Kinship provides the fundamental structure of human society: descent determines the inheritance pattern between generations, whereas residence rules govern the location a couple moves to after they marry. In turn, descent and residence patterns determine other key relationships such as alliance, trade, and marriage partners. Hunter-gatherer kinship patterns are viewed as flexible, whereas agric...

The proposition is advanced that many current measures of kinship strength may paradoxically indicate inadequate or weakened kinship structures. That is so because they rely on measures that emphasize continuous proximity. This curious paradox is a consequence of inattention to the relationship between technology, services, and proximity. This article presents nonproximity indicators of kinship...

Using methods of experimental cognitive psychology, we tested the hypothesis that attitude similarity serves as a heuristic cue signaling kinship, which may motivate kin-recognition responses (e.g., prosocial behavior) even to unrelated individuals. The experiment employed a reaction-time methodology to assess cognitive associations between specific target individuals and kinship cognitions. Re...

Gellner’s concept of an ideal kinship language anticipated later developments in methods for recording kinship connections, and also sparked a controversy about the relation between biological and social kinship. Though the debate has moved on, the topic has remained controversial. I argue that the idea of an ideal kinship language offers a way of analyzing the relationship between alternative ...

Birth is not merely a biological event; it is also a social event in that it creates relationships. As a consequence of reproductive technologies, the boundaries between the biological and social basis of kinship have become blurred. Reproductive technologies challenge previously held cultural constructions of kinship and bring about new kinds of social relations in that kinship boundaries are ...

Kinship terms have been found to be highly diverse across languages. Here we investigated the brain representation of kinship terms in two distinct populations, native Chinese and Caucasian English speakers, with a five-element kinship identification (FEKI) task. The neuroimaging results showed a common extensive frontal and parietal lobe brain activation pattern for different kinship levels fo...

We have traced the developmental origins of various CNS neurons and glial cells of a leech to 10 clonally related groups of cells, the bilaterally paired M, N, O, P, and Q kinship groups. Each kinship group is descended from one of 10 identifiable blastomeres of the early embryo, the teloblasts. Of the approximately 200 neurons in each side of a segmental ganglion, 130 to 160 are in the ipsilat...

Genetic relatedness (kinship) among Anopheles gambiae Giles female mosquitoes was assessed using microsatellite loci in five locations across Africa and in nine samples taken between 1994 and 1999 in western Kenya. We assessed variation among samples in kinship as well as the effect of distance on kinship. Relatedness within populations was low, and differences among samples taken at various ti...

We address a long hypothesized relationship between the proximity of individuals' dwelling units and their kinship association. Better understanding this relationship is important because of its implications for contact and association among members of a society. In this paper, we use a unique dataset from Nang Rong, Thailand which contains dwelling unit locations (GPS) and saturated kinship ne...

Knowledge of kin relationships between members of wild animal populations has broad application in ecology and evolution research by allowing the investigation of dispersal dynamics, mating systems, inbreeding avoidance, kin recognition, and kin selection as well as aiding the management of endangered populations. However, the assessment of kinship among members of wild animal populations is di...