Contextual cues of genetic relatedness to familiar individuals, such as cosocialization and maternal-perinatal association, modulate prosocial and inbreeding-avoidance behaviors toward specific potential siblings. These findings have been interpreted as evidence that contextual cues of kinship indirectly influence social behavior by affecting the perceived probability of genetic relatedness to ...

As observed in recent centuries, the contemporary variety of kinship systems reflects millennia human migration, cultural inheritance, adaptation, and diversification. This review describes key developments prehistoric kinship, from matricentric hominin evolution to Neolithic transition agriculture heterogeneous resilience matriliny. Starting with our ancestors, evolved among a cooperative bree...

Introduction This is an article about kinship, and more particularly the meaning of kinship, an issue that has characterized practically the whole history of anthropology from Lewis Henry Morgan’s pioneering studies, including the influential dismissals of kinship as a universal category by both Rodney Needham and David Schneider in the mid-twentieth century and the prominence given to Janet Ca...

Motivation Rapid and low cost sequencing of genomes enabled widespread use of genomic data in research studies and personalized customer applications, where genomic data is shared in public databases. Although the identities of the participants are anonymized in these databases, sensitive information about individuals can still be inferred. One such information is kinship. Results We define t...

In order to navigate the social world, children need to understand and make predictions about how people will interact with one another. Throughout most of human history, social groups have been prominently marked by kinship relations, but few experiments have examined children's knowledge of and reasoning about kinship relations. In the current studies, we investigated how 3- to 5-year-old chi...