Acknowledgements
We thank Dr. Pablo Santos for his invaluable support during an early stage of the project and Dr. Stuart Patterson for his mindful comments on the manuscript. We are grateful to the Kalahari Research Trust and the Kalahari Meerkat Project for access to facilities and habituated animals in the Kuruman River Reserve, South Africa. This paper has relied on records of individual identities and/or life histories maintained by the Kalahari Meerkat Project, which has been supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Research Grant Nos 294494 and 742808 to T.H. Clutton-Brock since 1/7/2012), the Human Frontier Science Program (funding reference RGP0051/2017), the University of Zurich, the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Mammal Research Institute at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Research for this study was conducted with permission of the ethical committee of Pretoria University and the Northern Cape Conservation Service, South Africa (Permit number: EC031-13, FAUNA 1020-2016). The study is funded by the German Research Foundation to S. Sommer (DFG SO 428/15-1).