When AAAS tries to sell feminist propaganda as science! May we call it junk science!
Maybe these males were the old or young or was otherwise handicapped (e.g. injury) etc.!
What about alpha females or larger than normal females? This was not investigated so it seems.
"In concrete jungles all over the world it feels like men and women are constantly competing for dominance. As human women navigate gendered pay gaps [???] and modern dating culture, their gorilla cousins [???] in actual jungles have to deal with their own challenges, such as being half the size of their male counterparts. ... Now, a new study calls into question this “male power archetype” by finding that female mountain gorillas actually outrank some males.
The researchers analyzed 25 years of behavioral data collected on 55 adult mountain gorillas in Uganda to understand the power dynamics between females and males. They found that even though each group was led by an alpha male, 88% of females outranked at least one male. ..."
From the highlights and abstract:
"Highlights
• Female mountain gorillas can outrank males despite being half their size
• In our study, females won 28% of agonistic interactions against adult non-alpha males
• Females had feeding priority over males they outranked
Summary
Males have been long assumed to strictly outrank females in all but a few mammals, potentially due to male-biased size dimorphism emerging from male-male competition and female mate choice.
However, recent work questions these traditional [feminist] views [???], suggesting that intersexual power varies along a continuum from strictly male- to strictly female-biased and is not a static species attribute.
We used a 25-year dataset to examine the intersexual power dynamics in wild mountain gorillas, considered a prominent example of strict male power.
Although the highest-ranking individual in each of the four study groups was male, 88% of females outranked at least one adult male in multi-male groups.
Females won 28% of agonistic interactions against non-alpha males, predominantly when these males were young adults or old. Our results did not support that females gain power over males due to mating-based leverage, as a byproduct of male-male competition, or due to female-female support, but they suggested that females may gain power over non-alpha males due to alpha male support and by leveraging commodities not directly linked to mating.
Females always had feeding priority on a valued monopolizable resource over non-alpha males they outranked and, in half of the cases, over non-alpha males overall, highlighting a functional component of female empowerment.
Our study questions the “male power archetype” [an invention by feminists] assumption in a hominid that exhibits extreme male-biased sexual size dimorphism and, thus, it calls for future work to investigate similar long-standing assumptions regarding the evolutionary origins of intersexual relationships across species."
Female mountain gorillas can outrank non-alpha males (open access)
Graphical abstract
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