ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
Harsh environments promote alloparental care across human societies.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The impact of urbanisation on social behaviour: a comprehensive review.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Pooled it
- Effect of Algoplaque Hydrocolloid Dressing Combined with Nanosilver Antibacterial Gel under Predictive Nursing in the Treatment of Medical Device-Related Pressure Injury.Computational and mathematical methods in medicine · 2022Trial
- The adaptive functions of routine allomaternal behavior in free-ranging Taihangshan macaques.Current zoology · 2026Article
- Fifty Years of Bird Ringing Reveal Opposing Seasonal Responses of Migration Timing to Temperature and Rainfall on Hilbre Island.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Religious parents receive more alloparental aid in rural Bangladesh.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- The Impact of Cooperation Under Climate Constraints: An Agent-Based Model for Exploring Paleolithic Behavioral Adaptations in the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor.Journal of archaeological method and theory · 2026Article
- The social learning and development of intra- and inter-ethnic sharing norms in the Congo Basin.PloS one · 2026Article
- Effects of fundamental social motives on environmental variation of compliance during pandemics.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Estimating (Non)Linear Selection on Reaction Norms: A General Framework for Labile Traits.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Shifting Seasons: Long-Term Insights Into Climate Change Effects on Bird Phenology From Ringing Data.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Indirect genetic effects among neighbors promote cooperation and accelerate adaptation in a small-scale human society.Science advances · 2025Article
- Plains Zebras Prioritize Foraging Without Sacrificing Social Bonds During a Severe Drought.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Interactions with alloparents are associated with the diversity of infant skin and fecal bacterial communities in Chicago, United States.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Article
- Religious Involvement Is Associated With Higher Fertility and Lower Maternal Investment, but More Alloparental Support Among Gambian Mothers.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2024Article
- Social restructuring during harsh environmental conditions promotes cooperative behaviour in a songbird.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Allometric scaling of metabolic rate and cardiorespiratory variables in aquatic and terrestrial mammals.Physiological reports · 2023Article
- Elephants as an animal model for self-domestication.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Human cooperation and evolutionary transitions in individuality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Sedentarization and maternal childcare networks: role of risk, gender and demography.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Shodagor women cooperate across domains of work and childcare to solve an adaptive problem.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Alloparental care is central to human life history, which integrates exceptionally short interbirth intervals and large birth size with an extended period of juvenile dependency and increased longevity. Formal models, previous comparative research, and palaeoanthropological evidence suggest that humans evolved higher levels of cooperative childcare in response to increasingly harsh environments. Although this hypothesis remains difficult to test directly, the relative importance of alloparental care varies across human societies, providing an opportunity to assess how local social and ecological factors influence the expression of this behaviour. We therefore, investigated associations between alloparental infant care and socioecology across 141 non-industrialized societies. We predicted increased alloparental care in harsher environments, due to the fitness benefits of cooperation in response to shared ecological challenges. We also predicted that starvation would decrease alloparental care, due to prohibitive energetic costs. Using Bayesian phylogenetic multilevel models, we tested these predictions while accounting for potential confounds as well as for population history. Consistent with our hypotheses, we found increased alloparental infant care in regions characterized by both reduced climate predictability and relatively lower average temperatures and precipitation. We also observed reduced alloparental care under conditions of high starvation. These results provide evidence of plasticity in human alloparenting in response to ecological contexts, comparable to previously observed patterns across avian and mammalian cooperative breeders. This suggests convergent social evolutionary processes may underlie both inter- and intraspecific variation in alloparental care.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.