How/ why did monogamy develop?

plutosheen · 2017-05-30T01:04:30+00:00

My opinion is that social monogamy in h sapiens developed during our palaeolithic past due to the need for male parental investment when our babies started being born helpless.

There were selection pressures which pushed for increased cranial capacity. Yet female pelvic width had an upper limit to accommodate increased neonatal cranial volume during birth- beyond a certain width it would've interfered with bipedalism.

Bipedalism trumped increased cranial capacity since bipedalism is more crucial to h sapien's survival whereas cranial capacity was probably pushed by sexual selection pressures more so than natural selection.

Hence babies started being born "prematurely" with a extra uterine gestational period (ages 0-4) which required male parental investment.

So the selection pressures for male parental investment, which is a consequence of social monogamy probably developed around this time.

It's a common trope in the manosphere that monogamy is a social construct. It is not. All human cultures be they state level societies or hunter gatherers have some form of marriage. The deep emotions accompanying oneitis attests to monogamy being associated with older brain structures.

Ironically, it is only during the Neolithic onwards when a single male could provide the parental investment to multiple females when polygamy started. Evidenced by archaeogenetics which showed that during the Neolithic only 1 out of 17 males passed on their genes.

account4189 · 2017-05-29T20:46:48+00:00

There are some good threads around here, but the mainstream line of thought is that it developed as a way to control and extract labor from beta/gamma/omega men, especially when humans moved from hunter-gather societies to more centralized agrarian or pastoral societies.

That said, humans have developed all sorts of social structures over time.

You can get some insight from looking at our closest animal relatives, chimps and bonobos. Chimps tend to have a pack structure where the alphas restrict other males from mating and kill offspring unlikely to be thier own, while bonobos literally engage in group sex and don't give much regard to lineage. Humans were probably somewhere in between.

Title	How/ why did monogamy develop?
Author	[deleted]
Upvotes	3
Comments	4
Date	May 29, 2017 7:30 PM UTC (9 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MGTOW
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MGTOW/comments/6e2bu0/how_why_did_monogamy_develop/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MGTOW/how-why-did-monogamy-develop.585007 https://theredarchive.com/post/585007

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