restricting rates of speciation and macroecological implications by influencing the assembly of island and migrant faunas.

| S-EPMC1691506 | biostudies-literature

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

OmicsDI is an Elixir interoperability service. Learn more ›

Tweets

OmicsDI Databases

PRIDE
PeptideAtlas
MassIVE
JPOST Repository
Physiome Model Repository

EGA
EVA
ENA
LINCS
PAXDB
Cell Collective

MetaboLights
Metabolomics Workbench
MetabolomeExpress
GNPS
BioModels
FAIRDOMHub

ArrayExpress
dbGaP
ExpressionAtlas
GEO
NODE

Information

Databases
Help
API
Contact us
Code on GitHub
Terms of use
Submit Data