Category: 7. Science

Despite being roughly half their size, female gorillas can, and frequently do, overpower male gorillas when competing for status and resources, according to a recent study.

This discovery challenges the traditional belief that gorilla society is strongly patriarchal – characterised by male dominance over females – and has implications for the origins of human gender dynamics.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany, and the University of Turku, Finland, analysed 25 years of data gathered by observing the behaviour of gorillas in four different groups.

Wild mountain gorillas have long been considered an example of strict male power structures among primates, due to the vast size difference between males and females – the starkest size difference among any great ape.

It’s true that gorilla society is hierarchical. Each group has one alpha male at the top, and the rest of the gorillas compete for status below him.

But this new study concluded that gorilla hierarchies are much more gender balanced than previously believed.

“Gorilla females often outrank males,” lead author Dr Nikos Smit, researcher at Max Planck and Turku, told BBC Science Focus. “This is important for our understanding and interpretation of power relationships; it is not all about size and strength.”

In fact, 88 per cent of female gorillas outranked at least one adult male in groups with multiple males – mostly if those males were particularly young or old.

Additionally, when female gorillas engaged in conflicts with non-alpha males, they were victorious more than a quarter of the time, despite being significantly smaller than their opponents.

Senior author Dr Martha Robbins – director of the Bwindi mountain gorilla research project – told BBC Science Focus that this success was likely due to the relationship between these high-ranking females and their alpha male.

“The gorillas are aware of their social position and the social dynamics in a group,” she said. “These non-alpha males are bigger and physically stronger than the adult females, but they know that they should restrain themselves to avoid aggression from the alpha male. If they want to remain in the group, it is better to acquiesce.”

The scientists found, too, that the prize for winning these conflicts seemed to be priority access to food – another finding that contradicts previous research.

Scientists used to think that female gorillas only fought other females for food, while male gorillas mainly competed with each other for female mates. But it turns out that males and females all fight over food.

The scientists concluded that these findings had implications for our understanding of gender dynamics in human societies.

They wrote that the dominance of men over women was not “an apparent and immediate consequence of evolution,” but instead the result of “the flexible social and mating systems of humans.”

And, they continued, this is further supported by the observation that among bonobos – one of our closest living relatives, alongside chimpanzees – males are much bigger than females, but females are dominant over the males.

From this, scientists have concluded that it’s unlikely humans inherited patriarchy from our primate ancestors.

Read more:

About our experts

Dr Nikos Smit is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turku, Finland, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. His research focuses on the evolution of social and mating systems, and the boundaries between conflict and cooperation.

Dr Martha Robbins is the director of the Bwindi Mountain Gorilla Research Project and a group leader in the department of primate behaviour and evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Her research focuses on the evolution of sociality.

A Neolithic family was massacred, skinned, defleshed, cooked and eaten in a cave on the Iberian peninsula 5,600 years ago, a new study suggests.

Researchers found evidence that at least 11 people, including adults, adolescents and children, may have been victims of warfare cannibalism during a bloody event at the El Mirador cave in northern Spain.

The chemical composition of the inner regions of disks around young stars will determine the properties of planets forming there.

Many disk physical processes drive the chemical evolution, some of which depend on/correlate with the stellar properties. We aim to explore the connection between stellar properties and inner disk chemistry, using mid-infrared spectroscopy.

We use JWST-MIRI observations of a large, diverse sample of sources to explore trends between C₂H₂ and H₂O. Additionally, we calculate the average spectrum for the T Tauri (M_∗>0.2 M_⊙) and very low-mass star (VLMS, M_∗≤0.2 M_⊙) samples and use slab models to determine the properties. We find a significant anti-correlation between the flux ratio of C₂H₂/H₂O and the stellar luminosity. Disks around VLMS have significantly higher FC₂H₂/FH₂O flux ratios than their higher-mass counterparts.

We also explore trends with the strength of the 10 μm silicate feature, stellar accretion rate, and disk dust mass, all of which show correlations with the flux ratio, which may be related to processes driving the carbon-enrichment in disks around VLMS, but also have degeneracies with system properties.

