{"id":342645,"date":"2025-12-11T07:58:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-11T07:58:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/342645\/"},"modified":"2025-12-11T07:58:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-11T07:58:08","slug":"the-most-monogamous-species-not-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/342645\/","title":{"rendered":"The Most Monogamous Species: Not Us"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"storyParagraph\">&#13;<br \/>\n                                        Sure, there are cheaters among us, but overall, humans rank quite high among monogamous species, besting chimpanzees, black bears, African lions, and bottlenose dolphins, according to a study published Tuesday in <a href=\"https:\/\/royalsocietypublishing.org\/rspb\/article\/292\/2060\/20252163\/363965\/Human-monogamy-in-mammalian-context?searchresult=1\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Proceedings of the Royal Society B<\/a>. Evolutionary anthropologist Mark Dyble of the University of Cambridge ranked 35 mammals by how monogamous they appear to be\u2014based on how many pairs of siblings in a population share both parents versus only one. In a strictly monogamous species, nearly all siblings should be full siblings; in a more promiscuous one, half-siblings dominate, per the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/science\/biology\/monogamy-mammal-study-humans-f9d899f2?mod=hp_featst_pos3\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Wall Street Journal<\/a>.&#13;\n                                    <\/p>\n<p class=\"storyParagraph\">&#13;<br \/>\n                                        Evaluating humans by the metric is a bit tricky, given our use of birth control. Still, Dyble compiled sibling data from about 100 mostly contemporary human societies, plus ancient DNA from archaeological sites, finding 66% are full siblings. That&#8217;s enough to make humans 7th on the list of most monogamous species, just behind Eurasian beavers. At the opposite end were Soay sheep, with just 0.6% of sibling pairs sharing both parents. The rate was 4% for chimps, black bears, and bottlenose dolphins, and 19% for African lions. The top 10, ranked by percentage of full sibling pairs, per the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/science\/2025\/dec\/10\/humans-rank-among-leading-monogamous-mammals-study-finds\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Guardian<\/a>:&#13;\n                                    <\/p>\n<p>                                      California deermouse: 100%  African wild dog: 85%  Damaraland mole-rat: 79.5%  Moustached Tamarin: 77.6%  Ethiopian wolf: 76.5%  Eurasian beaver: 72.9%  Humans: 66%  White-handed gibbon: 63.5%  Meerkat: 59.9%  Grey wolf: 46.2% <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"&#13; Sure, there are cheaters among us, but overall, humans rank quite high among monogamous species, besting chimpanzees,&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":342646,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[80247,14230,39382,171747,79,41693,201],"class_list":["post-342645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-humans","tag-lists","tag-mammals","tag-monogamy","tag-science","tag-university-of-cambridge","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342645\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/342646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}