He, Q-Q;
Wu, J-J;
Ji, T;
Tao, Y;
Mace, R;
(2016)
Not leaving home: grandmothers and male dispersal in a duolocal human society.
Behavioral Ecology
, 27
(5)
pp. 1343-1352.
10.1093/beheco/arw053.
Preview |
Text
Behavioral Ecology-2016-He-beheco_arw053.pdf - Published Version Download (721kB) | Preview |
Abstract
Models suggest that dispersal patterns will influence age- and sex-dependent helping behavior in social species. Duolocal social systems (where neither sex disperses and mating is outside the group) are predicted to be associated with mothers favoring sons over daughters (because the latter are in reproductive competition with each other). Other models predict daughter-biased investment when benefits of wealth to sons are less than daughters. Here, we test whether sex-biased investment is occurring in the duolocal Mosuo of southwestern China. Using demographic and observational data from Mosuo, we show support for both hypotheses, in that 1) males are more likely to disperse from their natal household if their mother dies, but females are not; 2) a large number of brothers increases the likelihood that both females and males disperse, whereas a large number of sisters only increases female dispersal; 3) mothers help daughters reproduce earlier and reduce death risk of daughter’s children, but not sons or sons’ children; 4) data on multiple paternity show that female reproductive success does not suffer from multiple partners, and in males multiple mates are associated with higher reproductive success, indicating that mothers can benefit from investing in their sons’ mating effort; and 5) gift decisions reveal similar kin effects to those shown in the demographic data, with mothers helping adult daughters and adult sons equally, but helping only her daughter’s children, not her son’s children. Mosuo mothers may invest resources for parental investment in their daughters and their offspring, while investing in their sons mating effort.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Not leaving home: grandmothers and male dispersal in a duolocal human society |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1093/beheco/arw053 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arw053 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | duolocal, grandmother, kin selection, matrilineal, Mosuo, sex-biased investment. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Anthropology |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1489816 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
