Mothers know best.

Abstract

To succeed in life, animals must be able to navigate through their home ranges, acquire food, avoid predators, and interact in appropriate ways with other members of their own species. At birth, mammals are not able to do any of these things: they are completely dependent on their mothers (and, occasionally, their fathers) for nourishment, transportation, warmth, protection, and socialization. For species that live in complex social groups, as most primates do, mothers’ role in shaping the social experiences of their offspring may be especially important. For example, in some species of Old World monkeys, mothers support their immature offspring in agonistic conflicts. This eventually enables young females to outrank all females that their mothers can outrank, even those that are older, stronger, and more experienced than themselves. In PNAS, Murray et al. (1) explore another way that primate mothers shape their offsprings’ social development. Murray et al. demonstrate that mothers of infant male chimpanzees are more gregarious than mothers of infant females and hypothesize that these differences reflect an adaptive maternal response to the sex-specific socialization needs of their offspring.