Primate Kinship and Relatedness

« Quelques-uns deffendent exactement aux nourrisses de leurs enfans, d'aprocher de leurs maris, craignans qu'elles ne troublent le laict, et qu'elles n'en deviennent trop échauffées. Ce que toutefois il ne faut entendre à toute rigueur : car la nourrisse qui sera d'une bonne nature, joviale et gaillarde, ayant désir du couple avec son mari, si elle sent que cela luy soit totalement dénié, elle s'eschauffe tellement en son harnois, que le laict se gaste, brusle et sent le bouquin, dont il est rendu beaucoup plus mauvais et pernitieux : mais quand elle a esté délectée de quelques médiocres embrassements, elle est rendue plus modeste, tranquille et tempérée. Le laict en est meilleur, plus doux, gratieux et convenable pour la santé de l'enfant. »
Jacques Duval dans son ouvrage "Traité des Hermaphrodits, parties génitales, accouchements des femmes, etc." (1612)

Мир «своих» и «чужих». По праву кровного родства: родовые структуры и брачные стратегии в прошлом и настоящем народов Евразии / The world of ‘Self’ and ‘Others’. By Right of Consanguinity: Clan structures and matrimonial strategies in past and present of Eurasian peoples

В этом выпуске мы предлагаем авторам и читателям рассмотреть проблему взаимоотношений между «своими» и «чужими» в рамках такого исследовательского направления как kinship studies.
Здесь, как ни в какой другой дисциплине, можно обнаружить нагляднейший и в то же время нетривиальный материал, который дает нам возможность изучать механизмы социального группирования и отчуждения / исключения. Различные системы родства и соответствующие им терминологии и иерархии могут показать внимательному наблюдателю как сходства, так и различия в стратегии и тактике интеграции / дифференциации сообществ, а метафоричность языка этих систем позволяет нам вернуться, возможно, на более высоком уровне обобщения, и к масштабу макро-анализа.

In this issue of “Tartaria Magna” we offer our authors and readers to consider a problem of interrelations between “insiders” and “outsiders” within kinship studies research trend. Here, as in no other scholarly discipline, one may come across most illustrative and, at the same time, unconventional research material giving us a chance to study mechanisms of social grouping and estrangement/exclusion. Various system of kinship and their relevant terminologies and hierarchies may expose to an attentive eye both similarities and differences in the strategy and tactics of community integration/differentiation. The metaphorical character of these systems allows us to return, perhaps, at a higher level of generalization, to macro-analysis.

Kinship is a fundamental feature and basis of human societies. We describe a set of computational tools and services, and the logic that underlies these, developed to improve how we understand both the fundamental facts of kinship and how people use kinship as a resource in their lives. Mathematical formalism applied to cultural concepts is more than an exercise in model building, as it provides a way to represent and explore their logical consistency and implications. Not surprisingly, kinship terminologies are particularly amenable to formal representation. Researchers throughout the history of kinship studies have noted the logicality of kinship terminology systems. The logic is explored here through the kin term computations made by users of a terminology when computing the kinship relation one person has to another by referring to a third person for whom each has a kin term relationship. Kinship Algebra Modeler provides a set of tools, services, and an architecture to explore kinship terminologies and their properties in an accessible manner.

“This book is extremely well-written and in my view is among the best synthesizers in human evolution study. Dwight provides a much-needed clarity and guidance on what makes us humans. I strongly recommended.”  Amazon (Independent Reviewer), Dr. Paulo Finuras, Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias. Lisbon

“Read effectively uses theory-of-mind concepts and recent work in the extended mind/social-brain realm (e.g., Dunbar, Gamble, and Gowlett 2010) as central components in modeling the development of human social relationships from a broader primate behavioral profile. I greatly appreciate his connection between cognitive processes and the expansion of social complexity and complex kinship systems in humans. Importantly, Read notes how direct comparisons between human and other primate social structure are rife with problems and that while we share much with our primate kin, core areas such as working memory and other cognitive processes differentiate us…. In sum, I agree with Read’s notion of innovation in the human lineage and his proposal for what that innovation entails,…” Current Anthropology, Agustus Fuentes, University of Notre Dame

“How Culture Makes Us Human is an intriguing book that I like very much.  My appreciation stems from the author’s ability to explicitly outline the cognitive capabilities within various primate lineages in order to demonstrate qualities of mind that allow for a cultural kinship system to develop. …Our species’ expanded intellectual capacities introduces cultural group selection… The author acknowledges this process and portrays culture as a conceptual system, in Tylor-like fashion, rather than focus on the transmission of individual culture traits as typically posited by gene-culture coevolutionary theorists and memeticists….Clearly written … I recommend it highly …”  Anthropology Review Database, Dr. William Yaworsky, University of Texas at Brownsville

