The surprising reason humans created marriage? P1 #stickman #humanhistory #prehistory #fyp

here's a strange question to sit with for a second why does almost every human society on earth have some version of marriage not just some cultures nearly all of them across every continent going back as far as we have written records that kind of universal pattern doesn't happen by accident so what's actually driving it let's start with biology because the story may begin long before anything we'd recognize as a wedding human babies are unusually demanding compared to most primates they're born extremely underdeveloped and stay dependent for years not months some paleoanthropologists most notably oh and lovejoy in the early 1980s proposed that this created real evolutionary pressure for something like pair bonding a male and female cooperating long term to raise offspring with the male helping provision food lovejoy even connected this to bipedalism itself suggesting that walking upright freed up hands to carry food back to a mate and offspring as supporting evidence he pointed to early hominin fossils like artypithicus that show reduced differences in canine tooth size between males and females a pattern that in many primate species is linked to reduced male on male competition for mates now I have to be honest with you this is a genuinely debated hypothesis not settled fact other researchers argue the fossil evidence is thinner than lovejoy claimed and that early hominin mating patterns may have been far messier than a clean pair bonding story suggests but the broader idea that costly dependent human infants created real pressure toward long term cooperative parenting is widely taken seriously in evolutionary anthropology even by researchers who reject the specifics of lovejoy's model here's the important distinction though pair bonding is not the same thing as marriage plenty of species pair up without lawyers ceremonies or in-laws marriage is something else it's a social institution with rules obligations and consequences that extend well beyond the couple so when and why did humans add all of that this is where the anthropologist Claude levy Strauss made an argument in 1949 that reshaped how researchers think about marriage entirely his claim marriage was never really just about the couple across many documented societies especially smaller scale ones marriage functions as a formal exchange between families or kin groups and alliance by marrying their children into other groups families created obligations trade relationships and cooperation between communities that might otherwise have no reason to trust each other in this view marriages less like a love story and more like ancient diplomacy with people instead of treaties that framework is influential but it's also just one lens plenty of anthropologists since have pushed back on treating it as a universal rule for every culture still the basic pattern it highlights marriage creating binding ties between groups not just individuals shows up again and again in the historical record so let's actually look at that record because the earliest written evidence is surprisingly specific some of the oldest surviving marriage laws come from ancient Mesopotamia the code of homerabi written around 1754 BCE spells things out in blunt legal language one law states plainly if a man takes a wife but doesn't formalize it with a proper contract that woman is not legally his wife read that again nearly 4,000 years ago marriage and Babylon wasn't primarily about romance it was paperwork a legal and economic contract with real consequences attached including detailed rules about inheritance dowry's and divorce