mark flinn

Baylor University, Anthropology, Faculty Member

University of Missouri Columbia, Anthropology, Faculty Member

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I am a bio-medical anthropologist. My research examines hormonal responses to social interactions, with focus on the special human relationships of coalitions, grandparenting, fathering, mothering, siblings, and pair-bonding.
Supervisors: Richard Alexander (NAS), William D. Hamilton (NAS, FRS), Napoleon A. Chagnon (NAS)

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Daniel D. Hutto

University of Wollongong

Noel B. Salazar

KU Leuven

Robert Lickliter

Florida International University

Kristen J Gremillion

Ohio State University

Richard Menary

Macquarie University

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Adam M Croom

Case Western Reserve University

Jean-Jacques Hublin

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Santiago Ginnobili

Universidad de Buenos Aires

Veena Das

Johns Hopkins University

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Papers by mark flinn

Why Sex?

SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks, 2021

Heritable traits and their impacts on child health in a Caribbean village

The 85th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, Atlanta, GA, 2016

Evolution of Hormonal Mechanisms for Human Family Relationships

Routledge eBooks, Jul 24, 2019

Remote sensing evidence for population growth of isolated indigenous societies in Amazonia

Isolated indigenous societies who actively avoid sustained peaceful contact with the outside worl... more Isolated indigenous societies who actively avoid sustained peaceful contact with the outside world are critically endangered. Last year “Tanaru”, the lone surviving man of his tribe for at least 35 years, died in Southwest Amazonia marking the latest cultural extinction event in a long history of massacres, enslavement, and epidemics. Yet in the upper reaches of the Amazon Basin, dozens of resilient isolated tribes still manage to survive. Remote sensing is a reliable method of monitoring the population dynamics of uncontacted populations by quantifying the area cleared for gardens and villages, along with the fire detections associated with the burning of those clearings. Remote sensing also provides a method to document the number of residential structures and village fissioning. Only with these longitudinal assessments can we better evaluate the current no-contact policies by governments and the United Nations, along with the prospects for the long-term survival of isolated tribes. While the world’s largest isolated indigenous metapopulation, Pano speakers in Acre, Brazil, appears to be thriving, other smaller isolated populations disconnected from metapopulations, such as the single village of isolated Yanomami in northern Brazil, continue being extremely vulnerable to external threats. Our applied anthropological conservation approach is to provide analyses of publicly available remote sensing datasets to help inform policies that enhance survival and well-being of isolated cultural groups.

The extended phenotype: The gene as the unit of selection

Ethology and Sociobiology, 1984

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The Role of Hormones in the Evolution of Human Sociality

The human family seems to follow a typical mammalian pattern:intense maternal care including brea... more The human family seems to follow a typical mammalian pattern:intense maternal care including breastfeeding of an altricial (helpless) offspringwith some support from other relatives. Beyond the shared mammal/primate commonality, however, humans have some highly unusual traits. We are the only species characterized by the combination of: stable breeding bonds, extensive paternal care in multimale groups, extended bilateral kin recognition, life-long brother-sister bonds, grandparenting, and controlled exchange of mates among kin groups. Perhaps even more surprising than this unique set of universals is the extraordinary diversity in composition and behavior of human families. These characteristics are important pieces of the human evolutionary puzzle, and are critical for theoretical and pragmatic understanding of human family relationships and child development. In this chapter we first review a general model for the evolution of human mating, parenting, and kinship patterns based on a process of runaway social selection. We then evaluate the fossil evidenceand the potential physiological and neurobiological mechanismsthat underpin these central aspects of our sociality. Evidence suggests that humans have a suite of derived traits best explained by an evolutionary history of bilateral, multiple-generation kin networks, pairbonding, and complex coalitions including intercommunity alliances based in part on mating/marriage relationships. Keywords: human evolution; family relationships; hominin fossils; hormones; behavioral endocrinology

Evolution of the Human Family: Cooperative Males, Long Social Childhoods, Smart Mothers, and Extended Kin Networks

