Kinship and Human Evolution by Bergendorff Steen;

Author:Bergendorff, Steen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Exchange and Social Relations

Having instigated kinship and exchange between groups, early humans stepped out of their immediate environment and came to live in networks of reproduction. What they could not find in their own niche they could obtain through trade. In this way, relationships between groups gained priority over direct foraging. This brought an entirely new dynamic to the human population. As the population increased, it could connect more and more niches based on groups that were interlinked but whom—for that very reason—emphasized their differences and expressed them symbolically.

But the ethnographic record also reveals that the modern descendants of these groups are organized socially in differently constituted groups, giving the impression that they must have evolved their social organizations in isolation from one another. This has given rise to debates about the primordial organization, about the origins of kinship systems, about whether social organization was based on matrilinearity or patrilinearity, and about the mechanisms through which one or more of these changed to produce today’s immense cultural variation.

Barnard, for instance, thinks that there were potentially two types of kinship system that could have been the primordial ones. One is mainly found in Africa and is characterized by flexibility in social organization, in kinship, and in the symbolic domain. The other is mainly found in Australia and is highly structured, featuring very strict marriage rules. So, primal society must have been either fundamentally flexible or highly structured. Barnard believes that one cannot have it both ways (Barnard 2012: 53–58).

There are some major differences between matrilineal and patrilineal societies that should be taken into account in relation to early human development. In matrilineal societies, the bond between brother and sister is strong while that between husband and wife is weak; children belong to their mother’s kin group and children inherit from their mother’s kin group, unlike in patrilineal groups.

Generally, matrilinearity and patrilinearity are seen as ideological reflections of more objective conditions, so that societies where cooperation among men in production or military activities is important tend to be patrilinear, while societies in which cooperation among women is more important will tend to be matrilinear. Steward (1936) argued that among early humans, men’s hunting was all important to the survival of the groups and therefore sons inherited their fathers’ hunting grounds, which probably made them patrilinear. Opie and Power (2011) argue that the role of grandmothers as foragers and caregivers to their daughter’s children was critical and therefore that the groups probably coalesced around matrilineages.

But these claims are not based on an in-depth understanding of kinship. They assume that the groups were foraging independently and almost in isolation and that they somehow grew more and more sociable until they developed kinship. Kinship in this rendition would not serve any purpose, except showing that early humans acquired it. There is no adaptive reason for kinship to evolve in this situation. It is just supposed that the human lineage at some point began to evolve on auto-pilot, propeling human evolution forward because of some inbuilt sociability.

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