Marco Polo reports on some very peculiar mating systems in the territories where he traveled. It was the custom in one city, he wrote, that when travelers arrived in town, the men would offer their wives to the travelers, sometimes going off to the next town so that the new pairs could do their thing in peace. In another area, mothers would parade their daughters in front of travelers, who would take their pick to sleep with. The travelers were expected to give their choice a token, which she then wore on a necklace until he got married. Young men of the region would prefer to marry the young women who were most decorated with tokens from foreign travelers, I suppose inferring that the most decorated girls were the most desirable. Polo does not say what the fate of the children born from travelers was. I wonder whether there is any evolutionary story to tell about the function of these customs; or conversely, whether Marco was just spinning tall tales.
Marco Polo's stories sound suspect to me. Westerners visiting foreign ("exotic") cultures often did spin tall tales, sometimes because they were small-minded, more often, I think, because they really couldn't interpret outside of their own cultural milieu, and so overlaid fabulist accounts onto small, true observations. Explorers and missionaries, for instance, also reported finding several "primitive" cultures that didn't have fire, but there is in fact no anthropological evidence that any human culture is without fire.
Regarding Marco Polo's story about the "girls decorated with tokens," I would expect precisely the opposite outcome. And indeed, I have (anecdotal) evidence of the opposite, in a different time and place. What follows is from stories I heard from several people in Madagascar while I was working there, Malagasy and vazaha alike, and I saw some of this with my own eyes (although never in NE Madagascar, where Maroantsetra and Nosy Mangabe are):
In Madagascar, in the '90s, foreign men, often French (because they had been the colonizing state), began to go to Madagascar for sex with girls and young women. Malagasy families, desperately poor, would sometimes "rent" their virgin daughters to these men, not because it was a sign of privilege or power, but because they could not say no to the money on offer. After some weeks traveling around with these girls, the men would tire of them, and return the girls to their natal homes, before they returned to their "real lives." But the girls could not fully reenter Malagasy society. They were effectively second-class citizens within their own society, and were generally ostracized, and ultimately married, if at all, men who were undesirable for their peers.
I, too, suspect that Marco was exaggerating, if not fabricating. The only "evolutionary" account I could think of for customs like this is that the towns he visited were isolated and the potential for in-breeding was great. So offering wives and daughters to foreigners would be a way to expand the gene pool. But why not the tried and true method, of arranging marriages between neighbouring communities?
I have a really massive, good looking friend whose car broke down while driving through the prairies of Manitoba, Canada. A Hutterite man and his son pulled over and helped them out and after chatting for a couple of minutes, asked if he would like to come get to know his daughter better.
Must have been a very close-knit community to go after him like that instead of someone from neighbouring group of similarly religiously minded people, since they must have known this guy wasn't going to become a new son-in-law because he clearly wasn't culturally similar to them at all.
Hello Heather. I am a DH podcast listener, sadly not much of a reader for this type of material. Somehow, I am more receptive to a spoken word. Anyway, this post, albeit older than others, seems to me as an apt place to ask my question - a hypothesis on low level biological regulating systems, controlling the size of a population of a specie. Human is my favourite one, so I'll use it in this hypothesis:
Similar to chemical signalling in archaea and (more commonly) bacteria cultures, that regulates its size and other emerging properties, so do humans fill the habitat with a plethora of chemical signals. One or more such chemicals affect human biology on local scale, if saturated, to the point of slowing down and reduction of human population. These are not limited to "trivial" pathways that directly reduce fertility chemically, but might include neural pathways that, combined with human cognitive abilities and imagination, create patterns of behaviour that lead to the slowdown and reduction of population.
The higher the local density of humans the higher is the effect of these regulating chemicals in the locale. As we increasingly move into denser and bigger communities, the effect of these neural pathways becomes greater, producing cultural patterns of behaviour, seen in the last decades, which affect the population size - new (non-)mating rituals and patterns, and socially enforced norms.
If these behaviours are the result of the density (saturation) and the levels (volume) of various signalling chemicals, then to test this hypothesis we need to spread out geographically (but not cognitively, i.e. maintaining higher connectivity via internet). The same amount of humans spread out into smaller physical communities should diminish the effect of signalling chemicals, which will allow for a different set of social norms to take root, resulting in the increase of population.
The followup consequence of the hypothesis is that it might be the ratio of active agents we can cognitively track vs the density of signalling chemicals in the environment. By increasing amount of humans we can meaningfully track and/or reducing the level of chemicals (e.g. by spreading out) we can achieve the boost in the population size.
The followup of the followup of the hypothesis. Boost in the interconnected population opens up new emergent properties of the system (new level of civilisation) but nature's safety features stop us from growing, because the growth in size must be accompanied by individual agent ability to meaningfully handle a larger local cluster. So, either increase the level of individual awareness or spread out, in order to reach the stars.
I am somewhat disappointed that you didn't offer any specific details on how or why a polyandrous system would/could come to exist (in the context of humans).
The only polyandrous system persisting into modernity that I am aware of is practiced in parts of Nepal.
This mating system is practiced out of necessity due to very limited arable land in the region with none remaining to claim or purchase. The same land/property in the region has been inherited for many generations. So far this is a very common story, but the twist is, not surprisingly, in the details.
In many cultures all over the earth property is passed down from a man/father to his eldest heir/son, and it is not uncommon for the property to be divided among all male heirs. The division is less often equal, or perhaps equally divided among all but the eldest who receives a great portion. But it is not uncommon for the younger males to be left with no inheritance; leaving them with the responsibility/necessity to acquire lands by some other means, generally on their own.
However, this is not an option in these parts of Nepal. All of the land of any value has been claimed for generations.
Just to be clear, the population in these areas has remained relatively static for quite some time—a fairly uncommon phenomenon itself, as well.
If the first child is male some families will have another child hoping for a female. But it a second male is born, these brothers will both inherit the property together and they will be expected to share a wife and ideally only produce a single male heir for the next generation.
Of course, now more than ever, there is the possibility for one of the boys to leave and move to a city or even another country. But in order to remain among their people and live in their ancestral homeland, brothers (almost never more than two unless the 2nd pregnancy results in twins) must practice this fraternal form of polyandry.
The practice is obviously not ideal and families seek to avoid and prevent the circumstances that require this solution. And when it does occur the brothers will be informed & 'conditioned' from quite a young age about their situation. They believe this helps to instill within them that they must develop a working relationship based on sharing that promotes non-violent conflict resolution.
There are certainly families that have no male heirs, with 2 or more girls which offers a potential escape of polyandry.
Having more than 2 children is not common. Not only is the land limited, it is high altitude, the soil is poor and the climate is not favorable which clearly limits the amount of food that can be produced and the number of people that can be sustained.
Dogs and cats don't seem to have a showier sex, yet tend towards polygamy. I wonder why the "showy = history of polygamy" doesn't seem to apply there. Perhaps because their distant ancestors (wild cats and wolves) tended towards monogamy?
How would we test your hypothesis? We would need a culture which grants women the freedom to conduct the experiment for generations--has one ever really existed or does misogyny predate our capacity for the research programme?
leaving love and sex out of the equations, when our kids were little, we had an au pair who greatly eased our lives. No bundling the kids at 6 AM on a cold dark Minnesota morning to get them to day care before our works days started. The list of minor off loads our au pair was able to handle was not long, but it significantly improved the whole family's satisfaction.
Assume in the 50s there was A bread winner and A home maker and that worked out. We know what 2 bread winners and 0 dedicated home makers is less than great. So why not 2 bread winners and 1 home maker?
It sounds like the au pair truly did make life easier for your family, and I have heard similar success stories from others. The problem with generalizing this is that while a financial relationship--a family with an au pair--is precisely "leaving love and sex out of the equation" (although we hope that the au pair comes to feel deep affection for the children, perhaps even love), how would a relationship in which all adults are somehow physically and intimately connected do so? There will be hurt feelings. Fine, feelings get hurt. But it will be worse than that--some will want another's role, will feel jealousy, will be certain that they are taking on too much.
A strictly financial relationship--I hire you to take care of my children and also do A and B and C, for not more than X hours / week--can be explicitly renegotiated. How do we renegotiate relationships in which our values and our histories, our passions and secrets and hopes and dreams, are at stake? Complexifying those negotiations by adding more people to the relationship makes the problem exponentially more difficult.
Interesting Article! Crazy coincidence is I'm from Kerala, India belonging to the Nair community. I never expected to read this on Substack! Crazy coincidences! But the system is not practised anymore and was not even prevalent in my grandmother's time (she was born in 1940s)
Thank you! Yes, I hadn't been able to find any evidence of polyandry in modernity among the Nair; thank you for providing on-the-ground evidence of this. In part, this is due to the fragility of the mating system in general; in part, it is due to dominant cultures wiping out smaller ones.
