Foraging Humans, Mammals And Birds Who Live In The Same Place Behave Similarly

1/14/2021 03:00:00 PM

Foraging humans find food, reproduce, share parenting, and even organise their social groups in similar ways as surrounding mammal and bird species, depending on where they live in the world, new research has found. The study, published in Science, shows environmental factors exert a key influence on how foraging human populations and non-human species behave, despite their very different backgrounds.



Data visualization determining which mammal and bird species lived in the same location
and computed their average behaviour [Credit: Barsbai et al., 2021]

The team of international researchers analysed data from more than 300 locations around the world, observing the behaviours of foraging human populations alongside other mammal and bird species living in the same place. Their findings show that for almost all behaviours, 14 of the 15 investigated, humans were more likely to behave similarly to the majority of other non-human species living in the same place than those elsewhere.

"Previous research has explored how environmental conditions shape the behaviour of closely related species. This is the first time a broad comparative perspective has been used to systematically compare very different species - humans, mammals, and birds - across a wide range of behaviours. Our evidence shows how remarkably pervasive and consistent the effect of the local environment is on behaviour," said author Dr Toman Barsbai, from the University of Bristol and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. "The similarities are not only present for behaviours directly relating to the environment, such as finding food, where we might expect a clear correlation, but also for reproductive and social behaviours, which might seem less dependent on the local environment."

For example, when obtaining food, there are environments where humans get a significant proportion of their calories from hunting. In these locations it was shown there are much larger proportions of carnivorous mammals and birds than elsewhere. Similar associations were also identified for reliance on fishing, how far to travel to gather food, whether or not to store food, and whether or not to migrate between seasons - with each behaviour found to be more common in humans, other mammals, and birds in some locations than in others.

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