How far back does “marriage” go in human social relationships? Also to be clear I’m not talking about monogamous (or polygamous) marriage specifically, just the “you’re bound to you and I’m bound to you” concept of marriage as a man-women social contract that would be generally be enforced and respected by the other members of the social group a person belonged to.
I found this para on an archived page at ehistory from Ohio State University.
In western society some aspects of modern family relationships and composition can be traced to ancient Mesopotamia and Babylonia. Ideas such as the wedding, marriage, and divorce began developing then. Through innumerable legal documents from the Sumerian to the Seleucid period, we see the individual as father, son, brother, or husband. The root of these relationships started with a proposal, followed by the marriage contract, and ending with the wedding.
Thus giving birth to the phrase: old habits are hard to break. 
Is it safe to assume the Chinese were doing it several thousand years earlier?
IIRC, the average testicle weight to body weight ratio for the other great apes works pretty well to estimate the degree to which they are monogamous. Making a similar prediction for humans puts us as being mostly monogamous, so something similar to marriage has probably been going on for a long time.
That marriage seems bound to fail.
That’s a binding arrangement! :smack:
Please revise to “you’re bound to me, and I’m bound to you”
Why am i laughing right now?
Every human society that we have any knowledge of, including isolated hunter-gatherer tribes, has had a concept of marriage. Innuits, polynesians on Rapa Nui, Tasmanians, Tierra Del Fuegans, Bushmen. Every human society.
It may be that at one time there existed human societies that did not practice some form of marriage, but we have absolutely no evidence for one.
It is likely that “marriage” pre-dates fully modern Homo sapiens. Lots of nonhuman animals have social arrangements similar to marriage. Although our closest primate relatives (Chimps, Gorillas, Orangutans) don’t have marriage-like arrangments, Gibbons do.
Do they have marriage in that they have lifetime (or at least long term) bonded mated pairs or in the sense of, as the OP phrased it, a “social contract that would be generally be enforced and respected by the other members of the social group a person belonged to.”? That is, would one gibbon think of another mated gibbon as off-limits? Would the community of gibbons insist that a mated pair care for one another if one of them lost interest?
I know I’m usually the one arguing that humans are animals and so our behaviors are not apart from them, but it seems to me like there’s something different between bonded mated pairs and marriage.
If not, would there be such a fuss over gay marriage right now? Obviously, being committed to one another and enjoying sexual activity together isn’t enough for most of us to be happy calling that “marriage”. There needs to be community recognition and sanction of the pair (or triad or whatever) as something more than the individuals taken independently.
Bonded marriage in human societies usually has at its roots an element of what we would today term contract law. It determines ownership of property, inheritance of lands and titles, and the legitimacy and often status of children. In smaller, tribal societies where intermarriage within the group would eventually create problems, marriage partners cement relations and alliances among tribes (or clans in slightly larger communities).
You can see how these relationships could develop from animal groupings, but drawing anything more than a dotted line between then and now would be stretching our knowledge of early humanity’s cultural and social behaviors.
Pair bonding undoubtedly goes far back. Marriage as a contract to further the interests of the tribe probably goes back just as far.
Marriage as a religious or spiritual bond between a pair of equals who have the freedom to choose any partners they like is a far more recent development.
Pair bonded mated pairs is what marriage IS. In my, you know, opinion.
Sure, there’s a lot of cultural fooferaw attached to it, and that varies from culture to culture. Like, who’s allowed to marry who, what should happen when the pair bond is violated and by who, what should happen when one or more parties want to end the relationship, what fictitious supernatural entities are involved, and so on. But every known human culture had marriage. Which pretty much means that marriage is a part of human nature, just like it is a part of swan nature or gibbon nature, but isn’t a part of chimpanzee nature or horse nature or octopus nature.
The trouble with extending the gibbon analogy is that gibbons form mated pairs, but those pairs are territorial. They chase all other gibbons away. Except the female gibbons sometimes sneak off and mate with stray male gibbons, and the male gibbons sometimes sneak off and mate with stray female gibbons. But there’s no larger gibbon society that enforces gibbon monogamy, rather gibbons attempt to enforce monogamy on their mates by chasing off other gibbons.
Why does it have to be monogamous? Gorillas form harem bonded groups.
But I think the OP was talking about the ceremonial and legal aspects of marriage, not just the behavior. I think the first part of your first post was correct. Since every extant society has some form of marriage, it almost certainly goes back at least to the root of our species, and probably before.
