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Abstract BackgroundSocial isolation is a key risk factor for the onset and progression of age-related disease and mortality in humans. Nevertheless, older people commonly have narrowing social networks, with influences from both cultural factors and the constraints of senescence. We evaluate evolutionarily grounded models by studying social aging in wild chimpanzees, a system where such influences are more easily separated than in humans, and where individuals are long-lived and decline physically with age. MethodologyWe applied social network analysis to examine age-related changes in social integration in a 7+ year mixed-longitudinal dataset on 38 wild adult chimpanzees (22 females, 16 males). Metrics of social integration included social attractivity and overt effort (directed degree and strength), social roles (betweenness and local transitivity) and embeddedness (eigenvector centrality) in grooming networks. ResultsBoth sexes reduced the strength of direct ties with age (males in-strength, females out-strength). However, males increased embeddedness with age, alongside cliquishness. These changes were independent of age-related changes in social and reproductive status. Both sexes maintained highly repeatable inter-individual differences in integration, particularly in mixed-sex networks. Conclusions and implicationsAs in humans, chimpanzees appear to experience senescence-related declines in social engagement. However, male social embeddedness and overall sex differences were patterned more similarly to humans in non-industrialized versus industrialized societies. Such comparisons suggest common evolutionary roots to ape social aging and that social isolation in older humans may hinge on novel cultural factors of many industrialized societies. Lastly, individual and sex differences are potentially important mediators of successful social aging in chimpanzees, as in humans.Lay summary: Few biological models explain why humans so commonly have narrowing social networks with age, despite the risk factor of social isolation that small networks pose. We use wild chimpanzees as a comparative system to evaluate models grounded in an evolutionary perspective, using social network analysis to examine changes in integration with age. Like humans in industrialized populations, chimpanzees had lower direct engagement with social partners as they aged. However, sex differences in integration and older males’ central positions within the community network were more like patterns of sociality in several non-industrialized human populations. Our results suggest common evolutionary roots to human and chimpanzee social aging, and that the risk of social isolation with age in industrialized populations stems from novel cultural factors.
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Social Organization of the Sintashta-Petrovka Groups of the Late Bronze Age and a Cause for Origin of Social Elites (Based on Materials of the Settlement of Kamenny Ambar)
The formation of social complexity often unfolded in non-unilineal ways in those regions of the world where the surplus product remained low enough to support institutionalized power and state bureaucracy. The Bronze Age of Northern Eurasia is a vivid example where social complexity arose based on herding economy, while population density remained low enough not to form territorially separate competing groups. Studying of such societies sheds light on how and under what conditions the social elite emerged. The undertaken analysis suggests that the formation, development, and decline of social complexity in the Bronze Age steppe societies were directly related to the intensification of subsistence practices and colonization of new territories. At the same time, some members of the society took upon themselves the role of community life’s managers, and, in return, received privileged statuses. The environment and the economy changing, the need for such functions disappeared. As a result, the Bronze Age social elites dissolved in the mass and lost their privileged statuses.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1640341
- PAR ID:
- 10057388
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Stratum plus
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 1857-3533
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 149-166
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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