In many human societies, social relationships are determined by kinship, and incest taboos prohibit marriage within the same cultural group, even if they are not close relatives.In addition, the whole of marriage and parent-child relationships between groups is called a kinship structure, and in particular, limited exchanges where two groups get married and full-scale exchanges where there is a one-way female flow between three or more groups have been found. ..However, it was not clear how those diverse kinship structures would arise.

　The research team discusses the evolution of kinship structure on a computer using a model of primitive society.Considering that marriage will bring about competition with rivals in marriage while encouraging cooperation between groups, we simulated the time evolution of society.The results show that the marital rules and various kinship structures discovered by cultural anthropologists are spontaneously generated depending on the parameters, and the distribution of kinship structures can be explained in correspondence with actual ethnographic findings. It revealed that.

　This research presents a new methodology to elucidate the universal structure underlying diverse human societies through theoretical research using models, and is said to give the concept of "universal anthropology."As a future task, he aims to elucidate the logic that connects individual-level behavior and social-level phenomena for various universal structures in human society and human history, using theoretical models.

Paper information:[Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America] Evolution of Kinship Structures Driven by Marriage Tie and Competition