Local convergence of behavior across species

Foraging humans, mammals and birds who live in the same place behave similarly

Toman Barsbai, Dieter Lukas, Andreas Pondorfer

Published in Science on 15 January 2021: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abb7481

Behavior is a way for organisms to respond flexibly to the environmental conditions they encounter. Our own species exhibits large behavioral flexibility and occurs in all terrestrial habitats, sharing these environments with many other species. It remains unclear to what extent a shared environment constraints behavior and whether these constraints apply similarly across species. Here, we show that foraging human populations and non-human mammal and bird species who live in a given environment show high levels of similarity in their foraging, reproductive, and social behavior. Our findings suggest that local conditions may select for similar behaviors in both humans and non-human animals.

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Kim Hill and Robert Boyd have written an accompanying Perspective in the same issue of Science.

This episode of the Science Podcast also covers our study (start at 11:23). We talk about the motivation for the study, the results, their interpretation and relevance, environmental determinism, and implications for humans in industrial societies.

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BBC, Berliner Zeitung, Daily Mail, Deutschlandfunk, El País, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Kurier, La Vanguardia, MDR, Science Podcast, Spektrum, Sueddeutsche, Sveriges Radio, Tages-Anzeiger

Comparing the behavior of foraging humans and non-human animals around the world 

For each of the 339 small-scale, subsistence-foraging populations from around the world (dots on map), we determined which mammal and bird species lived in the same location and computed their average behavior. For example, in the Mbuti population, which lives in the African rainforests, food storage is only minor and only 4% of the 171 mammal species living within a 25-km radius around the center of their population hoard food. Combining this information across populations shows that generally in locations where food storage among humans is more common, a higher proportion of local mammal species hoard food, as indicated by the upward slope in the scatter plot.