title: How old are chimpanzee communities? Time to the most recent common ancestor of the Y-chromosome in highly patrilocal societies.
abstract: Many human societies are patrilineal, with males passing on their name or descent group affiliation to their offspring. Y-chromosomes are also passed on from father to son, leading to the simple expectation that males sharing the same surname or descent group membership should have similar Y-chromosome haplotypes. Although several studies in patrilineal human societies have examined the correspondence between Y-chromosome variation and surname or descent group membership, similar studies in non-human animals are lacking. Chimpanzees represent an excellent species for examining the relationship between descent group membership and Y-chromosome variation because they live in strongly male philopatric communities that arise by a group-fissioning process. Here we take advantage of recent analytical advances in the calculation of the time to the most recent common male ancestor and a large sample size of 273 Y-chromosome short tandem repeat haplotypes to inform our understanding of the potential ages of eight communities of chimpanzees. We find that the times to the most recent common male ancestor of chimpanzee communities are several hundred to as much as over two thousand years. These genetic estimates of the great time depths of chimpanzee communities accord well with behavioral observations suggesting that community fissions are a very rare event and are similar to genetic estimates of the time depth of patrilineal human groups.
authors.affiliation: Boston University, Department of Anthropology, 232 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215, USA; Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Primatology, Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig 04103, Germany. Electronic address: langergr@bu.edu.
authors.forename: Kevin E
authors.initials: KE
authors.lastname: Langergraber
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Primatology, Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig 04103, Germany. Electronic address: rowney@eva.mpg.de.
authors.forename: Carolyn
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Rowney
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Primatology, Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig 04103, Germany; Robert Koch Institute, Epidemiology of Highly Pathogenic Organisms, Nordufer 20, Berlin 13353, Germany. Electronic address: SchubertG@rki.de.
authors.forename: Grit
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Schubert
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Primatology, Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig 04103, Germany. Electronic address: crockford@eva.mpg.de.
authors.forename: Cathy
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Crockford
authors.affiliation: University of St. Andrews, School of Psychology and Neuroscience, Westburn Lane, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9JP, UK. Electronic address: clh42@st-andrews.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Catherine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Hobaiter
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Primatology, Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig 04103, Germany. Electronic address: wittig@eva.mpg.de.
authors.forename: Roman
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Wittig
authors.affiliation: Harvard University, Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, 11 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Electronic address: wrangham@fas.harvard.edu.
authors.forename: Richard W
authors.initials: RW
authors.lastname: Wrangham
authors.affiliation: University of St. Andrews, School of Psychology and Neuroscience, Westburn Lane, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9JP, UK; University of Neuchâtel, Cognitive Science Center, Rue Emile-Argand 11, Neuchâtel 2000, Switzerland. Electronic address: klaus.zuberbuehler@unine.ch.
authors.forename: Klaus
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Zuberbühler
authors.affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Primatology, Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig 04103, Germany. Electronic address: vigilant@eva.mpg.de.
authors.forename: Linda
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Vigilant
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D007560:Cote d'Ivoire; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D051456:Gene Flow; D005787:Gene Frequency; D006239:Haplotypes; D008297:Male; D018895:Microsatellite Repeats; D002679:Pan troglodytes / Q000235:genetics*; D016133:Polymerase Chain Reaction; D013995:Time; D014454:Uganda; D014998:Y Chromosome / Q000235:genetics*
keywords: Ancestry; Community formation; Culture; Dating; Haplotype; Mutation rate; Pan troglodytes; Paternity; Philopatry