Publications by authors named "Jan Beise"

Small-scale human societies range from foraging bands with a strong egalitarian ethos to more economically stratified agrarian and pastoral societies. We explain this variation in inequality using a dynamic model in which a population's long-run steady-state level of inequality depends on the extent to which its most important forms of wealth are transmitted within families across generations. We estimate the degree of intergenerational transmission of three different types of wealth (material, embodied, and relational), as well as the extent of wealth inequality in 21 historical and contemporary populations.

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Biologists use genetic relatedness between family members to explain the evolution of many behavioural and developmental traits in humans, including altruism, kin investment and longevity. Women's post-menopausal longevity in particular is linked to genetic relatedness between family members. According to the 'grandmother hypothesis', post-menopausal women can increase their genetic contribution to future generations by increasing the survivorship of their grandchildren.

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We describe the natal dispersal patterns of the Krummhörn population as the outcome of intrafamilial competition. Depending on the affiliation with a specific social group and the sex of the individual, this competition is driven by different factors and obeys a different functional logic: The dispersal patterns of the daughters of landless workers allow a mate competition scenario to be detected, whereas the dispersal behavior of the children of farmers (especially of the sons) is driven by a resource competition scenario.

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The advent of molecular genetics has brought invaluable information, which is now routinely used by anthropologists in their attempt to reconstruct our demographic past. Since mitochondrial DNA loci are much more similar between populations than are Y-chromosome loci, it is suggested that women had a much higher migration rate than men throughout history. Based on an examination of intergenerational migration patterns in three large demographic databases, we bring this inference into question.

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The concept of genetic identity-by-descent (IBD) has markedly advanced our understanding of the genetic similarity among relatives and triggered a number of developments in epidemiological genetics. However, no empirical measure of this relatedness throughout the whole human genome has yet been published. Analyzing highly polymorphic genetic variations from the Centre d'études du polymorphisme humain (CEPH) database, we report the first genome-wide estimation of the mean and variation in IBD sharing among siblings.

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