The following text is the full article "More cows, more wives" by Olympia Campbell, as reproduced from the provided sources:
More cows, more wives
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good agricultural surplus, must be in want of a wife.
In the 1930s in the Upper Nile region of what is now South Sudan, anthropologist EE Evans-Pritchard met a Nuer woman sitting by a thatched hut with her children. In the distance, the father of her children tended the cattle; they looked like an ordinary family, but this man was not her husband. The Nuer woman was married to a ghost, and her children were officially the children of this ghost.
Among the Nuer, if a man died without leaving any heirs, his kinsmen would find him a wife so that his name would live on, fearing his restless ghost would otherwise haunt them. Evans-Pritchard observed that ghost marriages were nearly as common as those between the living, often necessitated by warfare, disease, or childhood mortality claiming young men. In these unions, a kinsman might marry in the deceased's name—"kindling the fire of the dead"—and while cattle were paid as bridewealth, any children born belonged legally to the ghost.
This arrangement often led to a cycle where ghost marriage begat ghost marriage, as the man marrying on behalf of the ghost gained a family in all but name, and the family's cattle were then used to secure marriages for younger brothers. This Nuer example is just one of many diverse marriage customs that were once invisible to Northwestern Europeans, who assumed their lifelong monogamous religious marriages and nuclear families were the natural order.
By the twentieth century, anthropologists began reporting foreign customs that challenged these notions. Margaret Mead’s 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa depicted a society where young women deferred marriage through casual love-making. Bronislaw Malinowski’s 1929 The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia described trial marriages among Trobriand Islanders, where young lovers lived together in a bukumatula (bachelors’ house) to see if the relationship worked, resembling modern dating.
The variety of marriage customs
In 1967, George Murdock and Douglas R. White formalized this scholarship in the Ethnographic Atlas, later refining it into the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample of 186 societies. Of these, only 31 were monogamous, 153 were polygynous (one man, multiple wives), and 2 were polyandrous (one woman, multiple husbands). It became clear that most people throughout history have not lived like Europeans. Marriage can be sanctified by religion or state, or simply occur when two people live together; it can be chosen or coerced.
Compared to other animals, human marriage is aberrant; while birds pair bond, only nine percent of mammalian species do. For most animals, relationships only last for the duration of copulation.
Interfering relatives
Humans are unique in that third parties—parents, siblings, and extended family—routinely interfere in marital decisions to shape, delay, or prevent unions. This ranges from South Asian purdah (seclusion of women) to the segregation of men, such as the Enga of Papua New Guinea, where boys were sent to live in men’s houses and could only marry after proving themselves and undergoing purification rituals.
Marriage is rarely a private matter because it serves the basic purposes of managing resources and building alliances. Evolutionary anthropologists suggest people seek to maximize descendants, and the best strategy to do so changes with the environment, often creating conflict between the sexes and families.
Marriage for hunter gatherers
For roughly 95 percent of human history, we lived as hunter-gatherers. In groups like the BaYaka of the Congolese rainforest, marriages are fluid; an enamored couple might simply walk into the forest and return to build a hut together. A young man may perform "bride service" by living and hunting with his girlfriend's family for a year, but the relationship can dissolve just as easily as it began, even with small children involved.
This fluidity is common in egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies with high mobility and no material wealth. Studies show that fathers in these populations have a surprisingly small effect on child survival compared to grandmothers and siblings. Because there is no stored wealth or inheritance, divorce and remarriage are frequent, and women often have children with two or three men over their lifetime.
How farming promotes inequality
Farming, which arrived 12,000 years ago, transformed marriage by allowing wealth accumulation and decreasing mobility. In northern Kenya, a Turkana man named Imana could support four wives and 13 children with his herd of over a hundred cows, while his poorer neighbor was limited to one wife.
The arrival of wealth led to the logic of "more cows, more wives". This shift may have been shaped by female choice; in Darwinian terms, it can pay for a woman to be the second or third wife of a rich man rather than the first wife of a poor one. However, not all polygyny is freely chosen. Among the Dogon of Mali, higher child mortality in polygynous households suggests coercion, whereas in Northern Tanzania, children of polygynous fathers are often wealthier and better nourished.
When women become a limited resource, they become economically valuable to parents who demand bridewealth. For example, the Chagga of Tanzania required a "deposit" of beer, goats, milk, and meat, followed by a "cascade of further obligations" to the bride's entire extended family. Fathers would sometimes allocate a sister to each son so her bridewealth could finance his marriage.
In these systems, wealth flows to sons because they can use inherited wealth to acquire more wives and descendants. These societies often invent ways to limit women's freedom to ensure paternity. The Dogon use menstrual huts to signal fertility; genetic data shows nonpaternity is lower among those who use these huts.
There are exceptions, like the Himba of Namibia, who are pastoralists but relaxed about infidelity. In one sample, 49 percent of children were not biologically the husband's, yet the husband helped raise them and paid for their marriages. This is possible because the Himba have low bridewealth and matrilineal inheritance, meaning men invest in their sisters' sons, whose biological relatedness is guaranteed.
Polygyny was also widespread in other cultures, with Quranic law capping wives at four and Papua New Guinea elites using pigs, shells, or more recently, cars and money to secure multiple wives.
Monogamy and primogeniture
Predominantly monogamous systems, like those in Europe and parts of Asia, often evolved to manage resources rather than as a mating preference. In ancient Greece, Rome, and under Confucian law, monogamy was the legal rule, yet elite men often had mistresses or concubines. Monogamy may have risen when dividing wealth among many heirs (like splitting a farm into tiny, unproductive plots) reduced its total value.
This led to unigeniture—where only one son inherits—and a system where women traded faithfulness for the guarantee that their children were the legitimate heirs. While women’s sexuality was strictly controlled, men often fathered children out of wedlock, but institutional systems were built to exclude "bastard" children.
Following the French Revolution, the government imposed equal partition of assets, which led families to limit their number of children to avoid the over-division of wealth, explaining France's early declining fertility. Similar trends are seen in Sub-Saharan Africa among groups with shared inheritance.
The end of marriage systems
In the contemporary West, marriage systems have become fluid again. Some people are monogamous, while others follow patterns resembling hunter-gatherers through divorce and remarriage, or Samoan-style trial marriages. Traditional controls have weakened as schooling, mobile phones, and urban migration reduce family involvement.
Christian missionaries also inadvertently undermined indigenous regulation systems while trying to ban traditional cults. Furthermore, changes to wealth mean we no longer differentiate between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" offspring, and women's integration into the workforce means they no longer need to trade fidelity for economic security.
While divorce rates are lower among the wealthy—partly because raising children and buying homes now often requires two stable incomes—the fundamental nature of marriage remains a tool to build connections and secure wealth. If marriage has a nature, it is to be reshaped to fit the world around it. In a world where familiar constraints have disappeared, perhaps all that is keeping us together is love.
Author: Olympia Campbell is a research fellow at the Toulouse School of Economics.
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