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The Foundation of Kinship

Households

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Abstract

Men’s hunting has dominated the discourse on energy capture and flow in the past decade or so. We turn to women’s roles as critical to household formation, pair-bonding, and intergenerational bonds. Their pivotal contributions in food processing and distribution likely promoted kinship, both genetic and affinal, and appear to be the foundation from which households evolved. With conscious recognition of household social units, variable cultural constructions of human kinship systems that were sensitive to environmental and technological conditions could emerge. Kinship dramatically altered the organization of resource access for our species, creating what we term “kinship ecologies.” We present simple mathematical models to show how hunting leads to dependence on women’s contributions, bonds men to women, and bonds generations together. Kinship, as it organized transfers of food and labor energy centered on women, also became integrated with the biological evolution of human reproduction and life history.

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Notes

  1. As noted by one reviewer.

  2. This definition builds on that of Netting et al. 1984.

  3. The endowment effect suggests that what one person has is usually more valuable to that person than it is to another person (Thaler 1980).

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to the National Science Foundation (NSF 104106-G002007) Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) Program in Evolutionary Modeling at the University of Washington (UW) and Washington State University for training and the challenge, the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, UW (5T32HD007543-09, Population Research Training), for support, and to three very helpful reviewers.

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Leonetti, D.L., Chabot-Hanowell, B. The Foundation of Kinship. Hum Nat 22, 16–40 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-011-9111-y

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