Why are adult daughters missing from ancient German cemeteries?
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
How is this shocking? The Chinese, for example, practiced until recently strict exogamous marriage whereby women were always married off outside the clan and men always stayed home. Women were forbidden to have contact with their biological family after marriage; in a sense their entire identity, including their lineage, became that of the clan they married into. It's similar to adoption in that regard, in the sense that in traditional East Asian cultures you don't distinguish adopted children from "blood" relations.
Such practices, while not universal, could be found around the world, AFAIU. It's a well known social pattern, which is why it's odd to hear it characterized as shocking.
For those interested in a classic adventure novel set in that era, I recommend "The Long Ships" by Frans Bengtsson. The latest edition's foreword is written by Michael Chabon.
"female contribution to subsistence does correlate significantly with matrilocal (as opposed to patrilocal) residence in general; however, this correlation is masked by a general polygyny factor"
If you account for polygyny, the more women are involved in creating food the less likely they are to leave. A simple way to look at it is that parents invest time to teach one gender to support them at old age. If you invest time and energy to teach your sons the local methods to create food then you want them to stick around. If you invested same amount of time to teach local knowledge on both and one left then not only have you wasted half the time and effort but that local knowledge might not even be useful for the party that left.
polygyny add an other layer on it as an increase in the female contribution to subsistence also increase the the probability for polygyny which in turn increase the probability for patrilocality. A bit of cynicism would explain this by saying that if women account for the majority of creating food then fewer men is needed, resulting in polygyny, which create an power imbalance as those men will be a blood relative to a significant larger number of children compared to any woman.
To apply this then to vikings, if the men left to pillage then it must have been the women that worked the land and raised animals, which mean the they likely invested the time to teach their daughters to do the same and relied on them for support at old age.
It's a self correcting phenomenon where the ratio self selects towards 1:1.
i.e. did you know that genetic analyses have revealed that ancestrally, only 40% of men managed to reproduce, while 80% of women did? Maybe more relevant to what we're actually discussing.
I'm not sure how fast exactly human birth ratios swing but I would hazard a guess a few dozen generations would be enough to self select at least partially back towards the norm. How long did it take the worlds population to recover after WW1/2?
I'm happy to see evidence contrary but please don't just dismiss things as if evolution is working on geological timescales it's just not.
Right now, Sweden is the nation with the oldest crossover. Men outnumber women till age 60, which is amazing.
This discussion has left the realm of biology or genetics, and has turned directly to culture and society. Society has long conquered genetics and biology.
Here's an example I just Googled which I don't remember ever reading before but echos what I said almost exactly:
> Like other Chinese, Hakka practice surname exogamy. Marriage traditionally was arranged, often village exogamous, and also patrilocal. Hakka marriage ceremonies suggest the transfer of women from one family to another and the incorporation of women into their husband's household and lineage rather than the establishment of bonds between two families. Wives are included in ancestral worship of their husband's lineage. Many Hakka claim that polygynous marriages were rare among the Hakka, yet until recently polygynous marriages were found among poor Hakka villagers in the New Territories of Hong Kong.
-- https://www.everyculture.com/Russia-Eurasia-China/Hakka-Marr...
Hardly a reputable source (seems like it was pulled from an older Wikipedia article), but such agreement would seem like an unlikely coincidence. A bibliography is provided at https://www.everyculture.com/Russia-Eurasia-China/Hakka.html
[1] Some aspects of traditional Chinese culture are better preserved outside China, as the Cultural Revolution literally and figuratively killed off parts of the cultural memory. Nonetheless, the reverse is also true; some aspects of the culture are preserved in the mainland but not in the diaspora. Perhaps only the historians really have the full story, even for relatively modern (e.g. early 20th century) practices.
The parent comment said: "The Chinese, for example, practiced until recently strict exogamous marriage [...]". This explains your experience.
>Do you have any sources for that?
