THAT'S THE WHY:"No man is an island" is a pretty apt expression, because we humans tend to be social creatures.
Why is that? A new paper out in Naturethis month – an analysis of how social living evolved in primates – has offered a few potential clues about the origins of such sociability.
Social behaviours don’t exactly leave trails of handy, informative fossils behind from which scientists could piece together the story. So the researchers at the University of Oxford and the University of Auckland took a different approach.
They looked at more than 200 non-human primate species and saw that social organisation seemed to have a “phylogenetic” component – it was similar among closely related groups.
So by analysing the genetic information, they studied the evolutionary pathways. And the picture they paint is that about 52 million years ago, bands of individuals started to hang out together, and this set the scene for later pair-bonding.
Interestingly, the initial shift correlates with a move away from foraging at night and towards being more active in the day, raising the possibility there could have been safety in numbers.
Humans are far more recent, and researcher Dr Susanne Shultz describes the complexity we see today. “There is an amazing flexibility in the way humans have managed to socialise, network and live together, both in groups and wider society,” she says.
“We have a huge variety of social settings to cope with, according to the different cultural practices and customs. This flexibility in the human lineage has not evolved to anything like this level in other primates.
“Our findings support previous studies that suggest that more brain power is needed for groups that have a more complicated social life.”
