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Much received wisdom in the conservation literature is that individual connections across community boundaries undercut natural resource management. However, when multiple communities access the same resource, these long‐distance relationships could generate interdependence and trust to motivate engagement in collective action to manage the resource. To test this, we interviewed 1317 people in 28 fishing villages in Tanzania about their participation in managing open‐access fisheries and their social relationships in each village accessing the fishery. People with more friends in other villages trusted more people in those villages and were more likely to participate in collective action to manage the shared fishery, such as reporting others for destructive fishing practices. These results show that long‐distance relationships may be a useful foundation upon which to build conservation efforts that cross community boundaries and bolster sustainable resource use. 

The management of large common-pool resources, like fisheries and forests, is more difficult when more people and more communities can access them—a particular problem given increased population sizes, higher mobility and globalized trade in the Anthropocene. Social relationships spanning communities, such as kin relationships, business or trade relationships and friendships, can make management even more challenging by facilitating and transmitting norms of overharvesting. However, these long-distance relationships can also bolster management by transmitting norms for sustainability, promoting interdependence and laying the groundwork for nested management systems. Here, we review the negative and positive impacts of long-distance relationships on local natural resource management (NRM), providing illustrative examples from our field research on forest and fisheries management in Tanzania. Drawing on the evolutionary literature, the development literature and our field data, we offer suggestions for how development partners can avoid the pitfalls of long-distance relationships and how they can use or even deliberately foster long-distance relationships to promote successful local NRM. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis’. 

Abstract ObjectivesWith our diverse training, theoretical and empirical toolkits, and rich data, evolutionary and biological anthropologists (EBAs) have much to contribute to research and policy decisions about climate change and other pressing social issues. However, we remain largely absent from these critical, ongoing efforts. Here, we draw on the literature and our own experiences to make recommendations for how EBAs can engage broader audiences, including the communities with whom we collaborate, a more diverse population of students, researchers in other disciplines and the development sector, policymakers, and the general public. These recommendations include: (1) playing to our strength in longitudinal, place‐based research, (2) collaborating more broadly, (3) engaging in greater public communication of science, (4) aligning our work with open‐science practices to the extent possible, and (5) increasing diversity of our field and teams through intentional action, outreach, training, and mentorship. ConclusionsWe EBAs need to put ourselves out there: research and engagement are complementary, not opposed to each other. With the resources and workable examples we provide here, we hope to spur more EBAs to action. 

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.