Week 6 Discussion: Non-traditional families

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This hints that parental control over mating should had been stronger in ancestral agropastoral

societies than in ancestral foraging societies.

The evidence from historical societies is important for another reason namely, that it

reflects the patterns of mating in the most recent period of human evolution. That is, by virtue

of being the most recent, these patterns are likely to have been consequential in human

evolution. This is due to the fact that the transition to post-industrialism is a very recent

phenomenon so, there has not been enough evolutionary time to reverse any consequences of

the agropastoral revolution in shaping the human mind.

To summarize, in this chapter I argued that parents often disagree with the mating

decisions of their children. Accordingly, they attempt to control the mate choices of their

daughters and sons and for this purpose they use social structures that have evolved to serve

different functions. In particular, by manipulating inheritance rights and the resources needed

for the payment of the bridewealth, fathers exercise considerable power over the mate choices

of their children and primarily over their sons. Social institutions that augment parental power

over mating are more prevalent in pre-industrial societies which base their subsistence on

agropastoralism than on hunting and gathering, which mandates that parental control over

mating is stronger in the former than in the latter societies. Finally, this indicates that the

agropastoral revolution 10,000 years ago had increased the influence that parents exercise

over their children‘s mate choices.

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