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African rangelands are changing rapidly due to land use change, the erosion of traditional social institutions, and increasing concern about extreme events. These changes pose a challenge to the resilience of pastoral people, their herds, and the rangelands that they inhabit. Despite these changes, debates in academics and policy continue about the optimal herd size to maintain pastoral livelihoods while avoiding environmental degradation. In this study, we draw from 33 focus group discussions with Maasai men and women in northern Tanzania to explore herd size preferences for coping with extreme events. Study participants expressed a preference for larger herds, with the primary rationale being enhanced ability to cope with drought and other extreme events. Those with large herds are better able to sell a few animals, and this money can directly benefit the family and help feed the rest of the herd through purchasing supplemental feed in the form of pumba, crop residues, or access to farmland for grazing crop residues. These findings highlight new pathways and reasons that large herds can be useful. Chief among these is having enough animals to sell to buy supplemental feed and yet sustain a viable herd. Recognizing the cultural importance of livestock to Maasai along with local perspectives on livestock herd numbers will help in supporting culturally relevant adaptation policy and practice. For example, policies and projects could focus on enhancing resilience through facilitating the saving and storing of crop residues or helping maintain livestock prices during extreme events. 

To address claims of human exceptionalism, we determine where humans fit within the greater mammalian distribution of reproductive inequality. We show that humans exhibit lower reproductive skew (i.e., inequality in the number of surviving offspring) among males and smaller sex differences in reproductive skew than most other mammals, while nevertheless falling within the mammalian range. Additionally, female reproductive skew is higher in polygynous human populations than in polygynous nonhumans mammals on average. This patterning of skew can be attributed in part to the prevalence of monogamy in humans compared to the predominance of polygyny in nonhuman mammals, to the limited degree of polygyny in the human societies that practice it, and to the importance of unequally held rival resources to women’s fitness. The muted reproductive inequality observed in humans appears to be linked to several unusual characteristics of our species—including high levels of cooperation among males, high dependence on unequally held rival resources, complementarities between maternal and paternal investment, as well as social and legal institutions that enforce monogamous norms.