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Introduction1
The purpose of this monograph is highly synthetic, hence its strengths and its weaknesses. I will attempt to bring the cumulative results of a century and a half of kinship studies in anthropology, into the focus of current debates on the origin of modern humans in Africa, and on an entangled bit of human evolutionary history commonly subsumed under the heading of the “peopling of the Americas.”
My interest in kinship systems was ignited in the early 1990s. Then a student at the Department of Anthropology and Ethnography of St. Petersburg State University, I was writing annual research papers on the various aspects of Northern Shoshone Indian culture with a special reference to primary written sources such as travelers', mountain men's, and missionaries' accounts. When the time came to examine Shoshone kinship structures, I had to consult works in general kinship theory, and it turned out that the type of kinship structure encoded in the Shoshone language has never been theoretically elaborated. From that time onward, I have been a voracious reader of kinship monographs and articles, initially in search for clues for the elegant alternate-generation equations in Shoshone, but also, increasingly, in search of the general laws of kinship terminological structure and change. Anthropological theories heavily depend on their empirical sources. Kinship studies were initially built on kin