Even the earliest ants may have been social butterflies.
Ants fossilized in 100-million-year-old amber have sensory equipment that suggests they had complex social lives similar to their modern-day ancestors, researchers report June 14 in Science Advances.
All ants live in advanced societies where adults live in large groups and engage in cooperative parenting and divisions of labor, but ants’ ancestors were solitary wasps. Researchers aren’t sure when the insects’ social lifestyle evolved. Some early ants have been found fossilized as groups, which hinted at social living around the time of the insects’ evolution during the Early Cretaceous Period. But it was still unknown if early ants chemically communicated with
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