UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON, SYLVAIN VIGUIER
The natural human preference to live with or near kin is particularly strong among hunter-gatherers, but gender equality may allow these communities to include large percentages of genetically unrelated residents, according to a study published last week (May 15) in Science.
Researchers at University College London (UCL) developed mathematical models to test how gender equality might influence the makeup of hunter-gatherer groups. In one simulation, the researchers gave men and women equal say in who they lived with and in the second, only men could decide. The researchers then determined the frequencies of couples in which both individuals were genetically unrelated. Over 100 simulations of a group size set to 20 individuals, the average frequency of unrelated pairs was 12 percent among the egalitarian groups ...
