Oliver Conway

Are you more like a meerkat, gorilla, or maybe a Californian mouse?

Well, all those animals feature in a new Monogamy League table which assesses how committed they and we are to pairing up.

Humans are apparently 66% monogamous, far above chimpanzees and gorillas, and similar to meerkats and beavers.

We heard more from lead author and anthropologist Mark Dybul.

We know, of course, that humans vary cross-culturally and within cultures in our marriage practices, mating behaviour.

But from an evolutionary point of view, there's value in stepping back and considering our species as a whole and characterising our mating system, as it were, in general mammalian context.

So how do we compare to other species?

That's partly because we're such a cooperative species and we often see the evolution of highly cooperative animal societies follow on from the evolution of monogamous mating.

So we have these theoretical debates about how monogamous humans are today and were in human evolutionary history.

So what I did in the study was look at the proportion of full siblings versus half siblings we see in human societies and compare that to other mammals.

So for all the mammal data, it's all genetic.

For some of the human data, it's

It's genetic, including some archaeological samples that go back several thousand years.

But some of the human data is actually based on what people have told us.

My paper doesn't directly address the question of why monogamy evolved.

One of the leading hypotheses is about resource distribution.

In some species, groups of females can live together and don't need to compete for resources intensely, so they can live in groups.

And in that situation...

If you then have males distribute themselves around those females, it's difficult to get monogamy going.

But in some species, you have females who control the territory and don't compete with their neighbours.