Primeval Kinship: How Pair-Bonding Gave Birth to Human Society
At some point in the course of evolution—from a primeval social organization of early hominids—all human societies, past and present, would emerge. In this account of the dawn of human society, Bernard Chapais shows that our knowledge about kinship and society in nonhuman primates supports, and informs, ideas first put forward by the distinguished social anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Chapais contends that only a few evolutionary steps were required to bridge the gap between the kinship structures of our closest relatives—chimpanzees and bonobos—and the human kinship configuration. The pivotal event, the author proposes, was the evolution of sexual alliances. Pair-bonding transformed a social organization loosely based on kinship into one exhibiting the strong hold of kinship and affinity. The implication is that the gap between chimpanzee societies and pre-linguistic hominid societies is narrower than we might think.The question of the origin of human society -- Primatology and the evolution of human behavior -- The uterine kinship legacy -- From biological to cultural kinship -- The incest avoidance legacy -- From interactional regularities to institutionalized rules -- Levi-Strauss and the exogamy configuration -- Exogamy out of the evolutionary vacuum -- The building blocks of exogamy -- The ancestral male kin group hypothesis -- The evolutionary history of pair-bonding -- Pair-bonding and the reinvention of kinship -- Biparentality and the transformation of siblingships -- Beyond the local group : the rise of the tribe -- From male philopatry to residential diversity -- Brothers, sisters and the founding principle of exogamy -- Filiation, descent, and ideology -- The primate origins of unilineal descent groups -- The evolution of human descent -- Conclusion: Human society as contingent
