Matrilocal Residence Is Ancestral In Austronesian Societies

Main Category: Genetics
Also Included In: Biology / Biochemistry
Article Date: 04 Mar 2009 - 7:00 PDT

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Human social behaviour does not fossilise, so we know little about marriage and families in prehistory. We used a "virtual archaeology" technique to reconstruct the residence rules reflecting how men and women move between communities when they marry.

Borrowing phylogenetic methods from evolutionary biology, we traced the language relationships of 135 Pacific societies and tracked the evolution of 5000-year-old residence rules. These early Austronesian-speaking societies had "matrilocal" residence systems, where men married and moved into their wives' communities.

Our results fit Pacific patterns of male Y chromosome and female mitochondrial DNA, showing how cultural rules can shape human genetic diversity.

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Proceedings B is the Royal Society's flagship biological research journal, dedicated to the rapid publication and broad dissemination of high-quality research papers, reviews and comment and reply papers. The scope of the journal is diverse and is especially strong in organismal biology.

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org