81 st annual meeting of the american association of physical anthropologists

Among the multiple primate papers presented, several talks were notable for using the relatively new social network theory to examine social behavior and the transmission of infectious diseases. David Watts (Yale) investigated grooming patterns among adult males at the Ngogo chimpanzee community in Kibale and found that high-ranking males displayed high centrality and prestige in the grooming network. They received the most grooming, particularly by fellow highranking males, while not necessarily reciprocating. Similarly, low-ranking males tended to groom and associate with other low-ranking males. Julie Rushmore (Georgia) combined social network data from a chimpanzee community at Kibale with infectious disease transmission models for the design of intervention strategies in the event of a disease outbreak among African great apes. She concluded that the treatment response should be disease-specific. Following suit, Collin McCabe (Harvard) and Charles Nunn (Harvard) investigated the effects of infectious diseases and parasitism in the evolution of culture and group size, respectively. Using data compiled from 127 primate species, McCabe showed that infectious diseases pose a potential cost to behavioral patterns implicated in the evolution of culture. Similarly, Nunn investigated the relationship between group size and parasitism within primates and across 42 different vertebrate taxa. He found very high variation, suggesting that factors such as learning and social network patterns may have a stronger effect than group size alone.