Evolutionary History of Hunter-Gatherer Marriage Practices.

Der aktuelle Forschungsstand deutet darauf hin, dass die Vielfältigkeit der Heiratsformen, die sich in vormodernen Gesellschaften beobachten lassen, das Ergebnis evolutionären Drucks sind. Dieser Ansicht zufolge können Polygamie und Monogamie als konkurrierende Strategien angesehen werden, die sich unter bestimmten Umständen ausbreiten. Der folgende Beitrag will dies auf der Grundlage archäologischer Daten überprüfen. Dazu werden aus zwölf Gräberfeldern der Kupfer-und Bronzezeit in Mitteleuropa detaillierte Informationen zum Geschlechterverhältnis und zu Unterschieden im Reichtum der Grabausstattung ausgewertet. Diese Ergebnisse werden dann mit den Vermögensunterschieden und der Subsistenzgrundlage der ausgewählten Populationen verglichen. Es scheint, dass diesen beiden Faktoren für die Erklärung der Vielfalt menschlicher Heiratssysteme eine Schlüsselrolle zukommt.

Journal of anthropological sciences = Rivista di antropologia : JASS / Istituto italiano di antropologia, 2013

The present paper examined the assumption of strong reproductive isolation (RI) between Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens, as well as the question of what form it might have taken, using insights from the parallel case of chimpanzee–bonobo hybridization. RI from hybrid sterility or inviability was thought unlikely based on the short separation-to-introgression timeline. The forms of RI that typically develop in primates have relatively short timelines (especially for partial implementation); they generally preclude mating or influence hybrid survival and reproduction in certain contexts, and they have the potential to skew introgression directionality. These RI barriers are also consistent with some interpretations of the archaeological and fossil records, especially when behavioral, cognitive, morphological, and genetic differences between the two human species are taken into consideration. Differences potentially influencing patterns of survival and reproduction include inter...

Kinship provides the fundamental structure of human society: descent determines the inheritance pattern between generations, whereas residence rules govern the location a couple moves to after they marry. In turn, descent and residence patterns de- termine other key relationships such as alliance, trade, and marriage partners. Hunter-gatherer kinship patterns are viewed as flexible, whereas agricultural societies are thought to have de- veloped much more stable kinship patterns as they expanded during the Holocene. Among the Bantu farmers of sub-Saharan Africa, the ancestral kinship patterns present at the beginning of the expansion are hotly contested, with some arguing for matrilineal and matrilocal patterns, whereas others maintain that any kind of lineality or sex-biased dispersal only emerged much later. Here, we use Bayesian phylogenetic methods to uncover the history of Bantu kinship patterns and trace the interplay between descent and residence systems. The results suggest a number of switches in both descent and residence patterns as Bantu farming spread, but that the first Bantu populations were patrilocal with patrilineal descent. Across the phylogeny, a change in descent triggered a switch away from patrifocal kinship, whereas a change in residence triggered a switch back from matrifocal kinship. These results challenge “Main Sequence Theory,” which maintains that changes in residence rules precede change in other social struc- tures. We also indicate the trajectory of kinship change, shedding new light on how this fundamental structure of society developed as farming spread across the globe during the Neolithic.

Early Human Kinship: From Sex to Social …, 2008

… of the Royal …, 2010

Accurate reconstruction of prehistoric social organization is important if we are to put together satisfactory multidisciplinary scenarios about, for example, the dispersal of human groups. Such considerations apply in the case of Indo-European and Austronesian, two large-scale language families that are thought to represent Neolithic expansions. Ancestral kinship patterns have mostly been inferred through reconstruction of kin terminologies in ancestral proto-languages using the linguistic comparative method, and through geographical or distributional arguments based on the comparative patterns of kin terms and ethnographic kinship ‘facts’. While these approaches are detailed and valuable, the processes through which conclusions have been drawn from the data fail to provide explicit criteria for systematic testing of alternative hypotheses. Here, we use language trees derived using phylogenetic tree-building techniques on Indo-European and Austronesian vocabulary data. With these trees, ethnographic data and Bayesian phylogenetic comparative methods, we statistically reconstruct past marital residence and infer rates of cultural change between different residence forms, showing Proto-Indo-European to be virilocal and Proto-Malayo-Polynesian uxorilocal. The instability of uxorilocality and the rare loss of virilocality once gained emerge as common features of both families.

Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 2022

The historical mating practices of a South Indian community, the Nayars, have often been cited as an example of matriliny and polyandry. Little attention has been given to puritanical aspects of their conjugal unions involving endogamy and hypergamy. We adopt an evolutionary psychology perspective to reexamine these practices. We outline key historical events to situate the Nayar case in the broader Indian context and compare different evolutionary psychology models of sexual strategies to determine the most befitting one. The unique mating arrangements provide a novel opportunity to appraise the focal points of the different models involving fitness-indicators, resource provisioning, parenting, and the temporality of the mating context. This exercise helps in revealing the primacy of assortative mating and perceived mate quality based on prestige-markers, despite the incertitude about resource provisioning or other direct benefits. Public Significance Statement We use an evolutionary psychology lens to reexamine historical mating practices of a South Indian community, the Nayars. Often cited as an example of matriliny and polyandry, little attention has been given to puritanical aspects of Nayar conjugal unions involving endogamy and hypergamy. We situate the Nayar case in the broader Indian context and compare different evolutionary psychology models of sexual strategies that explain social and serial monogamy in mostly western, industrialized, educated, rich and democratic societies to determine the most befitting one.

Human biology, 2009

The extent to which colonizing farmer populations have overwhelmed or "replaced" indigenous forager populations, as opposed to having intermarried with them, has been widely debated. Indigenous-colonist "admixture" is often represented in genetic models as a single parameter that, although parsimonious and simple, is incongruous with the sex-specifi c nature of mtDNA and Y-chromosome data. To help interpret genetic patterns, we can construct useful null hypotheses about the generalized migration history of females (mtDNA) as opposed to males (Y chromosome), which differ significantly in almost every ethnographically known society. We seek to integrate ethnographic knowledge into models that incorporate new social parameters for predicting geographic patterns in mtDNA and Y-chromosome distributions. We provide an example of a model simulation for the spread of agriculture in which this individual-scale evidence is used to refi ne the parameters.

2017

Present-day hunter-gatherers (HGs) live in multilevel social groups essential to sustain a population structure characterized by limited levels of within-band relatedness and inbreeding. When these wider social networks evolved among HGs is unknown. Here, we investigate whether the contemporary HG strategy was already present in the Upper Paleolithic (UP), using complete genome sequences from Sunghir, a site dated to ~34 thousand years BP (kya) containing multiple anatomically modern human (AMH) individuals. We demonstrate that individuals at Sunghir derive from a population of small effective size, with limited kinship and levels of inbreeding similar to HG populations. Our findings suggest that UP social organization was similar to that of living HGs, with limited relatedness within residential groups embedded in a larger mating network.

2017

Present-day hunter-gatherers (HGs) live in multilevel social groups essential to sustain a population structure characterized by limited levels of within-band relatedness and inbreeding. When these wider social networks evolved among HGs is unknown. Here, we investigate whether the contemporary HG strategy was already present in the Upper Paleolithic (UP), using complete genome sequences from Sunghir, a site dated to ~34 thousand years BP (kya) containing multiple anatomically modern human (AMH) individuals. We demonstrate that individuals at Sunghir derive from a population of small effective size, with limited kinship and levels of inbreeding similar to HG populations. Our findings suggest that UP social organization was similar to that of living HGs, with limited relatedness within residential groups embedded in a larger mating network.

Human Nature, 2006

Significant amounts of wealth have been exchanged as part of marriage settlements throughout history. Although various models have been proposed for interpreting these practices, their development over time has not been investigated systematically. In this paper we use a Bayesian MCMC phylogenetic comparative approach to reconstruct the evolution of two forms of wealth transfers at marriage, dowry and bridewealth, for 51 Indo-European cultural groups. Results indicate that dowry is more likely to have been the ancestral practice, and that a minimum of four changes to bridewealth is necessary to explain the observed distribution of the two states across the cultural groups.