Coexistence in Female‐Bonded Primate Groups

With few exceptions, diurnal primates are distributed in large social groups that are spatially and temporally coherent. The goal of primate socioecology since 1960s has been to understand what drives and structures this distribution. Whereas initial syntheses (Crook and Gartlan, 1966; Eisenberg et al., 1972) focused on males, this emphasis gave way during the 1970s to an increasingly articulated representation of primate sociality that was centered on females and their responses to the world (Dittus, 1977; Hinde, 1983; Seyfarth, 1976; Wrangham, 1980). This shift, to a large degree, was fueled by the coincidence of an accelerating number of detailed field studies and the emergence of sociobiological theory, including the recognition that females were the ‘‘ecological’’ sex (Emlen and Oring, 1977; Wilson, 1975). The former pointed to well‐differentiated relationships within groups, while the latter shifted the analytical emphasis from groups to individuals and promoted kin selection as the likely solution to the repro ductive consequ ences of coop eration and coexi stence (Ham ilton, 1964 , 1972). Given that this fieldwork concent rated on Old World monkey species (Cercopithecoidea) in which females predominantly remain in their natal groups—and hence are ‘‘female‐bonded’’ (Wrangham, 1980; where the term indicates both female philopatry and strong bonds between females)—subsequent empirical and theoretical attention was directed to the nature of the associations of female kin. Despite a well‐administered corrective to the uncritical assumption that the results of all this effort speak to the ‘‘typical’’ primate (Strier, 1994), instead of being phylogenetically circumscribed (Di Fiore and Rendall, 1994), interest in the social dynamics of female‐bonded (FB) primates