Humans behave like their animal neighbors

The humans of the traditional communities left on the planet feed, breed and organize like their animal neighbors.

In a study with more than three hundred hunter-gatherer societies, a group of scientists found that, where they share space, there has been a convergence between human and animal behavior.

The Mbuti, a people who still live on what they hunt and gather in the jungles of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the heart of Africa, live from day to day.

Unlike several indigenous communities in the Arctic, who keep their surplus game in different locations, the Mbuti hardly store food.

What is striking is that only 4% of the 171 species of mammals that live within a 25-kilometer radius around one of these African communities save for later, as do the arctic foxes of northern Canada.

This parallel is not anecdotal.

In fact, it is a practically universal pattern.

German and British anthropologists and biologists have collected data on 339 hunter-gatherer human communities in Africa, America, Asia and Oceania.

They cataloged their different cultural practices into 16 categories related to food, reproduction, and social organization.

Then they went to the databases of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and BirdLife International to geolocate the species of mammals and birds that live around each of these human groups.

They reviewed the scientific literature to determine the behaviors of the different species.

Finally, the behaviors of humans and animals overlapped.

Their results have just been published in

Science

.

The Central African Mbuti do not store food.

Neither do the 171 species of mammals that live around it.

This convergent behavior is an almost universal pattern

“In terms of foraging behaviors, there are environments where humans obtain a significant proportion of their calories from hunting.

In these places we show that there is a much higher proportion of mammals and carnivorous birds than in others ”, says the researcher from the University of Bristol and co-author of the study Toman Barsbai.

They also found similar associations in the case of communities dependent on fishing, the distance traveled each day to obtain food or, as with the Mbuti, whether or not they stored it.

All of these eating-related practices depend on environmental conditions.

"However, these similarities are not only present in behaviors more directly related to the environment, such as finding food, but also in behaviors related to reproduction or social", adds the behavioral ecologist of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology ( Germany) and study co-author Dieter Lukas.

Indeed, where human communities tend to have their first child earlier (or later), the animals that share their space also have their first offspring at earlier (or later) ages.

Another of the variables they analyzed was the involvement of males in the care of the offspring.

They saw that, for example, Arctic foxes and wolves, as well as most of the birds that nest in the Arctic region, intervene in the care of their young as equally as the Inuit do.

"In places where hunter-gatherer populations have social classes, a greater number of mammals and birds show remarkable social hierarchies"

Dieter Lukas, Behavioral Ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany

Regarding social behaviors, the dominant polygyny among some Australian aborigines corresponds to the absence of monogamy among marsupials.

"And in places where hunter-gatherer populations have social classes, a greater number of mammals and birds show remarkable social hierarchies," Lukas completes.

In total, of the 15 behaviors analyzed, only in one social one did not find a convergence between humans and animals: it is patrilocality, the tendency for couples to live in the place or with the family where the man or the male is from.

The study focused on communities that derive their livelihood from their environment.

The authors agree that agriculture, commerce or technology have been able to weaken the response of human behavior to the environment.

But its weight could still be felt in agrarian societies.

As the researcher at the University of Bonn (Germany) and co-author says in a note, “there is a tendency to think that agricultural intensification dampens the effect of the environment on humans.

However, it is possible that individuals in these populations are not as protected as we think and that the behaviors reflect adaptations that occurred before the adoption of agriculture.

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