Polyandry: One woman many husbands

High in the Himalayas, brothers share one wife

DailyNews.com

When Tashi Sangmo was 17 she married a 14-year-old neighbor in a remote Himalayan village in Nepal and, as part of the package, she also agreed to wed his younger brother.

In ancient times, the sons of almost every family in the region of Upper Dolpa would jointly marry one woman but the practice of polyandry is dying out as the region begins to open up to modern life.

"Things are easier this way because everything we have stays in one family. It doesn't get divided among many wives and it is me in charge," said Sangmo, who uses a dialect of Tibetan and was speaking through an interpreter.

"Two brothers bring in the money and it's me who decides what to do with it."

When Sangmo wed Mingmar Lama 14 years ago, it was understood that her spouse's brother Pasang -- then 11 -- would later join the relationship in a centuries-old practice that only persists in a few isolated Himalayan villages.

Between them, they now have three sons aged eight, six and four.

Full Report

 

Is there any danger of inbreeding with such built-in marriages? It is my personal theory that there's a reason why opposites often attract. In prehistoric times the number of available humans was very small. Therefore Mother Nature evolved this gut reaction to lessen the dangers of inbreeding by motivating people to mate with persons with quite different genes.

 

The risk is mostly for autosomal recessive diseases and from an evolutionary standpoint, avoiding deleterious traits. The modern day stigma against inbreeding is actually stronger than the genetics warrant. For example, first cousins having a child together doesn't significantly raise the risk of birth defects above the population baseline. See the coefficient of relationship which measures the level of consanguinity between two given individuals.

Your personal theory is also a theory in evolutionary biology. Nature has evolved many ways to avoid inbreeding. However, inbreeding is common in nature and it was (and still is in some parts of the world) common in the history of humanity.