Department of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame, 244 Corbett Family Hall, Notre Dame, IN, 46556, USA.
Eck Institute for Global Health, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA.
Sci Rep. 2020 Sep 22;10(1):15422. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-70958-3.
Humans are rare among mammals in exhibiting paternal care and the capacity for broad hyper-cooperation, which were likely critical to the evolutionary emergence of human life history. In humans and other species, testosterone is often a mediator of life history trade-offs between mating/competition and parenting. There is also evidence that lower testosterone men may often engage in greater prosocial behavior compared to higher testosterone men. Given the evolutionary importance of paternal care and heightened cooperation to human life history, human fathers' testosterone may be linked to these two behavioral domains, but they have not been studied together. We conducted research among highly egalitarian Congolese BaYaka foragers and compared them with their more hierarchical Bondongo fisher-farmer neighbors. Testing whether BaYaka men's testosterone was linked to locally-valued fathering roles, we found that fathers who were seen as better community sharers had lower testosterone than less generous men. BaYaka fathers who were better providers also tended to have lower testosterone. In both BaYaka and Bondongo communities, men in marriages with greater conflict had higher testosterone. The current findings from BaYaka fathers point to testosterone as a psychobiological correlate of cooperative behavior under ecological conditions with evolutionarily-relevant features in which mutual aid and sharing of resources help ensure survival and community health.
在表现出父性关怀和广泛的超合作能力方面，人类在哺乳动物中较为罕见，而这种能力可能对人类生活史的进化出现至关重要。在人类和其他物种中，睾丸激素通常是交配/竞争和养育之间的生活史权衡的中介。也有证据表明，与高睾丸激素男性相比，低睾丸激素男性可能经常表现出更多的亲社会行为。鉴于父性关怀和合作对人类生活史的重要性，人类父亲的睾丸激素可能与这两个行为领域有关，但尚未对其进行综合研究。我们在高度平等的刚果巴雅卡觅食者中进行了研究，并将他们与更具等级制度的邦多格渔民农民邻居进行了比较。我们检验了巴雅卡男性的睾丸激素是否与当地有价值的育儿角色有关，结果发现，被视为更好的社区分享者的父亲的睾丸激素水平低于不那么慷慨的男性。更好的养家糊口的巴雅卡父亲往往睾丸激素水平也较低。在巴雅卡和邦多格社区中，婚姻冲突较大的男性睾丸激素水平较高。巴雅卡父亲的当前研究结果表明，睾丸激素是在具有进化相关特征的生态条件下合作行为的心理生物学相关物，在这些条件下，互助和资源共享有助于确保生存和社区健康。