“… Read (UCLA) argues for the emergence of enhanced cognitive abilities …as a driving force behind human behavioral evolution. The author reviews the diversity of social systems among Old World monkeys and chimpanzees, humans' closest living relatives, in an attempt to establish the foundations of human social organization. The book leads readers from an appreciation of the complexities of monkey and ape societies to an understanding of the sophistication of modern human communities; this transition is accompanied by an organizational shift from biological kin selection to cultural group selection. In sum, a provocative book with tantalizing ideas,…” Choice, R.A.Delgado Jr. , University of Southern California

Abstract
The odyssey from the Old World monkeys to the great apes and then to the development of our unique forms of social organization is, then, the overall theme of this book. The odyssey begins, as it must, with our biological roots as a primate and with change in social organization initially occurring through Darwinian evolution. The challenge, when coming forward to human societies as we know them, has been to connect our Darwinian beginnings to the current complexity of human social systems in which Darwinian evolution, with its focus on individual traits in the context of a population of interbreeding individuals, has been transformed into a new mode of evolution with change at the level of societal organization. It is the functionality of systems of organization, rather than the functionality of individual traits, that is critical to the evolutionary success of human societies. Ancestral hunter-gatherer societies developed cultural means for the expression and continuity over generations of societal practices from whose functionality individuals and families benefit. Through enculturation, individuals take on the properties, structure and features that are part of the cultural milieu that frames the way individuals and groups of individuals interact. More than a century ago, Edward B. Tylor (1924[1871]: 1) referred to culture as “that complex whole,” a characterization that still stands today as a way to identify what is different about human societies in comparison to the societies of other social mammals. It is not an extra-somatic means of information transmission that is crucial to what constitutes culture, but rather that culture refers to conceptual systems such as the kinship systems central to the formation of human societies. The origin of kinship systems as the basis for social organization, hence as a conceptual system of relations, encompasses a transition to new forms of organization subject to change by the individuals embedded within those systems of organization. It is this capacity for self-modification that makes human societies unique.

This paper addresses typological relationships among kinship terminologies determined from structural differences in the way kin terms are organized as systems of concepts.  Viewing a terminology as a system of concepts makes evident the generative logic of a terminology that starts with properties shared across several terminologies and eventually includes properties specific to a single terminology.  These structural properties lead to a typology in which structural differences between terminologies form the branch points.  The typology highlights two primary dimensions along which terminologies may be distinguished: (1) structural differences between terminologies and (2) variation in the morphology of the lexemic form of kin terms.  Variation in the former relates to change constrained in the cultural domain and change in the latter relates to change constrained in the linguistic domain.

A good book review provides documentation for its evaluations, especially when they are either very positive or very negative. A good review is also faithful to what the author has written and bases criticisms or praise on accurate paraphrasing or quotes from the book. This review by Thompson fails on both accounts. Critical comments are not documented and the review is based on what Thompson imagines Read to have written, not what Read actually wrote.

Alloparental care and feeding of young is often called "cooperative breeding" and humans are increasingly described as being a cooperative breeding species. To critically evaluate whether the human offspring care system is best grouped with that of other cooperative breeders. (1) Review of the human system of offspring care in the light of definitions of cooperative, communal and social breeding; (2) re-analysis of human lifetime reproductive effort. Human reproduction and offspring care are distinct from other species because alloparental behaviour is defined culturally rather than by genetic kinship alone. This system allows local flexibility in provisioning strategies and ensures that care and resources often flow between unrelated individuals. This review proposes the term "biocultural reproduction" to describe this unique human reproductive system. In a re-analysis of human life history data, it is estimated that the intense alloparenting typical of human so...

In this paper I sketch a model for the transition from biologically to culturally based forms of social organization. The impetus for the transition arises from increased individualization among the non-human primates that can be observed as one moves phylogenetically from the Cercopithecoids and Ceboids (Old and New World monkeys) to the hominoids, especially the African apes.  Increased individualization introduced a conflict with coherent and stable social integration that was only resolved among the hominid ancestors to modern Homo sapiens by shifting to a cultural/conceptual, rather than a behavioral/biological, basis for social organization.  The shift entailed a change from evolution driven by individual fitness to evolution driven by the structural coherency of a conceptual system for social organization; that is, to selection based on group, rather than individual, level traits. Conceptually the transition depended upon the evolution of mental capacities such as a theory of mind and recursion, both of which are absent or occur only occur in minimal form among the non-human primates.

