Below, Meredith Small shares five key insights from her new book, Family: How the Human Need for Connection Forms and Shapes Our Lives.
Meredith is an anthropologist, primatologist, and science journalist. She is also professor emerita at Cornell University, where she taught biological anthropology for over three decades.
What’s the Big Idea?
Family is not simply a cultural invention. It is a fundamental part of human nature, rooted in millions of years of evolution. Although the ways we define and organize families vary enormously, our need to form lasting bonds, care for one another, and belong to a group is universal.
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1. We all have a family.
Family is the most ubiquitous form of social connection that humans make. Everyone has a family—even if members live miles or continents away, even if they are not the most pleasant people around, even if they are harmful or destructive. They are still your family.
And family is not just a bunch of genetic relatives, or what we used to call “blood” relations, because it also includes non-genetic members who join by vows, laws, or invitation. In that sense, family is both a biological and social kinship group.
Those who have traveled to other cultures, emigrated from their birth country, or maintained ties to a faraway culture recognize that families are defined differently around the world. To be a middle-class grown-up daughter in America is very different from being an adult female Ju/’hoansi hunter-gatherer in Botswana. Across all that difference, we all have and believe in families.
2. Family is part of human nature.
Family as a social structure has been around forever. In 1975, Donald Johanson and his crew found a cache of 216 fossilized fragments of ancient pre-humans called Australopiths, dating to 3.2 million years ago. Those bones represent 13-17 individuals, including three teenagers and five children. Archaeologists quickly nicknamed them “The First Family.” Finding fossil children alongside adults suggests that those children were part of a group because they needed care.
More evidence of family formation includes a 3.3-million-year-old three-year-old girl from Ethiopia, an almost complete skeleton of a 15-year-old boy on the shores of Lake Turkana in Kenya, dated 1.6 million years old, and an intentional burial of a baby skull on a six-inch rock shelf deep within a cave system in South Africa, dated 250,000 years ago. Later, we find genetically proven Neanderthal pairs—fathers and daughters, grandparents and grandchildren—buried next to each other in Siberian caves.
“Family is woven into us.”
Closer to the present, we see archaeological evidence of humans living in “households,” meaning smaller groups nested within larger ones. At one site in Turkey, roughly 6,000 years ago, people lived in mud-brick houses built on top of one another and buried their dead under the floors. Genetic analyses of those remains show that some individuals were genetically linked.
Another place to look for long-term evidence of family is in our close cousins, the nonhuman primates. Female chimps leave their mothers’ group at sexual maturity, but male chimps stay with Mom for life. Among macaques and baboons, mothers, sisters, aunts, and female cousins hang out together, groom each other, and defend one another in fights. These females know who is related to whom, as laboratory and field tests have shown. These primate cousins tell us that the issue of family is deeply seated in human nature. Family is woven into us.
3. The function of family.
The function of family varies across cultures, but it usually includes the following:
- Perpetuating lineage.
- Cooperation during good times and bad.
- Raising children.
- Intertwined economic arrangements.
There are also expectations. We expect protection, to be fed and educated, to receive an inheritance, and to have major life transitions marked by ritual and celebration. We expect, in short, to be seen.
The ways families form vary wildly. The Tiwi, First Peoples of Australia, recognize five levels of marriage and a wide range of approved possible mates. Among some traditional East African societies, a woman of means may marry a woman but have a male partner for sex. She is known as a “woman-husband,” and the children born to her belong to her and her wife.
In the contemporary West, we now recognize same-sex marriage and the families formed within it. We are also no longer fazed by single-mother families. The rules differ enormously, but the underlying drive to form families does not.
4. The dark side of family.
The statistics on family violence around the world are shocking. The amount of hurt aimed at women is overwhelming. And the fact that some families hurt their children or are unable to protect them from violence is a wound upon the social structure of the family that cannot be ignored.
Anthropologist Mark Flinn spent decades studying stress in children in a Caribbean village on the island of Dominica. He found that what stresses children most is not poverty, or school, or sports. It is family trauma.
“The statistics on family violence around the world are shocking.”
We also know that divorce, no matter how amicable, negatively affects children. Destroying a family destroys everyone’s identity, setting its members socially and psychologically adrift. When couples marry and divorce several times over a lifetime, they introduce compounding instability into their children’s lives. Family is the structure that holds us, so when it fractures, the damage runs deep.
5. We keep making families anyway.
Despite the downsides, we still choose to live together, gather for celebrations, get married, have children, and pass our history, goods, and money down through a family line. We also reach out to incorporate others, bestowing kinship terms like “uncle,” “auntie,” “cousin,” “brother,” or “sister” on people who are not genetically related but are socially and emotionally close. We name friends as family. We even name pets as family.
We love this social organization called family. Without family, we would be a lost species wandering around, alone, accomplishing nothing, and being vulnerable to everything. In the end, family is not just something we construct; family is us.
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