Anthropology Competition for inheritance promoted monogamy according to study
According to a new study, competition over inheritance has made monogamy a successful model. The desire to inherit land and property undivided led to men limiting the number of wives they had.
29.12.2025, 21:00
SDA
This is what a research team involving the University of Zurich wrote on Monday in the scientific journal "Pnas".
According to the researchers, polygyny, in which a man is married to several women, was historically the most common marriage system. Earlier research explained this by the fact that it could be advantageous for women to share a privileged husband with others in order to ensure better living conditions for their children.
Why monogamy nevertheless prevailed in many societies over time remained a mystery. After all, the researchers would have expected polygyny to be more common in agricultural societies with large differences in property and social status.
Statistical analyses
For their study, the research team analyzed data from 186 societies worldwide. The results showed that when resources such as farmland became scarce, privatized and inheritable, monogamy prevailed. The researchers explain this by the fact that men limited the number of wives they had in order to avoid dividing up the inheritance and to secure a competitive advantage for their offspring.
Another theory, according to which monogamy serves social stability, was not confirmed by the study. This assumption is based on the premise that polygyny leads to a surplus of unmarried men, which favors violence. Monogamy would therefore reduce competition between men and thus give society an advantage. The researchers found no clear evidence for this hypothesis.
According to the researchers, the results of the study also call into question the assumption that monogamy is primarily a historical product of European societies. The analysis shows that monogamy emerged several times and independently in different cultures and language families under similar scarcity pressures.
