So-called "alpha male" behaviour among apes has "helped shape the archetype of the dominant male into a controversial touchstone of modern culture", said The Washington Post. But a new study of the "power dynamics between male and female primates" shows that "the alpha male is in fact relatively rare".
In 70% of the 121 species of primates analysed for the study, published in the journal PNAS, "neither sex was clearly dominant". Male dominance is "not a baseline, as was implicitly thought for a long time in primatology", said co-author Élise Huchard, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Montpellier.
Female dominance, seen in 13% of the species studied, is mainly observed where females are "monogamous or similar in size to males" and where "females control reproduction" and decide "when and with whom to mate", said El País. Male dominance, found in 17% of the species, occurs where males are "larger, groups are terrestrial and many females mate with multiple males".
The concept of the "alpha male" originated from a book about wolf ecology from 1970. The author of the book later said the text made inaccurate claims. Yet even though the idea was disproved, the alpha male concept began being applied to other animal species and also to humans. Still, said the Post, there's "scant evidence to support the theory that sex-based inequities in humans originated from our primate relatives".
The dynamics seen in most of the primate communities actually "corroborate quite well with what we know about male-female relationships among hunter-gatherers, which were more egalitarian than in the agricultural societies that emerged later", Huchard told AFP.
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