“There is a premier league of monogamy, in which humans sit comfortably, while the vast majority of other mammals take a far more promiscuous approach to mating,” said Dr Mark Dyble at the University of Cambridge.<\/p>\n
In the animal world, pairing up has its perks, which may be why it has evolved independently in multiple species, including us. Experts have proposed various benefits to so-called social monogamy, where mates match up for at least a breeding season to care for their young and see off rivals. <\/p>\n
Dr Dyble examined several human populations throughout history, calculating the proportions of full siblings \u2013 where individuals share the same mother and father \u2013 compared with half-siblings, individuals who share either a mother or a father, but not both. Similar data was compiled for more than 30 social monogamous and other mammals.<\/p>\n
Humans have a monogamy rating of 66% full siblings, ahead of meerkats (60%) but behind beavers (73%).<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, our evolutionary cousins fall at the bottom of the table – with mountain gorillas at 6% rating, while chimpanzees come in at just 4% (alongside the dolphin).<\/p>\n
In last place is Scotland’s Soay sheep, where females mate with multiple males, with 0.6% full siblings. The Californian mouse came top, at 100%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“There is a premier league of monogamy, in which humans sit comfortably, while the vast majority of other…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":178928,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[85,46,141,386],"class_list":{"0":"post-178927","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178927\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}