Kinship is not only symbolic.It is also one of the most important organizing principles of human society which channels concrete productive activities, as for example, agriculture in tribal and peasant societies.Agricultural activities in any specific region again, operate under some climatic and technoeconomic constraints.The present case study of a Sanatl village in Midnapore,West Bengal, shows how even under the influence of a cash oriented market economy the Santals use kinship ties to carry out agriculture under a given set of technoenvironmental constraints.

The evolutionary pathway from the non-human primates to Homo sapiens involves a major change in social systems from the systems of face-to-face interaction that non-human primate societies are dependent upon to the relation based social systems of human societies. This pathway from non-human primate social systems to human social systems begins, as it must, at the level of biological kin, but ends with the symbolic kinship terminology systems that enable the computation of kin relations by reference to the logic of the kinship terminology at a constructed, cultural level. What kinship systems may share with languages is the capacity of the brain to work out structural logic, either in the form of a non-consciously understood grammar in the case of languages, or in the form of the computational logic (which is much like the logic of an addition table or a multiplication table for numbers) for kinship terminologies. I quite agree with Carlos Salazar’s comment: “Everything looks as if kinship systems were the ‘missing link’ in human biocultural evolution: the half-biological half-cultural connection that would enable humans to transcend the limits on social life imposed by natural selection, i.e. the limits on cooperation imposed by reciprocal altruism and kin selection, but without the need for a fully-fledged cultural system…” (Salazar 2014).  Kinship does not require a ‘fully-fledged cultural system’, for with the evolution of kinship systems we have the evolutionary origin of a cultural system.

The evolution of primate social organization and behavior is examined and the key qualitative difference between non-human primate and human social organization is identified. This difference is the advent of a cultural kinship system, available only to humans due to our species-specific abilities, particularly in recursive thinking and high capacity working memory. With these qualities of mind humans are able to organize in ways beyond the comprehension of other primate species.

This research investigates the potential of a new, noninvasive method for determining age of weaning among primates using stable carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios in feces. Analysis of stable isotope ratios in body tissues is a well-established method in archeology and ecology for reconstructing diet. This is the first study to investigate weaning in primates using fecal stable isotope ratios. Diets of a single Franc¸ois’ langur (Trachypithecus francoisi) mother–infant pair at the Toledo Zoo are reconstructed using this technique to track changes in infant suckling behavior over the weaning period. Stable isotope ratios in feces are sampled instead of more traditional samples such as bone or hair to enable daily, noninvasive snapshots of weaning status. Isotopic assessments of weaning status are compared to visual assessments to identify any discordance between the two. Three measurements documented the transition from breast milk to solid foods: stable carbon isotope ratios (δ13C), stable nitrogen isotope ratios (δ15N), and nitrogen content of feces (%N). It appears that solid foods were introduced at approximately 2 months of infant age, but that nursing continued into the 12th month, when sample collection ceased. Stable isotope data exposed a much longer weaning period than what was expected based on previously published data for captive langurs, and clarified visual estimates of weaning status. This reflects the method’s sensitivity to suckling at night and ability to distinguish actual nursing from comfort nursing. After testing this method with zoo animals, it can readily be applied among wild populations. An isotopic approach to weaning provides a new, accurate, and biologically meaningful assessment of interbirth intervals, and facilitates a better understanding of mother–infant interactions. Both of these outcomes are critical for developing successful conservation strategies for captive and wild primates.

From the Preface:


The odyssey from the Old World monkeys to the great apes and then to the development of our unique forms of social organization is, then, the overall theme of this book. The odyssey begins, as it must, with our biological roots as a primate and with change in social organization initially occurring through Darwinian evolution. The challenge, when coming forward to human societies as we know them, has been to connect our Darwinian beginnings to the current complexity of human social systems in which Darwinian evolution, with its focus on individual traits in the context of a population of interbreeding individuals, has been transformed into a new mode of evolution with change at the level of societal organization. It is the functionality of systems of organization, rather than the functionality of individual traits, that is critical to the evolutionary success of human societies. Ancestral hunter-gatherer societies developed cultural means for the expression and continuity over generations of societal practices from whose functionality individuals and families benefit. Through enculturation, individuals take on the properties, structure and features that are part of the cultural milieu that frames the way individuals and groups of individuals interact. More than a century ago, Edward B. Tylor (1924[1871]: 1) referred to culture as “that complex whole,” a characterization that still stands today as a way to identify what is different about human societies in comparison to the societies of other social mammals. It is not an extra-somatic means of information transmission that is crucial to what constitutes culture, but rather that culture refers to conceptual systems such as the kinship systems central to the formation of human societies. The origin of kinship systems as the basis for social organization, hence as a conceptual system of relations, encompasses a transition to new forms of organization subject to change by the individuals embedded within those systems of organization. It is this capacity for self-modification that makes human societies unique.