Alternatives to the traditional practice of patrilocal postmarital residence exist in modern day China and vary from urban to rural areas. Social and economic reforms that were instituted in postMao China had an influence on post-marital residence rules. These refonns include marriage laws, reproduction restrictions, the return to family fanns, and greater access to employment. Government refon...

Menopause remains an evolutionary puzzle, as humans are unique among primates in having a long post-fertile lifespan. One model proposes that intergenerational conflict in patrilocal populations favours female reproductive cessation. This model predicts that women should experience menopause earlier in groups with an evolutionary history of patrilocality compared with matrilocal groups. Using d...

Economists have modeled inheritance norms assuming the pattern of post-marital residence is exogenous. We model the co-evolution of these two institutions, examining how patrilineal inheritance and patrilocal exogamy reinforced each other in a patrilineal-patrilocal equilibrium. We also derive conditions for a matrilineal-matrilocal equilibrium. The endogenous choice of the old to monitor the s...

I unify the following (1) men face paternal uncertainty while women do not face maternal uncertainty, (2) putative fathers and paternal kin care about true paternity, (3) paternity confidence is systematically lower in matrilocal cultures than in patrilocal ones, (4) inheritance tends to be patrilineal in high paternity confidence cultures and matrilineal in low confidence ones, and (5) most so...

Humans divide themselves up into separate cultures, which is a unique and ubiquitous characteristic of our species. Kinship norms are one of the defining features of such societies. Here we show how norms of marital residence can evolve as a frequency-dependent strategy, using real-world cases from southwestern China and an evolutionary game model. The process of kinship change has occurred in ...

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...

Human social organization can deeply affect levels of genetic diversity. This fact implies that genetic information can be used to study social structures, which is the basis of ethnogenetics. Recently, methods have been developed to extract this information from genetic data gathered from subdivided populations that have gone through recent spatial expansions, which is typical of most human po...

Recent studies investigating the relationship between crop genetic diversity and human cultural diversity patterns showed that seed exchanges are embedded in farmers' social organization. However, our understanding of the social processes involved remains limited. We investigated how farmers' membership in three major social groups interacts in shaping sorghum seed exchange networks in a cultur...