From bridewealth to dowry?

Significant amounts of wealth have been exchanged as part of marriage settlements throughout history. Although various models have been proposed for interpreting these practices, their development over time has not been investigated systematically. In this paper we use a Bayesian MCMC phylogenetic comparative approach to reconstruct the evolution of two forms of wealth transfers at marriage, dowry and bridewealth, for 51 Indo-European cultural groups. Results indicate that dowry is more likely to have been the ancestral practice, and that a minimum of four changes to bridewealth is necessary to explain the observed distribution of the two states across the cultural groups. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 16^th meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES), Berlin 2004. Mark Pagel and Andrew Meade provided the software, the coded linguistic data, and valuable advice on their use. LF is funded by Fondazione Ing. Aldo Gini (Italy), the ESRC (UK), and the UCL Graduate School (UK). Five anonymous reviewers provided helpful comments. The authors are based at the Department of Anthropology of UCL and members of the AHRC Centre for the Evolutionary Analysis of Cultural Behaviour (CEACB). LF is studying towards a PhD, CH is a CEACB Senior Research Fellow, and RM is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology.