Kit Christopher Opie

University of Bristol | UB · Department of Anthropology and Archaeology

Although much attention has been focused on explaining and describing the diversity of social grouping patterns among primates, less effort has been devoted to understanding the evolutionary history of social living. This is partly because social behaviours do not fossilize, making it difficult to infer changes over evolutionary time. However, prim...

Although common in birds, social monogamy, or pair-living, is rare among mammals because internal gestation and lactation in mammals makes it advantageous for males to seek additional mating opportunities. A number of hypotheses have been proposed to explain the evolution of social monogamy among mammals: as a male mate-guarding strategy, because o...

Significance The agricultural revolution had a dramatic effect on all aspects of human society, but piecing together how humans lived as they spread farming practices worldwide remains difficult. In particular, the fundamental structures of human society, namely the way that property is inherited and the rules governing postmarriage residence, do n...

There has been a long history of attempts to explain the evolution of monogamy in mammals in general (Kleiman 1977), and primates in particular (Alexander 1979), partly because of the implications that it may have for the evolution of monogamy in humans. Monogamy is a complex term though, with some species invariably found in pairs (such as owl mon...

Language is one of the most complex of human traits. There are many hypotheses about how it originated, what factors shaped its diversity, and what ongoing processes drive how it changes. We present the Causal Hypotheses in Evolutionary Linguistics Database (CHIELD, https://chield.excd.org/), a tool for expressing, exploring, and evaluating hypothe...

The origins of human intergroup conflict are poorly understood despite the volume of attention the topic has received. Recent research suggests that, among mammals, violence is especially commonplace in primates, particularly social and territorial species. Here we use Bayesian phylogenetic methods to reconstruct the evolution of lethal violence ac...

The biological mechanisms that underpin primate social evolution remain poorly understood. Asian colobines display a range of social organizations, which makes them good models for investigating social evolution. By integrating ecological, geological, fossil, behavioral, and genomic analyses, we found that colobine primates that inhabit colder envi...

The extreme morphological variability of the baculum across mammals is thought to be the result of sexual selection ( particularly, high levels of post- copulatory selection). However, the evolutionary trajectory of the mammalian baculum is little studied and evidence for the adaptive function of the baculum has so far been elusive. Here, we use Ma...

Brindle & Opie. Postcopulatory sexual selection influences baculum evolution in primates and carnivores. Supplementary information on data, methods and analyses

Brindle & Opie. Postcopulatory sexual selection influences baculum evolution in primates and carnivores. Supplementary information on data, methods and analyses

Monogamy is common in birds but rare in mammals, because internal gestation and lactation in mammals encourages males to seek additional mating opportunities elsewhere. Three hypotheses have been proposed to explain the evolution of monogamy among mammals: as a male mate-guarding strategy, because of the benefits of bi-parental care, or as a defenc...

For many years, it has been variously suggested that the evolution of monogamy in primates was due to paternal care, dispersed female ranging, or infanticide. It was therefore of little surprise to us that we should find that these traits are strongly associated with mating systems in primates (1). The crucial question, however, is whether these tr...

We thank Alan Dixson (1) for his interest in our paper (2). Unfortunately, he seems to have misread it. First, contrary to Dixson's claim, we did not conflate callitrichid "mo-nogamy" with obligate monogamy in other primates, like gibbons and the small cebids. We note that these were conflated in Lukas and Clutton-Brock's (3) recent report on the e...

Although common in birds, social monogamy, or pair-living, is rare among mammals because internal gestation and lactation in mammals makes it advantageous for males to seek additional mating opportunities. A number of hypotheses have been proposed to explain the evolution of social monogamy among mammals: as a male mate-guarding strategy, because o...

Unlike bones, behavior does not fossilise, so it is hard to infer the evolutionary history of social traits. However, we have shown elsewhere that Bayesian phylogenetic methods allow the investigation of ancestral states and models of evolution of social grouping behavior in primates. Here, we extend this analysis to another significant aspect of p...

IntroductionThe Three ModelsConsumption, Production, and Provisioning of OffspringGrandmother Availability: !Kung vs HadzaSummary of Chimp vs Forager Production and ConsumptionThe Homo erectus ModelDiscussionConclusion