Age- and sex-dependent sibling effects on early-life survival in preindustrial humans
Spa, M.; Young, E. A.; Lummaa, V.; Postma, E.; Dugdale, H.
Show abstract
Siblings are an important part of an individuals early-life environment and may therefore play an important role in shaping an individuals fitness. The quantification of sibling effects is challenging, especially in long-lived species with extended parental care and overlapping generations, such as humans. Here we quantify how the survival status, age, and sex of older siblings shape childhood survival across 2941 focal individuals born between 1750-1870 using historical parish data from Switzerland. While the total number of older siblings was not associated with an individuals childhood survival, distinguishing between siblings by their survival status, age, and sex revealed several associations, which in some cases also interacted with the sex of the focal individual: While older brothers close in age reduced the survival of girls but not boys, having more older sisters born close in age improved their younger siblings survival. Our results, therefore, show that sibling interactions play an important role in shaping early-life survival, and highlight that the strength and direction of these effects are context-dependent and can arise through biological and cultural factors. We encourage future studies on sibling interaction to consider siblings survival, age and sex, in both humans and other species.
Matching journals
The top 9 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
- Early-life paternal relationships predict adult female survival in wild baboons 92%
- Testing frameworks for early life effects: the developmental constraints and adaptive responsehypotheses do not explain key fertility outcomes in wild female baboons 91%
- Early life environments shape adult cardiometabolic health during rapid lifestyle change 91%
Similar papers in this journal
- Sex-dependent influence of major histocompatibility complex diversity on fitness in a social mammal 91%
- Population differences in the length and early-life dynamics of telomeres among European pied flycatchers 91%
- The telomere regulatory gene POT1 responds to stress and predicts performance in nature: implications for telomeres and life history evolution 91%
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.