ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Phylogenetic reconstruction of Bantu kinship challenges Main Sequence Theory of human social evolution.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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25 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Cultural transmission, networks, and clusters among Austronesian-speaking peoples.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Phylogenetic insight into the origin of tones.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Persistence of Matrilocal Postmarital Residence Across Multiple Generations in Southern Africa.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Patterns and consequences of age-linked change in local relatedness in animal societies.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Shared cultural ancestry predicts the global diffusion of democracy.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- Pama-Nyungan grandparent systems change with grandchildren, but not cross-cousin terms or social norms.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- The demography of human warfare can drive sex differences in altruism.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Identifying post-marital residence patterns in prehistory: A phylogenetic comparative analysis of dwelling size.PloS one · 2020Article
- Current ecology, not ancestral dispersal patterns, influences menopause symptom severity.Ecology and evolution · 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
- The disequilibrium of double descent: changing inheritance norms among Himba pastoralists.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Differences between sons and daughters in the intergenerational transmission of wealth.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- When does matriliny fail? The frequencies and causes of transitions to and from matriliny estimated from a de novo coding of a cross-cultural sample.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- The expendable male hypothesis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Coevolution of landesque capital intensive agriculture and sociopolitical hierarchy.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Deep cultural ancestry and human development indicators across nation states.Royal Society open science · 2018Article
- Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2016Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
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 determine 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 developed 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 structures. 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.
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