The goal of the paper is to demonstrate how international slave trade spread the institution of slavery throughout Africa, resulting in long-term effects of the continent’s income and political centralization. The author first estimated the travel time to slave ports from each society in the Ethnographic Atlas to determine predicting factors for the adoption of slave trade in African societies. The author reported that societies with high exposure to slave capture in the past were more likely to have the custom of slavery and the custom of polygyny. The author further suggested that slavery institutions emerged in West Africa through local, politically centralized aristocratic systems while emerging in East Africa through the preservation of wealth within the nuclear family over generations.

The goal of the paper is to demonstrate how international slave trade spread the institution of slavery throughout Africa, resulting in long-term effects of the continent’s income and political centralization. The author first estimated the travel time to slave ports from each society in the Ethnographic Atlas to determine predicting factors for the adoption of slave trade in African societies. The author reported that societies with high exposure to slave capture in the past were more likely to have the custom of slavery and the custom of polygyny. The author further suggested that slavery institutions emerged in West Africa through local, politically centralized aristocratic systems while emerging in East Africa through the preservation of wealth within the nuclear family over generations.

The goal of the paper is to demonstrate how international slave trade spread the institution of slavery throughout Africa, resulting in long-term effects of the continent’s income and political centralization. The author first estimated the travel time to slave ports from each society in the Ethnographic Atlas to determine predicting factors for the adoption of slave trade in African societies. The author reported that societies with high exposure to slave capture in the past were more likely to have the custom of slavery and the custom of polygyny. The author further suggested that slavery institutions emerged in West Africa through local, politically centralized aristocratic systems while emerging in East Africa through the preservation of wealth within the nuclear family over generations.

Lowes and Nunn test the theory that the transatlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades of the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries prompted a shift towards matrilineal kinship systems throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Controlling for ecological variables commonly thought to affect kinship structure (including ruggedness of terrain, suitability for agriculture, etc.), the authors find a significant correlation between the number of people enslaved from a given ethnic group, and the tendency of that group towards a matrilineal kinship system. Polygyny was also identified as a statistically significant characteristic of communities most impacted by the slave trade.

This article focuses on ecological correlates of sexual division in the control of resources. The author tests several ecological theories put forth by others. Sex coalitions are examined in humans, and sexual dimorphism in resource acquisition and control is discussed.

Considerable disagreement exists in regard to the origin and distribution of economic phenomena such as money, slavery, markets, exchange, and imbalanced transfers. Here the author utilizes a worldwide cross-cultural sample of 60 pre-industrial "societies" to empirically test many economic hypotheses, with a focus on distributional mechanisms and institutions.

In this paper, the authors argue that polygyny creates social inequality in which economically advantaged men marry multiple women and economically disadvantaged men marry late in life or potentially never. The institution of polygyny results in a higher proportion of single men without families ("excess men"), who, the authors propose, may turn to violence to achieve higher wealth or prestige. Following this theory, the authors hypothesize that societies with more polygynous neighbors will be at higher risk for intergroup conflict, for which they find robust support. They also find that young men in polygynous societies, who are more likely to be economically disadvantaged and have less prestige, are also more likely to feel as though they are treated unequally and more ready to resort to violence, supporting the authors' theorized underlying mechanism.

This study tests the hypothesis that humans tend to transmit wealth to male heirs where polygyny is possible. The results support this hypothesis.

In this study, the authors draw from intensity theory and combine previous research from the fields of behavioral ecology, economics, and social evolution to analyze drivers in the emergence and persistence of inequality across the world. They propose that environmental heterogeneity and circumscription (the difficulty of moving and establishing oneself in a new environment relative to remaining in the current one) play a significant role in the stratification of societies. Their results indicate that situations arise from various environmental conditions and levels of circumscription that may result in an individual giving up autonomy for material gain, thus favoring inequality.

Researchers examine marriage patterns of 186 societies from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS). The eleven predictor variables are pathogen stress, arranged female marriages, population density, father roles during infancy, temperature, social stratification, wealth inequality, internal warfare, assault frequency, female agricultural contribution, and sex ratio. The two outcome variables measuring polygyny are cultural rules constraining polygyny and the percentage of married men who are polygynous. Controlling on phylogeny using a global supertree of the languages, analysis of marriage patterns reveals that assault frequency and pathogen stress are the strongest predictors of polygyny. These findings offer additional support for the theories of harem-defense polygyny and male genetic quality.