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Sharing and caring: Testosterone, fathering, and generosity among BaYaka foragers of the Congo Basin
Humans are rare among mammals in exhibiting paternal care and the capacity for broad hyper-cooperation, which were likely critical to the evolutionary emergence of human life history. In humans and other species, testosterone is often a mediator of life history trade-offs between mating/competition...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7508877/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32963277 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-70958-3 |
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author | Gettler, Lee T. Lew-Levy, Sheina Sarma, Mallika S. Miegakanda, Valchy Boyette, Adam H. |
author_facet | Gettler, Lee T. Lew-Levy, Sheina Sarma, Mallika S. Miegakanda, Valchy Boyette, Adam H. |
author_sort | Gettler, Lee T. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Humans are rare among mammals in exhibiting paternal care and the capacity for broad hyper-cooperation, which were likely critical to the evolutionary emergence of human life history. In humans and other species, testosterone is often a mediator of life history trade-offs between mating/competition and parenting. There is also evidence that lower testosterone men may often engage in greater prosocial behavior compared to higher testosterone men. Given the evolutionary importance of paternal care and heightened cooperation to human life history, human fathers’ testosterone may be linked to these two behavioral domains, but they have not been studied together. We conducted research among highly egalitarian Congolese BaYaka foragers and compared them with their more hierarchical Bondongo fisher-farmer neighbors. Testing whether BaYaka men’s testosterone was linked to locally-valued fathering roles, we found that fathers who were seen as better community sharers had lower testosterone than less generous men. BaYaka fathers who were better providers also tended to have lower testosterone. In both BaYaka and Bondongo communities, men in marriages with greater conflict had higher testosterone. The current findings from BaYaka fathers point to testosterone as a psychobiological correlate of cooperative behavior under ecological conditions with evolutionarily-relevant features in which mutual aid and sharing of resources help ensure survival and community health. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7508877 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-75088772020-09-24 Sharing and caring: Testosterone, fathering, and generosity among BaYaka foragers of the Congo Basin Gettler, Lee T. Lew-Levy, Sheina Sarma, Mallika S. Miegakanda, Valchy Boyette, Adam H. Sci Rep Article Humans are rare among mammals in exhibiting paternal care and the capacity for broad hyper-cooperation, which were likely critical to the evolutionary emergence of human life history. In humans and other species, testosterone is often a mediator of life history trade-offs between mating/competition and parenting. There is also evidence that lower testosterone men may often engage in greater prosocial behavior compared to higher testosterone men. Given the evolutionary importance of paternal care and heightened cooperation to human life history, human fathers’ testosterone may be linked to these two behavioral domains, but they have not been studied together. We conducted research among highly egalitarian Congolese BaYaka foragers and compared them with their more hierarchical Bondongo fisher-farmer neighbors. Testing whether BaYaka men’s testosterone was linked to locally-valued fathering roles, we found that fathers who were seen as better community sharers had lower testosterone than less generous men. BaYaka fathers who were better providers also tended to have lower testosterone. In both BaYaka and Bondongo communities, men in marriages with greater conflict had higher testosterone. The current findings from BaYaka fathers point to testosterone as a psychobiological correlate of cooperative behavior under ecological conditions with evolutionarily-relevant features in which mutual aid and sharing of resources help ensure survival and community health. Nature Publishing Group UK 2020-09-22 /pmc/articles/PMC7508877/ /pubmed/32963277 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-70958-3 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Article Gettler, Lee T. Lew-Levy, Sheina Sarma, Mallika S. Miegakanda, Valchy Boyette, Adam H. Sharing and caring: Testosterone, fathering, and generosity among BaYaka foragers of the Congo Basin |
title | Sharing and caring: Testosterone, fathering, and generosity among BaYaka foragers of the Congo Basin |
title_full | Sharing and caring: Testosterone, fathering, and generosity among BaYaka foragers of the Congo Basin |
title_fullStr | Sharing and caring: Testosterone, fathering, and generosity among BaYaka foragers of the Congo Basin |
title_full_unstemmed | Sharing and caring: Testosterone, fathering, and generosity among BaYaka foragers of the Congo Basin |
title_short | Sharing and caring: Testosterone, fathering, and generosity among BaYaka foragers of the Congo Basin |
title_sort | sharing and caring: testosterone, fathering, and generosity among bayaka foragers of the congo basin |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7508877/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32963277 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-70958-3 |
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