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Polygamy

    

   The ethnographic evidence suggests that human nature is adapted to an ancestral mating system that was predominately polygynous; one husband, with multiple wives. Most ancestral men have aspired to polygyny, even though most weren't impressive enough to attract more than one wife.

   Some ancestral women preferred to be the co-wife of a really impressive man than the sole wife of a second-rate one.

   If our ancestors' environments were so polygynous, why is ‘socially imposed’ monogamy—the moral and legal prohibition of polygyny—so common in modern societies? Or more accurately, why is it so common in the West?

   Polygyny remains legal and common in many non-Western societies, especially sub-Saharan African and Islamic countries.

   Why did monogamy spread throughout the West? There isn't universal agreement about what the correct answer is, but a plausible answer is that it spread because historically, monogamous groups were advantaged militarily over polygynous groups.

    

  The ancient Greco-Roman and medieval European leaders who embraced anti-polygyny laws were heavily invested in the business of war.  Their own social status and, indeed, survival often depended on their ability to maintain large, well-funded armies. The imposition of monogamy produced bigger, better armies, because monogamous groups can grow larger than polygynous ones.

   Why? Because men want wives, and if you need a lot of men on your team,you must offer them something that they want. In monogamous groups, unlike polygynous ones, high status males cannot hoard large numbers of women for themselves. The more equal distribution of women in monogamous groups means that more men can acquire wives, and fewer men have to leave the group to search for wives elsewhere. The larger the group, the more men there are to fight in battles and to pay taxes for the funding of wars.

   Socially imposed monogamy, therefore, emerged in the West as a reciprocal arrangement in which elite males allowed lower-ranking males to marry, in exchange for their military service and tax contributions.

Michael Price, Ph.D.

Psychology Today