I am using lions here for a lot of reasons. Mainly because we have had a lot of exposure to lions, and they have been studied widely. They are also very dramatic in nature, especially when they are at their peak. They are fierce, dominant, protective, proud, horny, and lazy. By nature they are calm and passive unless they need to be something else. The mane on a lion reflects his status and success in life and it sends that message out to other lions who know how to read it. The male lions mane condition is driven by hormones that rely on his success as a leader of a pride. How would you compare lions and prides to humans? As I was writing this it occurred to me that how they develop as cubs would be nice to know more about so I will look into that.
Humans use puffery to display their status and wealth also. But since we know how to fake it it’s not a very reliable indicator.
Very good example, we show the world one thing, but we are still a wreck on the inside.
Is that true? Can you identify a successful male lion by looking at his mane? If a lion is successful, does his mane change in any way?
I will try to find the study. But there was some group of lions in ASfrica they called the dark maned lions. They had some unique feature in their environment where the competition for pride leader was not as great and it produced these dark maned lions. If these lions lost a single fight their manes started to lose luster. With each lost fight they continued to deteriorate to the point where they looked like the females with no main at all or very little.
quoted for continuity
I know human women who are all of those things (not all the same woman, but among them they count these traits).
Your idea seems to be that secondary sex characteristics are a reliable indicator of success in life. This is definitely not true among humans. To make a very large generalization (I assume you are not opposed to that), very sexually attractive humans are often not taken seriously in fields outside of entertainment and sports. They tend to have certain kinds of success easily and so are not motivated to do the kind of hard work that it takes to produce real achievements. And while successful people can perhaps afford to artificially enhance their attractiveness, they do not grow more attractive naturally.
Another difference: among lions, if I understand correctly, females do all the work (hunting) while the males only eat, sleep, and occasionally fight so that they can pass on their genes. Among humans, women only do 75-80% of the work. And many men pass on their genes while being unattractive and doing bugger-all. Or so I am told.
I don’t really have a solid idea on how that works in humans beyond the idea that it does have an effect. I suspect our perception of who we are is more important than a general perception. For example a lion does not take it personal when he is run off by an elephant. He just views it as a force of nature. Some men might take it personal when they have to submit to authoriy in order to keep their jobs while other men may see the boss as simply a force he needs to deal with and not take it personal. Therefore it would have no effect on his hormone output.
If the lion is alive, and has a mane, then he’s a successful male lion. The rest are dead.
I briefly Googled this.
The 3 paragraphs I read mentions young lions as having higher testosterone that may effect mane growth.
Mostly it’s genetics, health, food supply and the variety of pests the lion carries. And age. The old lions lose their mane.
That’s the old meme, but more recent research has largely disproved that. Males hunt less often than females and tend to hunt as solitary ambush predators in heavy cover, rather than as part of a coordinated pride. But they do hunt. Which makes sense because males hunt for years on their own before they get strong enough to take over a pride. It would be odd if they lost that instinct.
As to comparison to humans - it is minimal. They aren’t very human-like in pretty much any sense. They’re unusual as a primarily communal felid, but…eh, there just isn’t much beyond that.
As to development of cubs - well, male lions taking over a pride will generally kill every cub to force the females into estrus. Not particularly common with human step-parents, a few movies not withstanding. Probably because we don’t have discrete estrus periods in humans.
Could you go into more detail as to why you are using lions? We’re not that closely related. Their social structure is very different. I don’t get it.
If my memory serves me right this was a national geographic documentary from about 20 years ago. So it was just the opinion of who did the documentary.
To be clear, you really have not offered any evidence for any of this. Just your opinions, and some study you can’t find.
You, on the other hand, make some reasonable points. What is your take on whether the male lion in a pride who does a solitary kill shares the food with the rest of the pride (as distinct from letting them feed when he’s had his fill)? I ask because I was thinking that the females do all the work dedicated to keeping the pride going, and the male(s) feed first if they want.
I’d argue that the unsuccessful male lions correspond to nearly homeless humans. And yes, folks that far down the human pecking order and with that uncertain of a nutrition situation are pretty obvious as distressed examples of the human species. Their “mane” and lots else besides generally looks like crap. And I don’t merely mean their attention to personal grooming.
But after that small observation I’ll agree with the several contrary posters upthread that there’s damned little similar between lion & human society. What resemblances you may find are either common to all predatory mammals, or are mere coincidence and tortured metaphor.
Or are garbage science packaged into an entertaining TV show.
More or less to the last. They may share with other males in the coalition (who are big enough or have strong affectionate bonds with the hunting male) who bully their way in. And the may surrender part of the kill to the rest of the pride if they’re full enough. But probably mostly what they are doing is reducing the amount of calories the females need to procure to fill the males. Which is probably significant for communal health, but not exactly communally minded.
The heart of the pride are the interrelated female mothers, daughters, sisters and cousins that form the steady population over decades. Males, if they aren’t killed when young by unrelated males (common, as pride coalitions turn over frequently), still live desperate, violent and generally much shorter lives than females. In many ways they get the shorter end of the communal stick. Sure they dominate food, but they are essential to maintaining a minimal stability. Smaller prides without males regularly associated with them seem to go downhill and sometimes fully disintegrate (this can happen in areas where one “super-coalition” takes over several prides for a few years and only infrequently visits smaller prides in their empire).
Some genders just get shafted in human terms relative to the other in certain other mammal species. I would rather be a female lion than a male and male sea otter than a female (female sea otters, aside from getting physically mauled and near- or potentially actually-drowned during mating, have an absolutely brutal caloric gauntlet to run to raise a youngster).