Human origins and the transition from promiscuity to pair-bonding

Abstract

A crucial step in recent theories of human origins is the emergence of strong pair-bonding between males and females accompanied by a dramatic reduction in the male-to-male conflict over mating and an increased investment in offspring. How such a transition from promiscuity to pair-bonding could be achieved is puzzling. Many species would, indeed, be much better off evolutionarily if the effort spent on male competition over mating was redirected to increasing female fertility or survivorship of offspring. Males, however, are locked in a "social dilemma," where shifting one's effort from "appropriation" to "production" would give an advantage to free-riding competitors and therefore, should not happen. Here, I first consider simple models for four prominent scenarios of the human transition to pair-bonding: communal care, mate guarding, food for mating, and mate provisioning. I show that the transition is not feasible under biologically relevant conditions in any of these models. Then, I show that the transition can happen if one accounts for male heterogeneity, assortative pair formation, and evolution of female choice and faithfulness. This process is started when low-ranked males begin using an alternative strategy of female provisioning. At the end, except for the top-ranked individuals, males invest exclusively in provisioning females who have evolved very high fidelity to their mates. My results point to the crucial importance of female choice and emphasize the need for incorporating between-individual variation in theoretical and empirical studies of social dilemmas and behaviors.food-for-mating | self-domestication

Male infanticide leads to social monogamy in primates

“…Indeed, a recent reconstruction of ancestral mating/marriage systems in humans suggests that Australopithecines (40,41) and early modern humans (42) may have been (at least facultatively) monogamous. The transition to social monogamy in humans has been proposed to depend on females choosing to stay faithful to males, even when of lower quality (43). Once in place these pair-bonds would facilitate paternal care in the form of male protection and provisioning (44,45).…”

Collective action problem in heterogeneous groups

“…For simplicity of interpretation, in my numerical results within-group heterogeneity will be captured by d rather than by H q . In implementing the model numerically, I assumed, following earlier work [84,77,107], that individual efforts at each rank were controlled by different loci, so that in each individual only one locus was expressed, corresponding to his rank. Generations were discrete and non-overlapping.…”

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