Multilevel Societies in Primates and Other Mammals: Introduction to the Special Issue

remarked that nowhere on Earth do people live regularly in isolated families. The habitual formation of superfamily level groupings is one of the unmistakable universals of human sociality. Males and females within these higher level groupings are connected via kinship and affinity ties, and affiliative and cooperative bonds reach far beyond the nuclear family unit Although interunit encounters are usually circumvented or characterized by animosity because of mating or resource competition in many nonhuman primates