From Past to Present: The Deep History of Kinship

Abstract

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Why Can Hunter-Gatherer Groups Be Organized Simlarly for Resource Procurement, but Their Kinship Terminologies Are Strikingly Dissimilar: A Challenge for Future Cross-Cultural Research

“…Cross-cultural research is aimed at developing explanatory arguments for patterning discerned at the meta-level of a cohort of societies, each of which had its own, largely independent development as an internally structured and organized system (Narroll 1970), The rationale for this approach from an evolutionary perspective can be seen in the deep history of Homo sapiens (see Read 2019), including the historical division of our species into quasi-species; that is, a division into groups with boundaries at the intraspecies level analogous to boundaries at the interspecies level for other organisms, and where group differentiation has a cultural, rather than a biological, basis. Groups that we refer to as different societies, including different ethnic groups, self-identify and differentiate themselves from other, even behaviorally similar groups through internally formulated cultural criteria rather than externally through biological adaptation, as is the case for biological species.…”