Reporting summary
Further information on research design is available in the Nature
Research Reporting Summary linked to this paper.
Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the
corresponding authors upon reasonable request.
Code availability
We provide source code for our nearest-neighbour-based analyses
(https://github.com/skollmor/repertoireDating). We also provide a
data-browser/data analysis graphical user interface that we used to per-
form some analyses and to explore and visualize data (https://github.
com/skollmor/dspace).
Acknowledgements We thank J. Herbst and Z. Huang for performing the tutoring experiments;
and A. Zai, S. Surace, A. Huber, I. Calangiu and K. Martin for discussing the manuscript. This
work was supported by grants from the Simons Foundation (SCGB 328189 and SCGB 543013
to V.M.) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF PP00P3_157539 to V.M. and SNSF
31003A_182638 to R. H.). All experimental procedures were approved by the Veterinary Office
of the Canton of Zurich.Author contributions S.K. conceived of the approach. S.K. and V.M. performed analyses. S.K.,
V.M. and R.H.R.H. wrote the paper. R.H.R.H. conceived and supervised collection of the
behavioural data.
Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests.Additional information
Supplementary information is available for this paper at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-
1892-x.
Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to S.K. or V.M.
Reprints and permissions information is available at http://www.nature.com/reprints.