Phylogenetic reconstruction of Bantu kinship challenges Main Sequence Theory of human social evolution

Abstract

Significance The agricultural revolution had a dramatic effect on all aspects of human society, but piecing together how humans lived as they spread farming practices worldwide remains difficult. In particular, the fundamental structures of human society, namely the way that property is inherited and the rules governing postmarriage residence, do not leave a clear trace in the archaeological record and, therefore, have been largely intractable. However, the recent availability of phylogenetic language trees coupled with new Bayesian statistical techniques makes it possible to reconstruct the ancestral state of Bantu kinship and reveals that inheritance and residence rules coevolved as farming spread throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Our results question current theory suggesting that residence rules are the primary driver of all other human social structures.

Introducing a state-of-the-art phylogenetic classification of the Kikongo Language Cluster

“…Their Bantu-wide variable composite heterogloss maps and their Variable Neighbourliness trees produced at the close of the millennium were the absolute highpoint of Bantu lexicostatistics, and will very likely never be bested within the traditional lexicostatistic framework. Starting early in the new millennium, the first vocabulary-driven phylogenetic classifications began to appear for the Bantu languages (Holden 2002, Holden & Mace 2003, Holden & Gray 2006, Pagel & Meade 2006, Walker & Hamilton 2010, Dunn et al 2011, Opie et al 2014, with also an attempt to include grammatical features into the model (Rexová et al 2006) as well as a recent phylogeographical attempt (Currie et al 2013). All of these phylogenetic classifications for the Bantu languages at large rather blindly reused both the data and the cognation judgements from Tervuren.…”

“…Their Bantu tree has no languages from zone H, nor from zones A, B, F and M for that matter. 19 The most recent published study in which the Tervuren data is reused is the one by Opie et al (2014), who apply Bayesian phylogenetic comparative methods to infer the ancestral state and evolutionary trajectory of Bantu kinship patterns. 20 In the supplementary material to their study they present maximum clade credibility trees consisting of 122 language varieties (119 Bantu + 3 Bantoid).…”

Folktale transmission in the Arctic provides evidence for high bandwidth social learning among hunter–gatherer groups

“…Language frequently exhibits highly tree-like patterns of vertical transmission (Bouckaert et al, 2012;Gray et al, 2009;Lee & Hasegawa, 2011), as do a variety of social practices (Currie et al, 2010;F. M. Jordan et al, 2009;Opie et al, 2014), and aspects of material culture (P. Jordan & Shennan, 2009;Larsen, 2011;Tehrani & Collard, 2002). By contrast, other social practices and aspects of material culture show high levels of horizontal transmission (Gray et al, 2010;P.…”

The fish is the friend of matriliny: Reef density and matrilineal inheritance

“…The prevalence of matrilineal kinship is also an important driver of behavioural differences between men and women (Gneezy et al 2009, Hoffman et al 2011). Yet, little is still known about the determinants of inheritance rules and how they evolve (Opie et al 2014).…”