Try searching "Chinese exogamy" in Google Scholar. Surname (i.e. "clan") exogamy is fairly well-known and still practiced. Here's a passage from Rubie S Watson's afterword to the 1991 book on Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society that she co-edited:
>In China, most unions have involved the transfer of the bride to her husband's household, which, at least initially, has often been headed by her husband's father or a senior agnate. Although not all newly married couples have lived patrilocally, residence with the husband's family has remained both numerically and symbolically significant. This has been especially the case in rural areas where more than 80 percent of the population live and where village exogamy has remained the usual practice.
If you're reacting to the statement that "[w]omen were forbidden to have contact with their biological family after marriage", this was not necessarily a strict prohibition. Because exogamy typically involves moving to a faraway village, it was usually a hassle for the bride to travel back to their biological family, and so if she actually did it, it could be interpreted as a breakdown in the marriage.
Until recently, the practice of adopting a pre-adolescent girl to be the future bride of a pre-adolescent son (tongyangxi) was also a common form of arranged marriage in China.[1] The practice can also go in the other direction, and is known as zhaozhui, or "son-in-law adoption".
[0] https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6p30...
If average rich household has 3 servants and there are n such households, there are going to be 3n servants.
"Strontium levels from three men, in contrast, showed that although they had left the valley as teens, they returned as adults."
What the evidence does tell us is that land was inherited along the male line and that women did not marry down to the local lower class (necessitating a move when the upper class consists entirely of your close male relatives and their wives).
Rather a social construct would seem more likely to be consistent.
But the article paints that as an act of sending away, when a more passive approach is not only just as plausible, if not more, but also supported by the observation of males that did a significant amount of traveling before settling down back home.
What effect would this kind of exogamy have? It might lead to a fair standardisation of the domestic arts, since women "from everywhere" came together in each tribe and could compare and adopt methods. Whereas, the arts of the hunt and the art of war might remain fairly distinct in each tribe.
Maybe women were married at a very young age and men could marry at a much older age. Maybe men could marry multiple times, women would often die in child birth.
No.
The article is saying that the adult women found in burial sites were originally born elsewhere, and their ancestors are not found in the same burial site.
This is basically some variation of “patrilocal residence”.
>"We apply a deep micro-regional approach and analyze genome wide data of 104 human individuals deriving from farmstead-related cemeteries from the Late Neolithic to the Middle Bronze Age in southern Germany."
In many species, members of clans and tribes go off to discover mating opportunities. I believe much of it has to do with limiting inbreeding.
I remember a scene in Game of Thrones where the guy didn't want to be eaten by the dead things, so he said he was going to take his boats to an island, kill all the men, and take their wives. Such things happen often in war. It might be a reason war exists.
In the case of the German daughters, if the males work the land, know the land, defend the land from invaders, then it would make sense the daughters leave to be protected by such men in another land.
You say you look to evolutionary biology, but it’s far more common for females to form family groups that kick the males out once they’re of age. Social animals like horses, bison, lions, even eusocial insects like bees and termites- they all send their males out to other groups.
Take baboons. Male indeed leave the troop while females tend to stay, but there is an exception. Low ranking females also tend to leave and join new troops. It is not that great to be at the bottom of the social hierarchy and female hierarchy in a baboon troop is based on linage so there is very little social mobility. Joining a new troop is not easy and often produce the same results as new females are rarely welcomed by the other females but it has a slightly better chance for social mobility compared to staying in the old one.
I would be surprised if you don't see the same pattern in many other social animals where the majority of the females are blood relatives.
Bees are a bit complex since in order to create new hives they swarm. In that situation they create a new queen and the old queen leaves with a subset of the bees and form a new hive while the new queen stays and start to lay eggs in the old hive.
Which might seem pedantic, but I think most evolutionary biologists would consider it to be a pretty important distinction.
There are evolutionary guards against inbreeding. Its why brothers + sisters can grow up and live together, but for the most part don't feel like dating or marrying each other.
Its beyond culture: its written in our genetic code itself. Presumably, the primitive-man tribes who did do in-breeding were probably wiped out in the stone-age due to the (now well known) problems.
True, there are exceptions. But in the general case, the guards against in-breeding are part of the human's genetic code. Sorta anyway: IIRC the specific genetic programming is against "marrying people who you grew up with".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_kinship#...
It's pretty much how royalty and landed gentry used to work in Europe.