Oxford University Press eBooks, Oct 1, 2007

Humans are characterized by a distinctive set of traits, including: (1) large brains, (2) long pe... more Humans are characterized by a distinctive set of traits, including: (1) large brains, (2) long periods of juvenile dependence, (3) extensive bi-parental care including large transfers of information, (4) multigenerational bilateral kin networks, (5) habitual bipedal locomotion, (6) use of the upper limbs for handling tools, including throwing projectile weapons, (7) concealed, or "cryptic," ovulation, (8) menopause, (9) culture including language, and (10) lethal competition among kin-based coalitions. A few other species exhibit several of these traits; only humans, however, are characterized by the entire combination (Alexander, 2005). The evolution and co-evolution of this suite of traits present several evolutionary questions or puzzles that are central to understanding the human family. Here we first briefly describe these puzzles then suggest a resolution based on the importance of social competition during human evolution. Afterward we turn to the developmental issue of how the family social environment may affect the timing of reproductive maturation and how this timing is essential to an understanding of the family.

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Uterine vs. agnatic kinship variability and associated cousin marriage preferences: an evolutionary biological analysis

Correlates of Reproductive In a Caribbean Village

Genealogical, demographic, and economic data collected in a rural Trinidadian village indicate th... more Genealogical, demographic, and economic data collected in a rural Trinidadian village indicate that: (1) individuals with more land have more offspring, (2) males with more land have higher mating success, (3) young adults with parents resident in the village have higher reproductive success, and (4) the residence o f father has a strong effect on young adult male reproductive success, but apparently has no effect on young adult female reproductive success, suggesting a gender bias in nepotism. The results indicate that there are important gender differences in the effect of resources on reproduction and in patterns of parent-offspring interaction.

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Evolution of stress response to social threat

Oxford University Press eBooks, Sep 18, 2012

Resource Distribution, Social Competition, and Mating Patterns in Human Societies

Princeton University Press eBooks, May 5, 2018

Anthropometric heritability and child growth in a Caribbean village: A quantitative genetic analysis of longitudinal height, weight, and body mass index in Bwa Mawego, Dominica

American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Aug 28, 2019

Objectives: Body size and composition vary widely among individuals and populations, and long-ter... more Objectives: Body size and composition vary widely among individuals and populations, and long-term research in diverse contexts informs our understanding of genetic, cultural, and environmental impacts on this variation. We analyze longitudinal measures of height, weight, and body mass index (BMI) from a Caribbean village, estimating the extent to which these anthropometrics are shaped by genetic variance in a small-scale population of mixed ancestry. Materials and Methods: Longitudinal data from a traditionally horticultural village in Dominica document height and weight in a non-Western population that is transitioning to increasingly Westernized lifestyles, and an 11-generation pedigree enables us to estimate the proportions of phenotypic variation in height, weight, and BMI attributed to genetic variation. We assess within-individual variation across growth curves as well as heritabilities of these traits for 260 individuals using Bayesian variance component estimation. Results: Age, sex, and secular trends account for the majority of anthropometric variation in these longitudinal data. Independent of age, sex, and secular trends, our analyses show high repeatabilities for the remaining variation in height, weight, and BMI growth curves (>0.75), and moderate heritabilities (h 2 height = 0.68, h 2 weight = 0.64, h 2 BMI = 0.49) reveal clear genetic signals that account for large proportions of the variation in body size observed between families. Secular trends show increases of 6.5% in height and 16.0% in weight from 1997 to 2017. Discussion: This horticultural Caribbean population has transitioned to include more Westernized foods and technologies over the decades captured in this analysis. BMI varies widely between individuals and is significantly shaped by genetic variation, warranting future exploration with other physiological correlates and associated genetic variants.

