SFI Omidyar Fellow Laura Fortunato discusses her recent study of the ancient origins of monogamous marriage in the Miller-McCune podcast "Curiouser and Curiouser."
Listen to the Miller-McCune podcast (15 minutes, June 24, 2011)
In her study, published in the journal Human Biology in February 2011, Fortunato examined evolution patterns of language and marriage customs in 27 Indo-European societies, from Iceland to India, to determine when monogamous marriage became widely practiced.
According to Fortunato, the practice of monogamy is more than 8,000 years old. She attributes one important reason for its rise to the growth of agricultural societies, where a man had to consider how many children would be inheriting, and therefore dividing, his land and wealth.
Listen to the Miller-McCune podcast (15 minutes, June 24, 2011)
Fortunato's Human Biology paper (February 2011)