ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2019
A worldwide view of matriliny: using cross-cultural analyses to shed light on human kinship systems.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Exploring matrilocality in history: insights from ancient DNA.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Article
- Genetic and linguistic comparisons reveal complex sex-biased transmission of language features.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Cultural transmission, networks, and clusters among Austronesian-speaking peoples.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Adoption, Fostering, and Parental Absence in Vanuatu.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 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
- Article
- The potential to infer the historical pattern of cultural macroevolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Pama-Nyungan grandparent systems change with grandchildren, but not cross-cousin terms or social norms.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Identifying post-marital residence patterns in prehistory: A phylogenetic comparative analysis of dwelling size.PloS one · 2020Article
- The expendable male hypothesis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- The evolution of female-biased kinship in humans and other mammals.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
- Sex-linked genetic diversity originates from persistent sociocultural processes at microgeographic scales.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Although matriliny and matrilocality are relatively rare in contemporary human populations, these female-based descent and residence systems are present in different cultural contexts and across the globe. Previous research has generated numerous hypotheses about which cultural traits are associated with the stability or loss of matrilineal descent. In addition, several studies have examined matrilineal descent with phylogenetic analyses; however, the use of language phylogenies has restricted these analyses to comparisons within a single language family, often confined to a single continent. Cross-cultural comparisons are particularly informative when they account for the relationships between widely distributed populations, as opposed to treating each population as an independent sample or focusing on a single region. Here, we study the evolution of descent systems on a worldwide scale. First, we test for significant associations between matriliny and numerous cultural traits that have been theoretically associated with its stability or loss, such as subsistence strategy, animal domestication, mating system, residence pattern, wealth transfer and property succession. In addition, by combining genetic and linguistic information to build a global supertree that includes 16 matrilineal populations, we also perform phylogenetically controlled analyses to assess the patterns of correlated evolution between descent and other traits: for example, does a change in subsistence strategy generally predict a shift in the rules of descent, or do these transitions happen independently? These analyses enable a worldwide perspective on the pattern and process of the evolution of matriliny and matrilocality. This article is part of the theme issue 'The evolution of female-biased kinship in humans and other mammals'.
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