Richard_39 said:
More than half now, isnt it?
I think Ive spoken on the subject before so I wont rehash it much, but marriage as a concept was created when roaming armies would run around towns "pilfering" local women leaving babies in their wake, with a bunch of farmers having no means to see to their needs. Hence, under threat of fire and brimstone, you gotthe men to marry so both the girl and the kid wouldnt die of hunger. Stayed relevant up to the point where women were finally allowed to work.
Alternative (hi)story, I'll leave it to each individual to decide which version they like more:
It has less to do with warfare but with a general desire to fashion a safe environment and to ensure that sufficient resources are available for the people of a tribe or between tribes that marry into one another. With the advent of agriculture we started to settle down, divide labor into the harder field labor and the lighter labor and domestic duties etc. And it's about conserving the bloodlines because in a promiscuous environment nobody can confirm fatherhood and while it's clear for women what came out of them, men would have to guess what they are investing in is actually theirs. Which wouldn't make much sense if they primarily married random farmers to widows with kids they have no stake in...I don't know. And wouldn't women with kids have already been tied to a man...who fathered the kid(s)...ergo, some sort of solid relationship or contract...like marriage. Or is this just women that got kids from all the different men in the tribe. If there was no concept of fatherhood already, why would it be a problem if some men die cause the tribe still provides. Am I not making sense here...?
Anyways, it just doesn't add up much to me. Bothered me more than the throwaway skydaddy stuff. And the whole "women couldn't work" thing seems grossly inaccurate. It's not like we had an organized law and a labor market 6.000 something years ago.