Slab model fits to the average spectra show that the VLMS H₂O emission is quite similar in temperature and column density to a warm (∼600 K) H2O component in the T Tauri spectrum, indicating that the high C/O gas phase ratio in these disks is not due to oxygen depletion alone. Instead, the presence of many hydrocarbons, including some with high column densities, points to carbon enhancement in the disks around VLMS.

The observed differences in the inner disk chemistry as a function of host properties are likely to be accounted for by differences in the disk temperatures, stellar radiation field, and the evolution of dust grains.

Sierra L. Grant, Milou Temmink, Ewine F. van Dishoeck, Danny Gasman, Aditya M. Arabhavi, Benoît Tabone, Thomas Henning, Inga Kamp, Alessio Caratti o Garatti, Valentin Christiaens, Pacôme Esteve, Manuel Güdel, Hyerin Jang, Till Kaeufer, Nicolas T. Kurtovic, Maria Morales-Calderón, Giulia Perotti, Kamber Schwarz, Andrew D. Sellek, Lucas M. Stapper, Marissa Vlasblom, L.B.F.M. Waters

Comments: Accepted for publication in A&A. 15 pages, 9 figures. ArXiv abstract is shortened
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA); Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
Cite as: arXiv:2508.04692 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2508.04692v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2508.04692
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Submission history
From: Sierra Grant
[v1] Wed, 6 Aug 2025 17:56:05 UTC (797 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04692
Astrobiology, Astrochemistry,

A team of astronomers has taken the sharpest-ever picture of the unexpected interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS using the crisp vision of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope

Both for research and medical purposes, researchers have spent decades pushing the limits of microscopy to produce ever deeper and sharper images of brain activity, not only in the cortex but also in regions underneath such as the hippocampus. In a new study, a team of MIT scientists and engineers demonstrates a new microscope system capable of peering exceptionally deep into brain tissues to detect the molecular activity of individual cells by using sound.

Ryan Fortenberry, an astrochemist at the University of Mississippi, Ralf Kaiser, professor of chemistry at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, and Alexander M. Mebel, computational chemist at Florida International University, are part of an international team that synthesized methanetetrol for the first time. They published their research on the elusive compound in the journal Nature Communications.

“This is essentially a prebiotic concentrate — a seed of life molecule,” Fortenberry said. “It’s something that can lead to more complex chemistry if given the opportunity. Think of it like an acorn that will grow into a tree in the Grove.

“The acorn alone cannot make a tree; it requires sunlight and water and lots of other things. But it can be what starts the process.”

Methanetetrol is an ortho acid – an elusive class of compounds that are particularly difficult to isolate and study but are thought to play a key role in early life chemistry.

To mimic how methanetetrol might form in space, the researchers froze water and carbon dioxide ices to near absolute zero and exposed them to cosmic ray-like radiation. This process allowed them to release the molecule into gas form and identify it using powerful ultraviolet light.

“The detection of the only alcohol with four hydroxyl groups at the same carbon atom pushes the experimental and detection capabilities to the ‘final frontier,’ the next level beyond what could be accomplished before due to the lack of experimental and computational approaches,” said Kaiser, whose lab has been trying to isolate methanetetrol for more than five years.

Since methanetetrol has so many oxygen bonds – and because oxygen does not like to bond close to other oxygens – the compound is very unstable, meaning it is likely to break down if it is not kept in the right conditions.

“You have this compact, carbon-oxygen molecule that just really wants to go ‘boom,’” Fortenberry said. “And when it does, when you give it any kind of energy, you’ll have water, hydrogen peroxide and a number of other potential compounds that are important for life.

“It’s a like a prebiotic bomb.”

If the molecule can form in the lab, it can also form in space, the authors said. This makes the compound particularly interesting to astrochemists who are looking for potential life-supporting regions.

“While carbon is the building block of life, oxygen is what makes up nearly everything else,” Fortenberry said. “Oxygen is everywhere and is essential for life as we know it.

“So, if we can find places where methanetetrol forms naturally, we know that it is a place that has the potential building blocks to support life.”

This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation grants AST-2403867.