Would love for you to invite Christopher Ryan on your podcast to steel man the argument for polyamory
Marco Polo reports on some very peculiar mating systems in the territories where he traveled. It was the custom in one city, he wrote, that when travelers arrived in town, the men would offer their wives to the travelers, sometimes going off to the next town so that the new pairs could do their thing in peace. In another area, mothers would parade their daughters in front of travelers, who would take their pick to sleep with. The travelers were expected to give their choice a token, which she then wore on a necklace until he got married. Young men of the region would prefer to marry the young women who were most decorated with tokens from foreign travelers, I suppose inferring that the most decorated girls were the most desirable. Polo does not say what the fate of the children born from travelers was. I wonder whether there is any evolutionary story to tell about the function of these customs; or conversely, whether Marco was just spinning tall tales.
Marco Polo's stories sound suspect to me. Westerners visiting foreign ("exotic") cultures often did spin tall tales, sometimes because they were small-minded, more often, I think, because they really couldn't interpret outside of their own cultural milieu, and so overlaid fabulist accounts onto small, true observations. Explorers and missionaries, for instance, also reported finding several "primitive" cultures that didn't have fire, but there is in fact no anthropological evidence that any human culture is without fire.
Regarding Marco Polo's story about the "girls decorated with tokens," I would expect precisely the opposite outcome. And indeed, I have (anecdotal) evidence of the opposite, in a different time and place. What follows is from stories I heard from several people in Madagascar while I was working there, Malagasy and vazaha alike, and I saw some of this with my own eyes (although never in NE Madagascar, where Maroantsetra and Nosy Mangabe are):
In Madagascar, in the '90s, foreign men, often French (because they had been the colonizing state), began to go to Madagascar for sex with girls and young women. Malagasy families, desperately poor, would sometimes "rent" their virgin daughters to these men, not because it was a sign of privilege or power, but because they could not say no to the money on offer. After some weeks traveling around with these girls, the men would tire of them, and return the girls to their natal homes, before they returned to their "real lives." But the girls could not fully reenter Malagasy society. They were effectively second-class citizens within their own society, and were generally ostracized, and ultimately married, if at all, men who were undesirable for their peers.
I, too, suspect that Marco was exaggerating, if not fabricating. The only "evolutionary" account I could think of for customs like this is that the towns he visited were isolated and the potential for in-breeding was great. So offering wives and daughters to foreigners would be a way to expand the gene pool. But why not the tried and true method, of arranging marriages between neighbouring communities?
I have a really massive, good looking friend whose car broke down while driving through the prairies of Manitoba, Canada. A Hutterite man and his son pulled over and helped them out and after chatting for a couple of minutes, asked if he would like to come get to know his daughter better.
Must have been a very close-knit community to go after him like that instead of someone from neighbouring group of similarly religiously minded people, since they must have known this guy wasn't going to become a new son-in-law because he clearly wasn't culturally similar to them at all.
Hello Heather. I am a DH podcast listener, sadly not much of a reader for this type of material. Somehow, I am more receptive to a spoken word. Anyway, this post, albeit older than others, seems to me as an apt place to ask my question - a hypothesis on low level biological regulating systems, controlling the size of a population of a specie. Human is my favourite one, so I'll use it in this hypothesis:
Similar to chemical signalling in archaea and (more commonly) bacteria cultures, that regulates its size and other emerging properties, so do humans fill the habitat with a plethora of chemical signals. One or more such chemicals affect human biology on local scale, if saturated, to the point of slowing down and reduction of human population. These are not limited to "trivial" pathways that directly reduce fertility chemically, but might include neural pathways that, combined with human cognitive abilities and imagination, create patterns of behaviour that lead to the slowdown and reduction of population.
The higher the local density of humans the higher is the effect of these regulating chemicals in the locale. As we increasingly move into denser and bigger communities, the effect of these neural pathways becomes greater, producing cultural patterns of behaviour, seen in the last decades, which affect the population size - new (non-)mating rituals and patterns, and socially enforced norms.
If these behaviours are the result of the density (saturation) and the levels (volume) of various signalling chemicals, then to test this hypothesis we need to spread out geographically (but not cognitively, i.e. maintaining higher connectivity via internet). The same amount of humans spread out into smaller physical communities should diminish the effect of signalling chemicals, which will allow for a different set of social norms to take root, resulting in the increase of population.
The followup consequence of the hypothesis is that it might be the ratio of active agents we can cognitively track vs the density of signalling chemicals in the environment. By increasing amount of humans we can meaningfully track and/or reducing the level of chemicals (e.g. by spreading out) we can achieve the boost in the population size.
The followup of the followup of the hypothesis. Boost in the interconnected population opens up new emergent properties of the system (new level of civilisation) but nature's safety features stop us from growing, because the growth in size must be accompanied by individual agent ability to meaningfully handle a larger local cluster. So, either increase the level of individual awareness or spread out, in order to reach the stars.
