ArticleEvolutionary human sciences2020
No universals in the cultural evolution of kinship terminology.
Article in Evolutionary human sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Semantic similarity across languages reflects neurocognitive dimensions shaped by climate.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Word choice is coupled with grammar: The case of kinship.PloS one · 2026Article
- Predictive Structure Emerges During the Generalisation of Kin Terms to New Referents.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Resolving selfish and spiteful interdependent conflict.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Kinbank: A global database of kinship terminology.PloS one · 2023Article
- Neighbours and relatives: accounting for spatial distribution when testing causal hypotheses in cultural evolution.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Logical word learning: The case of kinship.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Review
- Claude Lévi-Strauss as a humanist forerunner of cultural macroevolution studies.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
- Historical, archaeological and linguistic evidence test the phylogenetic inference of Viking-Age plant use.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Cultural extinction in evolutionary perspective.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Review
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Abstract
Kinship terminologies are the semantic systems of language that express kinship relations between individuals: in English, 'aunt' denotes a parent's sister. Theoretical models of kinship terminology diversity reduce over 10 billion possible organisations to six key types, each of which are hypothesised to be aligned with particular cultural norms of descent, marriage or residence patterns (Murdock, 1949). Often, terminological type is used to infer social patterns in past societies based on these putative relationships between kinship terminologies and social structure, and these associations are staples of 'Anthropology 101'. However, these relationships have not been scrutinised using modern comparative methods. Here we show that kinship terminologies vertically track language phylogeny in Austronesian, Bantu, and Uto-Aztecan, three languages families of different time-depths and environments. We find no unidirectional or universal models of evolution in kinship terminology. Of 18 existing anthropological coevolutionary theories regarding kinship terminology and cultural practices across 176 societies, we find only patchy support, and no evidence for putative universal drivers of evolution in kinship terminologies.
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