Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Long And The Short Of It: Testing The Conversion And Cuckold Strategies Of Ancestral Human Outgroup Mating, Joseph Frederick Salvatore

Doctoral Dissertations

The human social group likely aided in ancestral human’s survival. However, the small-knit extended kin group in which human ancestors evolved posed a plausible reproductive threat in the form of inbreeding. The outgroup mating hypothesis (Salvatore, Meltzer, & Gaertner, under review) proposed that, as a solution to the inbreeding dilemma, ancestral females may have mated outside their social group. The current work examines two competing hypotheses by which ancestral females mated with outgroup males and balanced parental investment concerns. The conversion hypothesis posits that ancestral females mated with an outgroup male under the provision that he and his group would …