I am somewhat disappointed that you didn't offer any specific details on how or why a polyandrous system would/could come to exist (in the context of humans).
The only polyandrous system persisting into modernity that I am aware of is practiced in parts of Nepal.
This mating system is practiced out of necessity due to very limited arable land in the region with none remaining to claim or purchase. The same land/property in the region has been inherited for many generations. So far this is a very common story, but the twist is, not surprisingly, in the details.
In many cultures all over the earth property is passed down from a man/father to his eldest heir/son, and it is not uncommon for the property to be divided among all male heirs. The division is less often equal, or perhaps equally divided among all but the eldest who receives a great portion. But it is not uncommon for the younger males to be left with no inheritance; leaving them with the responsibility/necessity to acquire lands by some other means, generally on their own.
However, this is not an option in these parts of Nepal. All of the land of any value has been claimed for generations.
Just to be clear, the population in these areas has remained relatively static for quite some time—a fairly uncommon phenomenon itself, as well.
If the first child is male some families will have another child hoping for a female. But it a second male is born, these brothers will both inherit the property together and they will be expected to share a wife and ideally only produce a single male heir for the next generation.
Of course, now more than ever, there is the possibility for one of the boys to leave and move to a city or even another country. But in order to remain among their people and live in their ancestral homeland, brothers (almost never more than two unless the 2nd pregnancy results in twins) must practice this fraternal form of polyandry.
The practice is obviously not ideal and families seek to avoid and prevent the circumstances that require this solution. And when it does occur the brothers will be informed & 'conditioned' from quite a young age about their situation. They believe this helps to instill within them that they must develop a working relationship based on sharing that promotes non-violent conflict resolution.
There are certainly families that have no male heirs, with 2 or more girls which offers a potential escape of polyandry.
Having more than 2 children is not common. Not only is the land limited, it is high altitude, the soil is poor and the climate is not favorable which clearly limits the amount of food that can be produced and the number of people that can be sustained.
Dogs and cats don't seem to have a showier sex, yet tend towards polygamy. I wonder why the "showy = history of polygamy" doesn't seem to apply there. Perhaps because their distant ancestors (wild cats and wolves) tended towards monogamy?
How would we test your hypothesis? We would need a culture which grants women the freedom to conduct the experiment for generations--has one ever really existed or does misogyny predate our capacity for the research programme?
Have you read https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1134&context=psychology_articles#:~:text=Research%20has%20found%20that%20both,et%20al.%2C%202012 ? A direct response would be great.
Speaking of replying to the rest of the literature, here's the latest--note also the rest of the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eco-fKOW6ks&list=PL_-Kd_WSmEAEjs1i5ve7wD5U4UDoPK54g&index=89
Eagerly await your piece on monogamy.
leaving love and sex out of the equations, when our kids were little, we had an au pair who greatly eased our lives. No bundling the kids at 6 AM on a cold dark Minnesota morning to get them to day care before our works days started. The list of minor off loads our au pair was able to handle was not long, but it significantly improved the whole family's satisfaction.
Assume in the 50s there was A bread winner and A home maker and that worked out. We know what 2 bread winners and 0 dedicated home makers is less than great. So why not 2 bread winners and 1 home maker?
It sounds like the au pair truly did make life easier for your family, and I have heard similar success stories from others. The problem with generalizing this is that while a financial relationship--a family with an au pair--is precisely "leaving love and sex out of the equation" (although we hope that the au pair comes to feel deep affection for the children, perhaps even love), how would a relationship in which all adults are somehow physically and intimately connected do so? There will be hurt feelings. Fine, feelings get hurt. But it will be worse than that--some will want another's role, will feel jealousy, will be certain that they are taking on too much.
A strictly financial relationship--I hire you to take care of my children and also do A and B and C, for not more than X hours / week--can be explicitly renegotiated. How do we renegotiate relationships in which our values and our histories, our passions and secrets and hopes and dreams, are at stake? Complexifying those negotiations by adding more people to the relationship makes the problem exponentially more difficult.
Interesting Article! Crazy coincidence is I'm from Kerala, India belonging to the Nair community. I never expected to read this on Substack! Crazy coincidences! But the system is not practised anymore and was not even prevalent in my grandmother's time (she was born in 1940s)
Thank you! Yes, I hadn't been able to find any evidence of polyandry in modernity among the Nair; thank you for providing on-the-ground evidence of this. In part, this is due to the fragility of the mating system in general; in part, it is due to dominant cultures wiping out smaller ones.