Abstract

The family defines many aspects of our daily lives, and expresses a wide array of forms across individuals, cultures, ecologies and time. While the nuclear family is the norm today in developed economies, it is the exception in most other historic and cultural contexts. Yet, many aspects of how humans form the economic and reproductive groups that we recognize as families are distinct to our species. This review pursues three goals: to overview the evolutionary context in which the human family developed, to expand the conventional view of the nuclear family as the ‘traditional family’, and to provide an alternative to patrifocal explanations for family formation. To do so, first those traits that distinguish the human family are reviewed with an emphasis on the key contributions that behavioral ecology has made toward understanding dynamics within and between families, including life history, kin selection, reciprocity and conflict theoretical frameworks. An overview is then given of several seminal debates about how the family took shape, with an eye toward a more nuanced view of male parental care as the basis for family formation, and what cooperative breeding has to offer as an alternative perspective.

Highlights

  • Formation shapes many aspects of our daily lives—who we work, eat and sleep with, who we share with, whether we live in large extended or conjugal families, and the time males and females, adults and children, spend in the company of each other

  • This is followed by an overview of the theoretical contributions that behavioral ecology has made toward understanding dynamics within and between families; these include life history, kin selection, reciprocity, the division of labor and other cooperation and conflict frameworks

  • As a review of behavioral ecology approaches to family formation, the charge here is to hopefully communicate the usefulness of this approach to family studies in the social sciences generally

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Summary

Introduction

Formation shapes many aspects of our daily lives—who we work, eat and sleep with, who we share with, whether we live in large extended or conjugal families, and the time males and females, adults and children, spend in the company of each other. I provide an orientation to characteristics that distinguish group and family formation in the human lineage from other closely related species. This is followed by an overview of the theoretical contributions that behavioral ecology has made toward understanding dynamics within and between families; these include life history, kin selection, reciprocity, the division of labor and other cooperation and conflict frameworks. The topic of this Special Issue on the family, small-scale societies, hunter-gatherers, have been central to study because their demographic and subsistence conditions, and social lives, encompass more diverse forms of the family than are often evident in industrialized societies.. As a review of behavioral ecology approaches to family formation, the charge here is to hopefully communicate the usefulness of this approach to family studies in the social sciences generally

Characterizing Social Structure in the Human Lineage
Human and Nonhuman Primate Multilevel Systems
Characterizing the Human Family
Life History Theory
Kin Selection and Dynamics within Family
Reciprocity and Mutualism Foregrounding Multifamily Cohesion
Key Debates about Family Formation
Are Humans Patrifocal by Nature?
Is Male Parental Investment the Driving Force in the Origin of the Family?
Findings
Conclusions
Full Text
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