Abstract: The matrilineal Mosuo of southwest China live in large communal houses where brothers and sisters of three generations live together, and adult males walk to visit their wives only at night; hence males do not reside with their own offspring. This duolocal residence with ‘walking’ or ‘visiting’ marriage is described in only a handful of matrilineal peasant societies. Benefits to women of living with matrilineal kin, who cooperate with child-care, are clear. But why any kinship system can evolve where males invest more in their sister’s offspring than their own is a puzzle for evolutionary anthropologists. Here, we present a new hypothesis for a matrilineal bias in male investment.
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Jia-Jia Wu, Qiao-Qiao He, Ling-Ling Deng, et al. Communal breeding promotes a matrilineal social system where husband and wife live apart
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Vol. 280, No. 1758. (2013), doi:10.1098/rspb.2013.0010
Full Text: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1758/20130010.full
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