Abstract
Infant and child mortality in 18th and 19th century Krummhörn exhibits a remarkable feature: significantly more daughters than sons of comparably prosperous high status farmers achieve adulthood. We interpret this difference as being the outcome of differential parental care reflecting varying reproductive perspectives and social role expectations, to which sons and daughters from farmer families were exposed. This is verified by sex differences in the children's probability of marrying and their differing chances of social persistence. Against the background of severely restricted reproductive opportunities and recognizably higher upbringing costs for a son, parental underinvestment in the survival of sons can be best understood as an economically motivated measure in the course of a farmer's efforts to concentrate his property and to maintain his family's social status. At the same time, such a scenario also had a biological adaptive value, because it contributed to the intergenerational perpetuation of above average chances of life and reproduction, and hence, to the genetic persistence of the farmer families.
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