About the issue

In some human societies, families are focused on related men while others are more tightly organised around related women. Why should this be so? In this theme issue, we use evidence and theory motivated by an evolutionary framework to examine female-biased kinship in human and non-human mammals. These papers suggest that female-biased kinship is likely more common than previously thought, arising in numerous contexts, across taxa, and across time and space. Female-biased kinship is associated with many outcomes important to individual reproduction, health, and well-being. It is also thought to play a role in allowing for increased social complexity and multi-generational transmission of social information in some ecological contexts. A more central focus on how females contribute to human and non-human evolution underscores that much of the flexibility in mammalian social systems is facilitated by a stable female core.

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