Puberty comes with its challenges for Homo sapiens, but for female chimpanzees it presents a particular quandary: how to avoid mating with your male kin. It’s not easy, especially on home turf. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) embrace promiscuous mating; during sexual swellings, female chimpanzees mate with almost all eligible males in their group. This means their daughters run a high risk of encountering brothers, half-brothers, and even their own fathers when they reach adolescence. “With humans, you know who your dad is, you know who your paternal brothers are, because we’ve got paired bonds [sticking with one sexual partner] marriage, language, and all these things,” said Kevin Langergraber, a primatologist at Arizona State University and co-author of a recent paper in the journal Royal Society Open Science. “In chimps, it can get complicated.” One strategy to prevent inbreeding is straightforward: leave. Get out of your birth group and seek partners elsewhere, or what’s known as dispersal. Among social mammals, it’s common for young males to strike out and start their own broods. But in chimpanzees, like in many human societies, it’s the females who emigrate in search of mates. This isn’t always the case, however, according to findings by a team led by Lauren C. White, who did the work while she was a postdoctoral candidate at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. The team, which included Langergraber, traced kinship bonds among chimps in the Ngogo group in Uganda’s Kibale National Park. A chimpanzee family in Gombe National park. Image…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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