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These sentinels keep their babies safe from harm in their high-rise nursery; playful primates are prone to falling out and need to be watched. As well as rescuing tumblers, babysitters also play with their charges, groom them and possibly even suckle them too. Occasionally this guard duty falls to aunts or sisters, but Baden has found that friends – both male and female – are equally, if not more, important
In her 2009 book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, Hrdy cites a catalogue of evidence from surviving traditional cultures that suggests our ancestors in the Pleistocene may have had a significant degree of help – from men who thought they just might have been the father, to actual fathers, post-menopausal grandmothers, non-breeding aunts and older children. The help from these allomothers is the reason our species was able to foster big brains yet still proliferate. ‘Human infants are born larger and even more helpless than any of the other apes, and yet
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Best Dad. Darwin’s frog swallows his clutch of a dozen or so eggs just before they’ve hatched. They stay in his throat sac for eight whole weeks, after which he barfs up whole baby froglets. For the whole ‘pregnancy’ he doesn’t eat and is muted by the experience.
When Darwin outlined ‘the law of battle’ sexually combative female topi did not feature. In his reading of the animal kingdom, females have no need to fight over sex. Darwin’s theory of sexual selection is, with the rarest of exceptions, all about males clashing over conjugal rights to females. ‘It is certain that amongst almost all animals there is a struggle between the males for the possession of the female,’ he tells
The idea that females might be using their horns to fight other females is never considered in the many pages of Darwin’s thoughtful conjecture. Instead he concludes that although such armaments must be a ‘waste of vital power’, their presence or absence in females depends not on them being ‘of any special use, but simply in inheritance
When biologists talk about the “battle of the sexes” they often tacitly assume that the battle is between persistent males who always want to mate and females who don’t,’ he has said.
‘It is not uncommon to see males collapsing with exhaustion as the demands of the females get too much for them,’ Bro-Jørgensen said.
In a wild population in the Congo, high-ranking female gorillas were seen to be even more audacious: harassing, interrupting and even replacing lower-ranking females during copulations. The researchers concluded that tactical non-conceptive sex was an effective ‘spiteful strategy’ to monopolize the silverback’s sperm and resources for their offspring alone.
‘The textbook definition of birdsong is that it’s “complex vocalizations by male birds during the breeding season”. So it’s actually defined as a male vocalization.’
far from being dumb, 71 per cent of female songbirds sing.
‘The question we should really be asking is not why do male birds sing, but why have some females subsequently lost song?’ Langmore said to me. Unlike male birdsong, research into female song is still in its infancy. But it appears that female songbirds use their vocal abilities primarily to compete with other females.
When it comes to social species, status is key for determining access to food, shelter, top-quality sperm – all the resources a female requires to reproduce. So it pays to be the top bitch. Males
‘Females are not innately disposed to organize into hierarchies… primate males appear to be the archetypal “political animal”,’ was the woeful conclusion of Female Hierarchies, the first ever textbook specifically devoted to female dominance relations. This could not be more wrong.
Recall the savannah baboons we met in the previous chapter. High-status females have it all: first dibs at food sources and a high-ranking protection racket for them and their babies. Low-status mums and their offspring are subject to constant bullying by those above. The resulting stress impacts their reproductive capacity. Low-ranking females breed later, ovulate less frequently and can even spontaneously abort as a result of being persistently terrorized by dominants. As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy notes, across primate species ‘high rank carries with it not only freedom from harassment and
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Female primates have been described as ‘obsessed with signs of status differences or disrespect’. They just don’t make it as obvious as the males.
Meerkat society is predicated on ruthless reproductive competition between closely related females who, when pregnant, will readily kill and eat each other’s pups. This baby-eating bonanza is kept in check by the omnipotence of a dominant female with a zero-tolerance policy for breeding subordinates. Her goal is to prevent any of her female relatives reproducing during her reign, and rope them into caring for her babies instead. This removes any unwanted competition for her pups and protects them from being eaten. It also allows her to invest all her energy into raising more litters than she
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Suckling is a serious drain on a subordinate’s reserves, but these enslaved females have no choice when the alternative is exile and a lonely death. This threat explains the curious altruism of inherently self-motivated individuals.
‘As a developing female, the last thing you want is for your mother to kick you out of the group. So in a sense, you have to play her game. She is bigger than you and has the capacity to throw you out. So instead you just have to hope someone will eat her,’ Clutton-Brock told me. One thing you won’t see is subordinate females ganging up to overthrow the top bitch.
Every meerkat born has a one in five probability of being killed by another meerkat, most likely a female and quite possibly their own mother.
