No, Male Dominance Among Primates Is Not Universal Either
On the myths of primate patriarchy and how they feed into the inequality between humans
Nearly a hundred years ago, a shipment of ninety-seven hamadryas baboons arrived at the London Zoo to populate a new open-air exhibit dubbed Monkey Hill.
They were supposed to be all male — it was believed they would appeal to the public more than the smaller and less gaudy females — however, by accident or mistake, the shipment included six (unlucky) females.
And the result was, well, a bloodbath. The males immediately went to war over access to the few females, and even when the females were dead, the males continued to fight over their bodies. The violence was oftentimes so intense the zookeepers had to wait days to retrieve the carcasses.
Within two years, almost half of the baboons were dead.
Now, you might not be familiar with the Monkey Hill story — which, unfortunately, didn’t stop there as zookeepers kept adding baboons to the enclosure — but you likely are with the flawed conclusions drawn from it. Solly Zuckerman (later Lord Zuckerman), a scientist hired by the London Zoo to observe the baboons, later on argued that the experiment proved the universality of male dominance among primates.
This view, together with other similar arguments used by the 19th and early 20th century scientists, underpinned the idea that patriarchy — a system of male dominance — simply must be in our genes. If male primates dominate the females, it’s no wonder we, humans, do it, too, right? And if it’s indeed rooted in our biology, then we can’t possibly ever change it, can we?
It wasn’t really until a few decades ago — when more women flocked to the fields of primatology and anthropology — that this belief was challenged, and previously neglected codominant or female-dominated primates started to be researched, too.
Actually, according to a recent study, primate societies aren’t male-dominated by default, and far more of them feature power sharing or have females in charge than previously thought.
It probably should be a no-brainer — at least today — that if you put dozens of baboons in a setting that wouldn’t have existed in the wild, you’ll have a strange and potentially even violent situation on your hands.
Not to mention that drawing conclusions about ‘natural’ behaviour based on said unnatural arrangement is as faulty of a logic as using Big Brother to draw conclusions about human nature. Although reality shows like this one, in which contestants live in isolation from the outside world, at least feature an equal number of men and women.
If you were to lock up ninety-something men with six women — or vice-versa — and give them limited resources and little to no information, we’d likely end up with a situation not unlike the Monkey Hill, perhaps (and hopefully) just a tad bit less deadly. Humans like to consider themselves as ‘superior’ to animals, but we’re primates, too.
And just as egalitarian or female-dominated societies aren’t hard to find in humanity’s past — also a widely studied topic lately — they aren’t hard to find in the primate world either.
An often cited example, and one we have the primatologist Alison Jolly to thank for, is lemurs. Yup, it’s the dominant female lemurs that call the shots in their societies, choose their own mates, and even dictate who everyone else should mate with, using prompts such as tail and fur pulling or the occasional nip.
But even though lemurs have long been categorised as merely a female-ruled ‘outlier’ among primates, a recent study published in the journal Animals by a team of anthropologists at the University of Texas at Austin suggests that there are quite a few other ‘outliers’, too.
In fact, after analysing data on dominance patterns and related factors — such as the oestrous overlap, female-male ratio in each group, and sexual dimorphism — among 79 living primate species, the researchers found that in 42% of them females were either dominant or on a level playing field with males. That included every major primate group, including lesser apes, like gibbons, and great apes, like bonobos.
The study also found that dominance didn’t correspond to how close species were evolutionarily or geographically, however, it did correlate with other features.
For instance, in species where the females and males had a similar body and canine size, females either dominated or shared power equally with males, with each taking the lead in different social areas. Female bonobos are smaller but much closer in size to males than, say, female gorillas, and tend to establish tight social bonds with their female counterparts, which leads to female-dominated societies.
Other factors can influence the power dynamics, too — including the female-to-male ratio. If a group has more females, males tend to dominate because they have a wider choice of mates. Power also tends to be concentrated in females of species that go into heat for a relatively short period or don’t go into heat as a group.
The team also examined fossils of eight different extinct primates — distant ancestors of modern species — and, surprise, surprise, found patterns that would correspond with various intersexual power relationships, too.
Primate patriarchy might’ve made perfect sense a hundred years ago when scientists still generously applied the androcentric perspective to everything and anything, but it’s by no means a universal dynamic.
