Overview

• The research tracked four wild mountain gorilla groups in Uganda over a quarter century, analyzing interactions among 32 females and 24 males.
• By forging strategic partnerships, 88 percent of adult females outrank at least one male, reshaping long-held beliefs about size-based dominance.
• Female gorillas win roughly one in four conflicts against larger males, often backed by alpha males or deferred to by subordinate males.
• Prime-age alpha males sire about 85 percent of offspring and dominate nearly all interactions with females, cementing their top status.
• Authors argue that these social mechanisms challenge biologically driven models of hierarchy and point to cultural roots of human gender power imbalances.