One legendary matriarch, named Mabili, succeeded in birthing eighty-one pups during a decade-long reign. Given that only one in every six or seven meerkats will get to reproduce effectively, the variance in breeding success for female meerkats is even more profound than for your average antagonistic alpha male. Clutton-Brock told me that the most successful red deer stag he ever documented only ever fathered about twenty-five offspring during its lifetime,
This system has been honed to the extreme by the termites, who have been cooperating since the early Jurassic, some 150 million years ago, when dinosaurs walked the earth.
In many species the queen swells into a monstrous egg-laying machine whose abdomen has swollen over a thousand times into a giant waxy off-white sausage around ten centimetres long. Her head, thorax and legs remain tiny and can only flail about pathetically, since all other movement is restrained by her grotesque, pulsating girth. She must be fed and her gargantuan maggot-like body cleaned by a legion of workers, allowing her to spend every bit of her energy squeezing out a fresh egg every three or so seconds, all day every day, for up to twenty years.
The rest of the several million termites in the colony, other than the king, are rendered sterile and kept in their lowly castes by ingesting pheromones secreted by the royal anus, all of which makes the British monarchy suddenly seem quite reasonable. Eusociality is an alien way of life that challenges philosophical ideas of the individual and has provided inspiration for countless sci-fi dystopias. Aldous Huxley reportedly based the dictatorship in Brave New World on humans as social insects, with five castes. The fact this sci-fi society has evolved in invertebrates – such distant relatives
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The naked mole rat’s face is one only a mother could love – if only the mother in question were not a highly belligerent despotic queen with no love for anything.
So it is possible that there is a dual role of prolactin in mole rats: it not only stops them from breeding, but also makes them better carers to the colony’s young. For the queen to maintain her dominance throughout the colony takes some serious legwork. ‘We know she expends enormous amounts of energy patrolling the colony. We found that the queen is more than twice as active as the next most active animal in the colony and travelled three times the distance over the space of about eighteen months,’ Faulkes explained to me. Faulkes thinks this relentless royal tour is necessary to maintain
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‘Naked mole rats are a brilliant example of a sort of utopian, almost communist society, but of course, lurking under that, there’s all kinds of sinister shit going on.’
In real-life Madagascar there are ring-tailed lemurs aplenty, but their leader isn’t a king, she’s a queen. The producers may have felt it only natural to impose male governance on their feel-good movie, but in ring-tailed lemur society females are unquestionably the authoritarian sex.
sifaka don’t walk, they dance.
Male sifaka are second-class citizens, forced to give up the comfiest, sunniest sleep spots and best food to the alpha female. Any resistance is met with a firm hand. According
named Alison Jolly. Jolly, who died in England in 2014 aged seventy-six, is one of primatology’s lesser-known female visionaries. She pioneered a brand of environmental activism that helped protect much of Madagascar’s unique wildlife and established the idea that primate higher intelligence evolved to manage complex social relationships rather than toolmaking. This flew against the thinking of the time but is taken for granted today.
Female hostility over rank isn’t unusual amongst primates – we’ve already witnessed bullying at play within the matriarchy of savannah baboons – but attacking males is. One study into female ring-tailed lemur aggression found that males are three times more likely than females to be the recipients of serious injury. Some males even die as a result of female violence. In Madagascar I watched male ring-tailed lemurs subjected to routine physical harassment – biting, shoving and hitting – to surrender their food, a cosy sleep spot or prime patch of sun.
Madagascar’s lemurs are prosimians – our most basic primate cousins. They evolved from an early offshoot of the main primate evolutionary path that subsequently went on to divide into the New World monkeys (simians that inhabit the Americas) and Old World monkeys (simians of Africa and Asia, which led to the evolution of all great apes, including us). Some fifty to sixty million years ago the ancestors of modern lemurs became isolated on the island of Madagascar. No one is quite sure how, but the most popular theory is they floated to the island on a raft of vegetation. This pioneering group
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In the sixties and seventies primatology was well and truly hypnotized by showy male dominance systems.This
When females are only receptive for a short period, a male can temporarily enforce her chastity by clogging her vagina with his coagulated seminal fluids. These plugs can get pretty big – in ring-tailed lemurs they’re over five cubic centimetres.2 They don’t make it impossible for subsequent males to mate, but they need to be dislodged so they are a significant obstacle. When the female is only receptive for a day or even less, this might make all the difference. A recent study by Amy Dunham, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Rice University, found that copulatory
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Game theory predicts that when two contestants are equally matched, the winner will be the one that values the prize most.Females, with their elevated reproductive costs, have higher nutritional demands than males and are more at risk from going hungry. Undernourished females are unlikely to produce quality eggs or support pregnancy and lactation, but a skinny male can still shoot viable sperm and fire his genes into the next generation. So, females have more to lose in the reproductive fitness stakes and will therefore be expected to fight harder for resources.
The spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta) is a candidate for most domineering female mammal on the planet. They aggressively overpower males in most situations and sport an eight-inch clitoris that’s shaped and positioned exactly like the male’s penis. They also have a false scrotum and no external vaginal opening. Instead they must copulate and give birth through their ‘pseudo-penis’.
It would seem that soaking in a prenatal androgen soup wires these fetal females towards aggression, giving them the competitive edge as adults. But if evolution is all about maximizing genetic posterity then this antagonistic advantage is something of a double-edged sword. For the spotted hyena, increased aggression may help her and her cubs fight off rivals when feeding is highly competitive at a communal carcass. But the price is giving birth through a clitoris,
our shared ancestor must have been either co-dominant or fully female dominant.
‘Everybody always says, “Why would you have female dominance?” Well, why wouldn’t you?’ she exclaimed over Skype, with seasoned exasperation. ‘You have a placental mammal in which the cost of reproduction is borne by the female. Why would you not have a situation arise where that female would have advantages over the male?’ The answer, she believes, is if dominance is achieved by increased aggression from androgen exposure, then this comes with some costly side effects that only some species have evolved to manage and thus maintain their reproductive fitness. Other females have discovered ways
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Power in animal societies has traditionally been defined in terms of dominance through physical intimidation – which is a very male way of looking at it. Lewis believes we need to find a new way of categorizing power structures to recognize the commanding influence of females that are small yet mighty.
In chimps, the alpha male is officially the dominant political figure. But no alpha male could rise up and dominate the colony without Mama’s support, which gave her an enormous amount of power. The males may have sucked up attention with their screaming and fighting, but Mama was, without doubt, ‘the boss
Female hierarchies are stable and rarely contested. According to de Waal they’re maintained by ‘respect from below rather than intimidation and strength from above’ and perhaps are better described as subordination hierarchies.3 Amongst male chimps it’s a very different story. Rank is determined partly by physical strength but crucially by tactical coalitions with other males. Alpha male status is frequently challenged and highly unstable.
‘We need to move away from this idea of dominance as being something special,’ de Waal told me. ‘We need to make distinctions. You have physical dominance, which clearly in many species is male. Then you have rank, which is communicated more between males and between females than between the sexes.’ Rank is measured by who submits to whom, which chimps do by bowing and pant-grunting. These outward signs of status reflect what de Waal calls the ‘formal hierarchy’ and act like military stripes on a uniform. ‘Finally, you have power,’ de Waal told me, ‘meaning how much influence you have on the
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Amongst capuchin monkeys, for example, it is the diminutive females that more commonly display leadership when it comes to foraging and group movements not the alpha male, challenging the age-old assumption that dominance and leadership are one and the same.
Like chimps, females are around two thirds the size of males and also migrate from their birth group. Their social lives could not be more different, however. Instead of living out their adulthood as a forlorn diaspora with little or no agency, females join groups and form alliances with unrelated females. The power of this constructed sisterhood allows them to dominate the bigger males. It is formed and maintained not by fighting and physical intimidation, but by what scientists describe as G-G rubbing, shorthand for genito-genital rubbing.
‘Sex is the bonobo’s answer to avoiding conflict,’ de Waal added, which is why these unconventional apes have been dubbed the ‘make-love-not-war’ hippy ape.
Males, for example, will enjoy each other’s company by ‘penis-fencing’, which sees them rubbing their ‘swords’ together whilst dangling from a branch (nice work if you can do it). For females, the most frequent and preferred sexual activity is G-G, which they will choose over sex with a male if both present themselves at the same time. ‘There’s no bonobo that’s exclusively heterosexual or homosexual. They’re all bisexual,’ Parish told me. Like humans, bonobos have a partial separation between sex and reproduction, with females frequently initiating and engaging in sex outside of their fertile
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In those days, face-to-face copulation was considered uniquely human, a cultural innovation that needed to be taught to preliterate people (hence the term ‘missionary position’). These early studies were studiously ignored by the international scientific establishment. It wasn’t until the sexual liberation of the 1970s that the full glory of the bonobos’ sex life started to go public.
Female bonobos in Congo’s LuiKotale forest have even been recorded using specialized gestures and pantomime to convey their desire for a bit of G-G. The soliciting female will point backwards with a foot towards her sexual swelling and then shimmy her hips in imitation of a rub, at which display the second bonobo will embrace her for the real thing. The authors of the paper note the significance of such gestures in the evolution of language – the ability to point
Parish’s former supervisor, the brilliant Barbara Smuts, incorporated bonobos into a new thesis which proposed how, over the course of human evolution, this unusual degree of gender inequality came about. She pointed the finger at our ancestors’ gradual switch from hunter-gathering to intensive agriculture and animal husbandry. While cooperation on hunts gave men the possibility of controlling food resources, women’s contribution to foraging limited this control. The smaller plots of land associated with the switch to intensive agriculture and animal husbandry, however, limited women’s
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