Linking human and nonhuman mating systems

Funding

For seeing the workshop through, we thank Tim Caro and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder for their tireless energy, Sean O’Donnell and Eileen Lacy for their assistance, and Ben Hart and Peter Marler for their guidance as principal investigators. The authors extend thanks to the graduate student participants. The workshop and associated seminars are funded by NSF Grant DIR91-13287. ince Emlen and Oring’s seminal paper S in 1977 (Ref. l), behavioral ecologists have made considerable progress in the study of mating systems (the general behavioral strategies employed in obtaining mates112).M ore recently, anthropologists have made strides towards understanding individual strategies in patterns of marriage across human societiess. To foster a dialogue between anthropologists and behavioral ecologists, the University of California at Davis hosted an interdisciplinary workshop on human and nonhuman mating systems (27-30 March 1994). The workshop featured presentations followed by integrative discussions arranged by topic, which facilitated interactions among participants from diverse fields. Organized by Tim Caro and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, this is the third workshop sponsored by the members of the NSF Research Training Grant in Animal Behavior at UC Davis. Each workshop forms part of a unique format: a winter seminar devoted to discussions of the literature, followed by the workshop and a spring quarter of writing and synthesizing the material.