The Demography of Finite Populations and the Origins of the Incest Taboo

Abstract

During the Last Ten Years we have acquired a much better understanding of Band Society—the socio-cultural system that characterizes the behavior of most hunter-gatherers (Lee and DeVore 1968; Sahlins 1972; Williams 1974). The same decade has also added considerable detail to explanations of the evolution of Band Society into more complex socio-cultural systems (Binford 1968; Flannery 1968, 1969). Compared to its steady state and its demise, the origins of Band Society have received much less attention. This lack of concern is particularly perplexing given the rapid accumulation of paleoanthropological and archaeological data on human origins in the sixties and early seventies. In order to stimulate discussion in this area of anthropological research, this paper deals with the origins of one subsystem of band society—the mating strategies. The research reported here focuses on the effect of mating strategies and population size on age specific fertilities and on their potential role in the origins of the incest taboo.Three areas of hunter-gatherer demography are immediately relevant to Band Society origins: population density, mating network, and population growth. Ethnographically studied huntergatherers characteristically live at population densities below one person per square kilometer (Sanders and Price 1968), the population which exchanges mates is usually not much larger than 500 (Birdsell 1968; Wobst 1974), and band societies generally show intrinsic rates of growth near zero (Weiss 1973). There is nothing in the archaeological record to suggest that prehistoric hunter-gatherers, on the average, had greater population densities, larger mating networks, or more rapid growth rates. If these factors were already operative during the Pleistocene, we can ask ourselves how they would have affected demographic processes earlier in human evolution.