ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2013
Communal breeding promotes a matrilineal social system where husband and wife live apart.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 43 citations in OpenAlex.
- Psychological and cultural correlates of illness conception and menopausal symptoms: a cross-sectional and longitudinal comparative study of Mosuo, Yi, and Han women.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Article
- The slave trade and the origins of matrilineal kinship.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Jeans and language: kin networks and reproductive success are associated with the adoption of outgroup norms.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Hunter-Gatherer children's close-proximity networks: Similarities and differences with cooperative and communal breeding systems.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Post-marital residence patterns and the timing of reproduction: evidence from a matrilineal society.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Communal breeding by women is associated with lower investment from husbands.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- The Relationship Between Children and Their Maternal Uncles: A Unique Parenting Mode in Mosuo Culture.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- The expendable male hypothesis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- A worldwide view of matriliny: using cross-cultural analyses to shed light on human kinship systems.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Why war is a man's game.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Offspring sex preferences among patrilineal and matrilineal Mosuo in Southwest China revealed by differences in parity progression.Royal Society open science · 2016Article
- Kinship as a frequency dependent strategy.Royal Society open science · 2016Article
- Cooperation is related to dispersal patterns in Sino-Tibetan populations.Nature communications · 2015Article
- Phylogenetic reconstruction of Bantu kinship challenges Main Sequence Theory of human social evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2014Article
- Intergenerational and sibling conflict under patrilocality. A model of reproductive skew applied to human kinship.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2014Article
- Reproductive competition between females in the matrilineal Mosuo of southwestern China.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2013Article
- Not leaving home: grandmothers and male dispersal in a duolocal human society.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The matrilineal Mosuo of southwest China live in large communal houses where brothers and sisters of three generations live together, and adult males walk to visit their wives only at night; hence males do not reside with their own offspring. This duolocal residence with 'walking' or 'visiting' marriage is described in only a handful of matrilineal peasant societies. Benefits to women of living with matrilineal kin, who cooperate with child-care, are clear. But why any kinship system can evolve where males invest more in their sister's offspring than their own is a puzzle for evolutionary anthropologists. Here, we present a new hypothesis for a matrilineal bias in male investment. We argue that, when household resources are communal, relatedness to the whole household matters more than relatedness to individual offspring. We use an inclusive fitness model to show that the more sisters (and other closely related females) co-reside, the more effort males should spend working on their sister's farm and less on their wife's farm. The model shows that paternity uncertainty may be a cause of lower overall work rates in males, but it is not likely to be the cause of a matrilineal bias. The bias in work effort towards working on their natal farm, and thus the duolocal residence and 'visiting marriage' system, can be understood as maximizing inclusive fitness in circumstances where female kin breed communally.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.