Might copulating with multiple males allow the female to “game” paternal certainty and plant a seed of confusion, so to speak? After all, by mating multiply, a female langur was engineering the possibility that these lethal males, potential killers of her infant, had actually sired it. And this, Hrdy realized, would make it less likely that a male would kill the infant that might be his. The only way to fool the males was to mate polyandrously, sometimes even in rapid sequence with numerous partners. Not only was this not “unnatural,” it was beneficial, Hrdy asserted, suggesting that female
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