Still, this assumption that it’s males, and males only, who have all the power and control in the world of primates, together with quite a few other myths, continues to prevail and even be extended to… humans.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of years or haven’t used social media much, you’re likely familiar with the term alpha male.’ It gained notoriety thanks to a 1982 book, Chimpanzee Politics, written by a world-renowned primatologist, Frans de Waal, which was appropriated — and misinterpreted — by Republicans, business people, and similar creatures.
As a result, the ‘alpha male’ is now essentially reduced to a brutish and intimidating bully who will beat you over the head with a club if you as much as look at him funny.
But that’s certainly not how Waal described them.
According to him, alpha males in a chimpanzee society are essentially the most empathetic and community-oriented ones who keep the peace, break the fights, support the underdogs, and are loved by their community — not feared. But there are alpha females all over the primate world, too. And yes, even in species that tend to be male-dominated, like chimpanzees. Similar to males, alpha females resolve conflicts, bring parties together, and fix the relationships in the group.
Still, Waal’s decades of research on the behaviour and social intelligence in primates, especially his more recent work, also suggest that the view of primates as universally male-dominated, with one male alpha on top of everyone else, is far too simplistic and largely inaccurate.
In a recent appearance on The Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature, an award-winning podcast series, Waal says that ‘female hierarchies are found everywhere’ with women being ‘just as sensitive to status differences as men are.’ He also argues that while humans are the most genetically similar to both chimpanzees — which are male-dominated — and bonobos — which are female-dominated, anatomically, ‘we are more like bonobos or bonobos are more like us.’
Waal also points out there’s far more variability in sexuality, gender expression and roles among primates — which they are perfectly tolerant of — than was previously assumed:
If we start looking for it, because scientists haven’t really looked for it (…), we will see tons of it.
For instance, while it’s believed that it’s mostly a female job to take care of offspring, and males do very little except protect the offspring sometimes, that’s not what actually happens. During his research, Waals found that male care for offspring is common among primates and that it’s more commonly males, not females, who take care of orphaned infants, even if they aren’t related to them.
It’s pretty straightforward, and not only from the early years of primatology, that Western science has long been abused for ideological purposes — including to reinforce male power and distort the possibilities for gender equality.
Because women and men are just ‘too different.’
Because one’s brain size is bigger than the other’s.
Because other primates clearly favour male domination, too.
Actually, humans have a pretty low level of sexual dimorphism compared with other species, and it’s the smallest among all primates. It also varies across the world and even… time. For instance, analysis of human remains in one of the oldest known human settlements in the world, Çatalhöyük, located in southern Anatolia, Turkey, suggest not only that men and women back then lived together as equals but that even the height difference between the sexes was slight.
Could that mean that social circumstances can affect biological sex differences? Perhaps, yes.
There’s also a wealth of other archaeological, anthropological, and ethnographic evidence that shows humans lived in mostly egalitarian settlements until fairly recently — around 6–12,000 years ago, depending on the area — and some even in female-dominated ones. At least 160 matrilineal societies are still in existence today.
Just like there’s diversity among our primate relatives, there’s remarkable diversity in the human species, which shows that we’re more than capable of inventing countless forms of social organisation.
Still, despite neither history nor biology proving that this has always been a man’s world, the idea that patriarchy is universal and inevitable, together with all the other nonsense around ‘alpha males,’ runs deep in our culture and world. Today, there’s even a whole industry out there, churning out one unhinged product or service after another — including an ‘alpha male’ boot camp that costs ‘only’ $18,000 to participate in — to appeal to the mass of men obsessed with achieving the ‘alpha’ status.
But, unfortunately, there’s a cost to this reluctance to admit we’re more alike than we’re different and that we need to work together and not dominate one another.
And we all keep paying for it.
Humans are often so desperate to divide ourselves into whatever camps we need to imagine in order to sustain our current societal order that we fail even to question whether they’re good or necessary or really ‘natural.’
But we should.
The myth of inevitable and universal male superiority, whether among primates or us, primates with anxiety, mortgages and credit scores, is just that: a myth.
And one that only becomes increasingly shattered the more we understand nature and ourselves.
This is brilliant scholarship! And so clearly stated. This topic, including your recommended research into primate gender roles, would make a compelling documentary film or streaming series. Thank you. Joe Hartnett, Pacific Film Foundation
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