| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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adult males and females do not breed but instead help with pup rearing and provisioning duties. In contrast, male dogs do not team up with the females they impregnate or help in any way to raise their own young. They lost this behavior during domestication.
Even the hominoid family exhibits considerable variation in mating systems. Gibbons and humans, for example, have stable pair bonds with relatively infrequent extrapair copulations and live in nuclear families, whereas orangutans are solitary, gorillas have a harem system, and bonobos and chimpanzees have contrasting types of promiscuity.
Anatomical changes can be traced over millions of years in the bones of humans’ distant ancestors, but inferring their activities or societies requires subjective interpretation. It is known, however, that present-day species in the wild belonging to the same genus can have very different behaviors. Witness hamadryas baboons, Papio hamadryas, whose males are focused entirely on their few harem females, and olive baboons, Papio cynocephalus, whose males mingle freely with all the troop females. Or consider chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, which are much more aggressive (especially when frustrated by investigator-induced supply problems with banana offerings) than bonobos, Pan paniscus, which seem to live for sex of both the homo and hetero kind.
Although baboon males are usually feisty, Robert Sapolsky (2011), who has studied wild savanna baboons for almost 30 years, reports that the aggression of a group may be a cultural rather than an inherent characteristic. The fiercest males of the Forest Troop and the Garbage Dump Troop fought continually over garbage tossed out by a Kenyan hotel that in time included tubercular meat. Most of these males died of tuberculosis. The new Forest Troop as a result comprised fewer males, and they were amiable rather than belligerent. Fighting was largely replaced by mutual grooming; males even groomed each other—“a behavior nearly as unprecedented as baboons sprouting wings” (Sapolsky 2011, p. 36). Ten years later, the genial surviving males from the tubercular era had been replaced by younger immigrant males. Despite these new males, the