Development of sociality and social relationships and maintenance of social structure over generations in the closest evolutionary relatives of humans, the great apes

Sociality is an evolved trait, which forms the basis of primate societies. It influences individual survival, reproduction, access to information, and disease transmission.

As early-life experiences have long-term consequences, knowledge of individual developmental history has contributed well to understanding the factors that underlie variation in individual health, longevity, resilience to internal and external stressors, amongst other crucial aspects of an animal’s life.

Therefore, studying aspects of individual development is fundamental to understanding how individuals become well-adapted to their environment.

Great apes live in complex societies with constantly changing opportunities for associations and interactions, for which they make complex cognitive decisions just like humans.

As they are our closest evolutionary relatives, long-term developmental studies on them are indispensable to understand how the development of the social life of humans evolved.

National and international collaborations focused on data and knowledge sharing for comparative studies on great apes will help to overcome the current gaps in our knowledge about human social evolution.

The future fellow will collate two decades of fine-scale observational data collected on individually identified great apes from birth until the start of adulthood from four great ape projects.

The aims are to 1. investigate, at the individual level, the development of sociality and social relationships, 2. investigate, at the population level, social inheritance of social structure over generations, and 3. develop a general theory of social structure maintenance.

This action will be the first to take a large-scale, data-intensive, and comparative approach to studying the social life of immature great apes using a combination of cutting-edge computational tools and analytical methods. The results of this action will bridge fundamental gaps in our knowledge of Hominidae sociality and social structure.