“It’s not that individuals don’t want to live with kin,” Dyble explains. “It’s just that if everyone tried to live with as many kin as possible, this places a constraint on how closely related communities can be.” And this in turn means that neither men nor women have greater control over whom they live with. There must be sexual equality in decision making. “It has this transformative effect on social organization,” he says. If this arrangement was normal in our evolutionary history, Dyble believes it could explain some aspects of human development. “We have the ability to cooperate with
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