You wouldn’t say that if you were a bonobo 
I didn’t say marriage had to be monogamous, since it is a typical feature of human societies that high status males sometimes marry more than one female. Polyandry where low status males marry one female is much, much rarer…it’s more typical that low status males don’t have the opportunity to marry at all. But it’s a pair bond in the sense that a husband might marry two wives, but that doesn’t make the wives married to each other.
And of course, it is also a typical feature of human societies that there is often plenty of “off the books” sex outside the marriage, just like it does among birds and such. And since human mating patterns are part of human biology, it shouldn’t come as a suprise that different individual humans have variable behavior. It is human nature for adult humans to care for children, but some adult humans just don’t have any interest in doing so, while others are obsessed with it. Some humans don’t seem interested in sex, while most others are, you know, obsessed with it. And most humans seem to desire some sort of marriage or marriage-like arrangement, but some just don’t. But there has never been a human society where those people outnumbered the marriage-minded.
Since our mating system evolved from different pre-human mating systems, this variation shouldn’t be much of a suprise.
It’s impossible to say whether they were man and wife, but the remains of a male and female Neanderthal were found buried in the same graves on the Iberian peninsula dated to around 50,000 BCE, and similar arrangements have been found in Israel and Iran and Iraq from that time and before. It’s possible that it was just two people who died at the same time and had to be disposed of simultaneously, but lacking any type of writing it’s not inconceivable this was a husband-wife arrangement.
Gilgamesh was written around 2500 BCE and mentions marriage.
The Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1750 BCE) mentions divorce and alimony/custody/child support laws.
Genesis (written between 1200-500 BCE depending on which portion- and there are many people on the board with more knowledge than I have regarding when each part was written) is probably one of the most detailed writings to give courtship rituals and marriage contracts and information on bride selection, etc., rather than just mention wives and divorce.
Most ministers consider Genesis 2:24 to be the first account of marriage:
Prompting Adam and Eve both to ask “what’s a father and mother?” but that’s another story.
Sarai/Sarah is the first wife to really be developed as a character, with Hagar being sometimes referred to as a junior wife (though really she’s more of a surrogate mother since by law Ishmael belonged to Sarah). Abraham’s third baby-mama, Keturah, is referred to as his wife, but then the children of his concubines (plural) are referenced when he’s sending away his 6 youngest sons with gifts. Abraham refers to Sarah as his half-sister (which would certainly not have been uncommon in the Middle East at the time) but there’s dispute among biblical scholars as to whether he’s lying to save his skin or not, but in either case how he chose her for wife is not discussed (presumably marriage to a sibling wouldn’t require a bride-price or dowry, but that’s just a guess).
The first depiction of a courtship of sorts is Abraham’s selection (via a servant who’s sworn an oath on Abe’s testicles) of his grandniece Rebecca to marry his son Isaac; Rebecca is basically purchased with her consent. The first mention of a marriage ceremony (in the online English translations anyway) is when Jacob pays a hefty brideprice (7 years of labor) to marry his cousin Leah (you know the story) and then an equal brideprice to marry her sister Rachel. Both are evidently dowered with at least one female slave apiece for they give them to their husband to act as surrogate mothers.
I’m sure there are older descriptions of marriages and courtships- certainly there are older mentions- but Genesis is great for the amount of detail it gives. Of course the first marriage results in expulsion from paradise, the first dealt with in detail results in a woman and son being driven into the desert and [by tradition] starting 4000 years of Arab-Israeli conflict, the next involves the wife helping a younger son embezzle an estate from her blind husband, and the next involves major deception and theft of 7 years labor to satisfy lust and then the theft of idols, so maybe Adam & Steve wouldn’t have been so terrible after all so long as they could adopt kids from wherever Cain’s wife came from. 
OK. Have you changed your mind about gorillas then? I don’t see the difference between their arrangement and that of gibbons.
Well, that’s a fair point. But the main difference is that the primary social group in gorillas is a band of (mostly) related females. And different males attach themselves to this group until they get ousted by another male. It’s harder to analogize a band of gorillas as a male and his wives, because the social grouping of females existed before that male came along and will likely continue after he’s gone.
The big difference between human mating pairs and gibbon mating pairs is that gibbon pairs are territorial, while mated human pairs will remain in a social group with other sexually mature adults. And so the problem of who’s fucking who, which gibbons solve by chasing away all other gibbons, gorillas by the males chasing away all other adult male gorillas.
And then add in the kicker that human females don’t go into an obvious breeding season and you’ve got a recipe for a lot of confusion among the human-types. I don’t think there’s another species that closely replicates our social and mating structure, we’re pretty unusual in that respect.