In the volume Politics and history in band societies (1982), anthropologist George Silberbauer described how a G/wi forager band in the Central Kalahari Desert solved a social problem involving a man named /wikhwema.

/wikhwema was “not very bright”. Silberbauer described him as a vain and inflexible man, prone to petulant outbursts, whose opinions were often wrong. He was apparently considered something of a standing joke within the band. Unsurprisingly, his wife N!anoag//ei was described as a morose and chronically dissatisfied woman, and one day she left /wikhwema for his best friend, a recently widowed man named /amg//ao.

/amg//ao was well-regarded within the band. He was “a virtuoso dancer, a consistently successful hunter and was rumoured to be a bit of a demon as a lover.”

/amg//ao was also a dwarf.

/wikhwema mourned the loss of his wife and best friend for over a year, and many in the band considered him quite the nuisance, including his daughter and mother-in-law, who still lived in the band. Every time /wikhwema was despondent or threw a tantrum, the rest of the band would convene to discuss the problem. Eventually, word got around to where N!anoag//ei and /amg//ao were living, and intervening parties tried to convince her to return to /wikhwema, but she wouldn’t budge.

While N!anoag//ei was happy with /amg//ao, she missed her daughter and mother terribly, and wished to see them again.

Finally, some “lateral thinker” among the band proposed a unique solution. How about a joint marriage: N!anoag//ei, /wikhwema, and /amg//ao could all live together. A polyandrous marriage! Polyandry was completely unknown to the G/wi, yet after a long deliberation among the band, this arrangement was considered acceptable.

While the trio did not exactly live happily ever after, /wikhwema was no longer considered a nuisance to the rest of the band, and the matter was considered resolved.

Among the G/wi, this is the only known example of a polyandrous marriage. Most marriages among the G/wi are monogamous, however, there were nine men married polygynously: eight men with two wives each, and one man with four wives.

Across cultures, polygyny is significantly more common than polyandry. In the Ethnographic Atlas, less than 1% of societies (only 4 out of 1231) are coded as practicing polyandry, while 85% (1041 out of 1231) of societies are coded as practicing at least occasional polygyny. In anthropologists Katherine E. Starkweather and Raymond Hames 2012 paper ‘A Survey of Non-Classical Polyandry’, published in Human Nature, they argue that polyandry is more common than previously reported, noting there is evidence for at least occasional polyandry in an additional 53 societies.

However, as with the G/wi foragers, polyandry still tends to be rare, and generally restricted to specific social and ecological circumstances. For some of the societies mentioned by Starkweather & Hames, there is only a single example of polyandrous marriage, such as among the !Kung, and as we saw among the G/wi. Further, polyandry in many societies may be a temporary response to a highly skewed sex ratio in favor of men. For example, Starkweather & Hames write that, “10 of 15 marriages were polyandrous in 1958 among the Shirishana Yanomamö when the sex ratio was 149 [149 men for every 100 women]. As the population grew and the sex ratio declined to 108, however, only 1 of 37 marriages were polyandrous.”

Overall, polyandry is more likely to occur in these contexts:

1) Where the sex ratio is highly skewed, with significantly more males than females.

2) Among relatively ‘egalitarian’ hunter-gatherer societies.

3) Where adult male mortality is high.

4) Among brothers.

5) Where males generally contribute a majority of the subsistence and economic labor.

6) Where males are often absent for prolonged periods of time (frequently traveling to trade, for example).