ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2017
Evolution of male strategies with sex-ratio-dependent pay-offs: connecting pair bonds with grandmothering.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 29 citations in OpenAlex.
- Targeting the Hunting Hypothesis: Review of Evidence From the Hadza.Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Review
- Revisiting "Grandmothers and the Evolution of Human Longevity" 2003 AJHB https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.10156.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Article
- Evolution of Human Pair Bonds as a Consequence of Male-Biased Mating Sex Ratios?Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2025Article
- Relationship between energy acquisition and family composition in hunter-gatherers.Anthropological science : journal of the Anthropological Society of Nippon = Jinruigaku zasshi · 2024Article
- Sex ratios and gender norms: why both are needed to understand sexual conflict in humans.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Review
- Life history impacts on infancy and the evolution of human social cognition.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Cognitive consequences of our grandmothering life history: cultural learning begins in infancy.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- Sexual dimorphism in chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) and human age-specific fertility.Journal of human evolution · 2020Article
- Ecology of a widespread large omnivore,Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- Hunter-gatherer studies and human evolution: A very selective review.American journal of physical anthropology · 2018Article
- Adult sex ratios and reproductive strategies: a critical re-examination of sex differences in human and animal societies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Men's provisioning of mates and offspring has been central to ideas about human evolution because paternal provisioning is absent in our closest evolutionary cousins, the great apes, and is widely assumed to result in pair bonding, which distinguishes us from them. Yet mathematical modelling has shown that paternal care does not readily spread in populations where competition for multiple mates is the common male strategy. Here we add to models that point to the mating sex ratio as an explanation for pairing as pay-offs to mate guarding rise with a male-biased sex ratio. This is of interest for human evolution because our grandmothering life history shifts the mating sex ratio from female- to male-biased. Using a difference equation model, we explore the relative pay-offs for three competing male strategies (dependant care, multiple mating, mate guarding) in response to changing adult sex ratios. When fertile females are abundant, multiple mating prevails. As they become scarce, mate guarding triumphs. The threshold for this shift depends on guarding efficiency. Combined with mating sex ratios of hunter-gatherer and chimpanzee populations, these results strengthen the hypothesis that the evolution of our grandmothering life history propelled the shift to pair bonding in the human lineage.This article is part of the themed issue 'Adult sex ratios and reproductive decisions: a critical re-examination of sex differences in human and animal societies'.
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