Amazing stuff!
"Humans are far closer to meerkats and beavers for levels of exclusive mating than we are to most of our primate cousins, according to a new University of Cambridge study that includes a table ranking monogamy rates in various species of mammal. ...
The study ... has humans at an overall 66% rate for full siblings, placing us seventh of eleven species in the study considered socially monogamous and preferring long-term pair bonds.
Meerkats come in at a 60% full-sibling rate, while beavers just beat humans for monogamy with a 73% rate. ...
Mountain gorillas manage a 6% full sibling rate, while chimpanzees come in at just 4% – on a par with dolphins. ..."
From the abstract:
"Monogamy has been argued to have played an important role in human evolution and, across animals more generally, evolutionary transitions to highly cooperative societies have been far more likely to occur in monogamous species, raising the possibility that this may have also been the case for humans.
However, the extent to which we can consider monogamy to be the typical human mating system is subject to debate.
Here, I provide comparative context on human mating behaviour by comparing the distribution of sibling types (full siblings versus half-siblings) across more than 100 human societies with equivalent data from 34 non-human mammal species. While cross-culturally variable, rates of full siblings in humans cluster closely with rates seen among socially monogamous mammals and fall consistently above the range seen in non-monogamous mammals.
Although the human data is demonstrative of considerable cross-cultural diversity in marriage and mating practices, the overall high frequency of full siblings is consistent with the characterization of monogamy as the modal mating system for humans."
Human monogamy in mammalian context (open access)
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