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@davoloid we solved it once, we can solve it again!

@lienrag @RadicalAnthro Providing for the support of their offspring. Bringing back food, provisions.

@davoloid

Thanks !
But I thought that chimps and most apes aren't monogamous ?
So how do they know who their offsprings are ?
Surely they never attended sex-ed to even be able to associate mating with reproduction ?

(off-topic but note that a chimp sex-ed session could make for a good novella or short-story, either deadpan comical or even serious)
(the - quite lame - Dangerously Chloe webcomic had a short but hilarious sex-ed from succubus part that I still remember fondly)

@RadicalAnthro

@lienrag @davoloid

Come and hear tonight's brilliant talk by Kit Opie. He will be using a comparative evolutionary framework to work out how so-called 'monogamy' might arise from a highly promiscuous chimp/bonobo background. He'd focus on the issue of infanticide by males, one of the major aspects of primate sexual conflict.

Mating systems are very much affected by female strategies to avoid infanticide. Almost half of 200+ primate species have documented observation of infanticide. Males who are certain they have NOT had sex with a mother are a risk. Hence female strategies for promiscuity to confuse males about 'who's the daddy?' If a male has even a squeak of a chance of being the dad, he won't kill an infant. So females lead them to believe it. This is built on work by the major Darwinian theorist of human evolution, Sarah Hrdy. If you never heard of her, 'Mothers and others' is the best book on human evolution this century

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674060326

@RadicalAnthro

I'd love to ! But I'm a bit far away...

I know lions kill the cubs when they conquer a female, but that's simpler than "kill infants of females of your tribe that you hadn't sex with".
I guess that chimps don't "believe" that the kids are their or not ?
So I'm curious about how their behavior towards infants in their tribe is determined (I confess that I never knew about male infanticide in chimp communities)...

@davoloid

@lienrag @davoloid we're on Zoom
Plus Vimeo recording later.

Yes chimps (even monkeys like langurs) will be perfectly well aware whether they had sex with a female or not, and that is all natural selection needs to work on. Social anthropology seems unable to distinguish between body knowledge and cues (similar for monkeys, apes and us) and ideology (that's us alone).

@RadicalAnthro

I'll see if I can attend, thanks.
Else I'll try to watch it on Vimeo.

Zoom isn't very radical¹, though ? Nor is choosing Vimeo over Peertube...

¹ Well, I guess it can be considered radically authoritarian but I'm not sure that's the radicality you're aiming for...

@lienrag our chief priority is accessibility. We've been a community class over 40 years. ZOOM use was born during COVID and has been kept going with that intercontinental community.