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Social network accuracy among children and adolescents in a rural Dominican community

Evolution and Human Behavior

Human cooperation and evolutionary transitions in individuality

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

A major evolutionary transition in individuality involves the formation of a cooperative group an... more A major evolutionary transition in individuality involves the formation of a cooperative group and the transformation of that group into an evolutionary entity. Human cooperation shares principles with those of multicellular organisms that have undergone transitions in individuality: division of labour, communication, and fitness interdependence. After the split from the last common ancestor of hominoids, early hominins adapted to an increasingly terrestrial niche for several million years. We posit that new challenges in this niche set in motion a positive feedback loop in selection pressure for cooperation that ratcheted coevolutionary changes in sociality, communication, brains, cognition, kin relations and technology, eventually resulting in egalitarian societies with suppressed competition and rapid cumulative culture. The increasing pace of information innovation and transmission became a key aspect of the evolutionary niche that enabled humans to become formidable cooperators...

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13 • Alloparental Care and the Ontogeny of Glucocorticoid Stress Response among Stepchildren

Substitute Parents

Genetic ancestry, admixture, and population structure in rural Dominica

PLOS ONE, 2021

The Caribbean is a genetically diverse region with heterogeneous admixture compositions influence... more The Caribbean is a genetically diverse region with heterogeneous admixture compositions influenced by local island ecologies, migrations, colonial conflicts, and demographic histories. The Commonwealth of Dominica is a mountainous island in the Lesser Antilles historically known to harbor communities with unique patterns of migration, mixture, and isolation. This community-based population genetic study adds biological evidence to inform post-colonial narrative histories in a Dominican horticultural village. High density single nucleotide polymorphism data paired with a previously compiled genealogy provide the first genome-wide insights on genetic ancestry and population structure in Dominica. We assessed family-based clustering, inferred global ancestry, and dated recent admixture by implementing the fastSTRUCTURE clustering algorithm, modeling graph-based migration with TreeMix, assessing patterns of linkage disequilibrium decay with ALDER, and visualizing data from Dominica with...

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Were humans their own most important selective pressure for cooperation and morality? A critical review of Richard Wrangham's The goodness paradox

Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 2020

Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Societyby Cordelia Fine. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017, 266 pages, $26.95 (hardcover)

Journal of sex & marital therapy, Jan 4, 2017

In Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society, Cordelia Fine targets one of the most pe... more

The Human Family

On Human Nature, 2017

Abstract Family relationships are a key component of human evolution. The extent and duration of ... more Abstract Family relationships are a key component of human evolution. The extent and duration of offspring care is extraordinary, and unique in the huge informational transfer via language. Kin relationships are bilateral, variable, multigenerational, and intergroup. Mating relationships are also variable, usually influenced by kin, and generate important affinal linkages in traditional cultures. These aspects of human sociality are biologically embedded in neurological and physiological mechanisms. Analysis of genetic, hormonal and neural mechanisms can provide clues into the evolution of the emotional and cognitive systems that underpin the human family.

Aggression, Affiliation, and Parenting

Basics in Human Evolution, 2015

This chapter summarizes how and why humans evolved the seemingly oppositional traits of coalition... more This chapter summarizes how and why humans evolved the seemingly oppositional traits of coalitional aggression and extensive parental care. Coalitions are one of the most striking aspects of human behavior. All societies recognize alliances among communities, usually based on kinship. Intergroup competition is ubiquitous, often deadly and fueled by revenge, and critical to general human welfare. Children in all cultures develop friendship cliques and engage in group-against-group team play. Parenting is also a fundamental component of human sociality. The extent and duration of offspring care is extraordinary—and unique in the huge informational transfer via language and culture. The emotional, cognitive, and behavioral components of human family relationships are biologically embedded in neurological and physiological mechanisms. Analysis of affiliative and stress hormonal axes can provide clues into the emotional and cognitive systems that underpin these core aspects of human sociality.

Why Sex?

SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks, 2021

Heritable traits and their impacts on child health in a Caribbean village

The 85th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, Atlanta, GA, 2016

Evolution of Hormonal Mechanisms for Human Family Relationships

Routledge eBooks, Jul 24, 2019

Remote sensing evidence for population growth of isolated indigenous societies in Amazonia