Clearly, scientists need to watch more Maury. Polyandry is a common theme.

Unicorn alert, aisle 9.

Thanks, Dan! @1 I'll suggest people seek grants to study Maury. Probably should come with the equivalent of academic combat pay.

*shrug* Sometimes polyandry is just what makes sense, given the circumstances. People generally strive for the sensible option, all things being equal. No big surprise.

Why label what a man, his wife, his mistress, her lover, and people they meet at bars do?

@3 for the Unicorn win.

@5- Yep. It's either that, do without, or screw boys. I suspect option C will become more common too in these nations with operational sex ratios. That, or a raging war will break out to kill off a bunch of males- another way humankind has dealt with this problem over the millenia.

inb4 THEREFORE POLYANDRY IS THE MOST NATURAL WAY OF HUMAN SEXUALITY

X Polyandry More Common Than Previously Thought

And yet still not very common.

I can't be the only one who thought the movie Savages would have been sooo much better if the boys kissed too.

Zzzzzzzzzzz.

Your sexuality only matters to you. As subjective as what kind of food you like. BFD.

This straight/gay/bi/chicken-humping/whatever propaganda that Savage spews here is just so boring. Get over yourselves people and become productive for goodness sake.

If we consider sex workers, then all societies are polyandrous.

I, for one, am very much for this.

@ 11 - You - a self-described stoner - could also be more productive if you didn't take the time to read posts that don't interest you and to comment on them.

@15 ... I don't think he means that he tokes, I think that he means that he is a gun fan. Eugene Stoner is the inventor of the AR-15, which developed into the M-16.

Well, not "is", was. Mr. Stoner reached the end of the 74-round magazine that God issued him some fourteen years ago.

@ 16 - Thanks for the info. Having never lived in a gun-crazy culture, this is something I can't even begin to be interested in, but at least now I know where he's coming from.

But isn't calling yourself after the inventor of a gun "just so boring"? (And many other negative adjectives I could think of...)

Maybe he should toke. That would certainly make him more productive than being a gun junkie, which is only destructive.

Oh, I wouldn't go that far, Ricardo. I live in nice, safe, comparatively gunless Canada, and have no plans to own a weapon any time soon, and yet I want a t-shirt that says "John Moses Browning Is God". Brilliance is worthy of admiration.

@ 19 - I'm sorry, but I can't possibly agree with you on that. By that criteria, we should all admire Hitler. He WAS brilliant at what he did. Except that what he did was absolutely evil.

Following on 20 - I meant, of course, "criterion".

Sorry, what? I was just banging this Godwin guy and lost the thread.

The Conclusion they draw from this data about our ancestors isn't a very sound one. Hunter-Gatherer tribes didn't really practice marriage like most settled societies do. Most tribal systems in history simply had people fuck who they wanted to fuck. Now there might have been tribes with a power balance that favored females. That is possible I guess. But I doubt there was polyandry as we define it.

This is sort of like the whole thing about the "mother goddess" statues. Where people try to fit historical data to paint a picture of a higher form of human nature in history when none probably existed. The "mother goddess" statues were probably just neolithic skin mags.

So much ignorance in these comments it's hard to know where to start.
Polyandrous does not just mean a woman fucking more than one man, people. It means 2 or more men MARRIED to one woman.
"Hunter-gatherers" encompasses literally thousands of cultures. To say "they didn't [try "don't" - they're not extinct!] practice marriage like most settled societies do" is a gross generalization. And for the record, those polyandrous Tibetans mentioned in the article? They're farmers, i.e., "settled societies."
"Hunter-gatherer" is not synonymous with "tribal." A "tribe" is a specific form of social organization, larger than bands (most hunter-gatherer groups live in bands) but smaller than chiefdoms or states.
Also, while Steven Pinker is a brilliant linguist, he's no paleoanthropologist and a lot of his claims about hunter-gatherers being so violent are completely bogus, based on data from groups that aren't even hunter-gatherers (like the Yanomami, who are mainly horticulturalists).
Sigh... on some perfect planet they teach anthropology instead of [pseudo] economics in high school.

@Danfan : thanks for clarifying.

I'm illiterate in anthropology, so I couldn't help but chuckle at the thought of some horticulturalist groups being quite violent. So much for the Flower power...

danfan @24:

Furthermore, the studies on so-called "primitive" societies are usually contaminated by the researchers having to interact with these societies. Esp. regarding the Yanomami and their supposed violence, there has been quite a debate on the validity of the reports:

"Researcher contamination in Yanomamö findings
Chagnon wrote that the Yanomamö were "innately violent" and engaged in "chronic warfare". Other anthropologists argued that the Yanomamö became violent after Chagnon arrived to conduct his research and offered machetes, axes and shotguns to selected groups to elicit their cooperation.[11][12]
In the television documentary film The Trap, Chagnon walks off-camera in disgust during an interview after having been asked if his presence in the village could have affected his study." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Ch…