Assessing the learning curve in laparoscopic TAPP repair for emergency inguinal hernia: a comparative study with open repair.

In human hunter‐gatherer societies, successfully catching prey can signal a male's quality as a provider, and sharing the spoils of the hunt can broadcast that signal throughout his community (Gurven and Von Rueden ; Jaeggi and Gurven , ). In such societies, meat is a highly prized food source that often arrives in quantities greater than a single individual or household can consume (Wood and Marlowe ). Consequently, the cost of sharing is small, but the benefit of receiving is significant, leading meat to be shared more widely than other foods (Hawkes et al. ; Hill et al. ; Jaeggi and Gurven ; Kaplan and Hill ). Men who share more meat more often provide their immediate family with difficult‐to‐acquire nutrients, experience increased reputation within their community, and are sought after as both mates and extra‐pair mating partners (Alvard and Gillespie ; Gurven ; Gurven and Von Rueden ; Hill et al. ; Wiessner ). Thus, frequent meat providers experience higher reproductive success in most hunter‐gatherer societies (Smith ; Wiessner ). While the extent of human meat sharing is unique, the practice of catching and sharing prey as a signal of male quality has deeper evolutionary roots. Males of numerous insect (Vahed ) and some arachnid (, Albo and Costa ) and bird species (, Heinrich ; , de Kort et al. ; , Emery et al. ; , González‐Solís et al. ; , Amat ) provide prospective mates with “nuptial gifts” or “courtship feeding” to signal their quality as a provider and encourage mating opportunities, with males that share more or larger prey items generally having better reproductive outcomes. However, within the clade of our closest living relatives, nonhuman primates, in which we might expect to detect the evolutionary origins of human meat‐sharing practices, there are no convincing examples of meat sharing as a “costly signal” of male quality (Jaeggi and Gurven ). Nor is there substantial evidence of a relationship between male meat sharing and reproductive success (Jaeggi and Van Schaik ). The bulk of the research on meat sharing has focused on chimpanzees () as the only taxon that hunts in groups and shares meat actively (Boesch and Boesch ; Watts ). Studies exploring a possible link between meat sharing and reproductive success in chimpanzees have yielded mixed results. Following a meat‐sharing event, male chimpanzee hunters have been reported to receive immediate mating opportunities (Stanford ), delayed mating opportunities (Achorn et al. ; Gomes and Boesch ), or no notable increases in mating success (Mitani and Watts ). The transfer of meat between individuals is not only restricted to apes. Capuchins and baboons are the two other primate taxa in which meat‐eating is most observed and best described (Watts ). While neither capuchins (Perry and Rose ) nor baboons (Allan et al. ; Goffe and Fischer ; Harding ; O'Hearn, Neumann, et al. ; Rhine et al. ; Schreier et al. ; Strum ) perform owner‐initiated “active sharing,” they both transfer meat to others with varying degrees of tolerance up to and including recipient‐initiated “passive sharing”—also termed tolerated theft (Stevens and Gilby ). However, it remains uninvestigated whether the frequency with which males provide meat to others functions as a signal of male quality in these species (Jaeggi and Gurven ; Watts ). Baboons, in particular, offer a valuable analogy for human hunter‐gatherer diet and food practices given their shared ecological history, parallel evolution with early hominids, and, in some species, the similarity of their societies' multilevel social organization (Chapais ; Codron et al. ; DeVore and Washburn ; Fischer et al. ; Grueter et al. ; Jolly ).