Sergey Gavrilets of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Department of Mathematics, and National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis at the University of Tennessee presented a mathematically sound new theory that explains the development of the emergence of the institution of the modern family as being female driven in a paper presented in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Gavrilets basic proposal is that female driven selection of good providers as mates reduced male competition for mating privileges and produced the change to single pair bonding that resulted in the emergence of the institution of the modern family.
The emergence of the institution of the modern family is tied to the increased emphasis on provisioning females over male competition for mating and allowed previously low ranked males to become mate competitive if they were good providers. Gavrilets also ties this development to a greater involvement of males in child rearing and to an increased probability of children living to adulthood. Multigenerational family units were a direct result of this development.
This first sexual revolution is explained mathematically as being better correlated to archeological and paleontological evidence that presently exists than any previously proposed theory of human family unit development.The 4.4 million year old fossils of Ardipithecus ramidis are offered as the first evidence of this first sexual revolution.
Gavrilets does not include more recent changes in human behavior and culture that have allowed women to become income earners. The paper does not examine the increasing number of single parent (usually female) households either. These developments could in fact be an evolutionary trend that has to date been unaddressed.
