Gorillas offer clues to how social relationships work in humans – study

Survey of 164 primates in Rwanda shows how impact of being close to others is affected by group size and sex

Human friendship groups are complex - and often fraught - but a study of mountain gorillas has found that their societies can also be head-scratchingly complicated.

The study, which took in 20 years of health data involving 164 gorillas in Rwanda, discovered that the costs and benefits of being close to others changed depending on the size of groups and differed for males and females.