Spouse selection by health status and physical traits. Sardinia, 1856–1925

Abstract

Military medical information and data from civil registers of death and marriage have been used to study the role of physical characteristics and health conditions in explaining access to marriage for the male population of Alghero, a small city located in Sardinia Island (Italy), at the turn of 19th century. Literature data about contemporary populations have already demonstrated the influence of somatic traits in the mate choice. The results presented here show that men with low height and poor health status at the age of 20 were negatively selected for marriage. This holds true also in a society where families often arranged marriages for their children. This pattern of male selection on marriage was found to be particularly marked among the richest and wealthiest SES groups. Our hypothesis is that this social group carefully selected for marriage those individuals who were apparently healthier and therefore more likely to guarantee good health status and better life conditions to offspring. In evolutionary terms, the mate choice component of sexual selection suggests that the height of prospective partners could be claimed as one of the determinants, along with other environmental causes, of the observed higher stature of men belonging to the wealthiest social strata of the Alghero population.

Physical attractiveness influences reproductive success of modern men

“…Facially more attractive and taller men more frequently engaged in marriage, and in turn, married men had higher reproductive success than unmarried men, corroborating and extending previous research (Pawlowski et al 2000;Nettle 2002;Jokela 2009;Manfredini et al 2010). Although Prokop et al (2010) did not find any associations between reproductive success and facial attractiveness, we suggest that this could be due to either their using photographs of older men for rating attractiveness (mean age of their participants was 47.7 years) as well as investigating only married men having at least one child.…”

“…Tall men are more likely to marry (Manfredini et al 2010) and are more attractive to females (Hensley 1994;Pierce 1996;Mueller and Mazur 2001;Manfredini et al 2010), which is supported by high response rates of females to male advertisements published in newspapers (Pawlowski and Koziel 2002;Koziel and Pawlowski 2003). In addition, some data indicate that more attractive women have on average taller husbands (Pawlowski et al 2008).…”

Health and socio-demographic conditions as determinants of marriage and social mobility

“…In addition to the difficulties in obtaining reliable data on the health and somatic traits of past populations, it is widely held that, in the past, marriage choices were dominated not only by social and religious norms but also by family strategy (Derosas 2003). Our previous research on the male population of Alghero, Sardinia, at the turn of the 19 th century (Manfredini, Breschi, and Mazzoni 2010) provides evidence to support the thesis that physical characteristics also played a very important role in a marriage system that was governed by family rather than individual choice. We also found that state of health represented a decisive element in the marriage strategies of the community's wealthiest families.…”

“…Not only were they more likely to die in early adulthood (Breschi et al 2008a), but they were also less likely to marry before the age of 40 (Manfredini, Breschi, and Mazzoni 2010). Here we have taken this research one step further by investigating whether these factors influenced not only the quantitative, but also the qualitative aspects of marriage.…”

“…This group consisted mainly of sons of fishermen and sailors, only a small fraction of whom went on to be enlisted in the army (8%, see Table 1). However, given that sailors and fishermen constituted a select group made up primarily of people originating from Naples-who are known to have displayed culturally specific behaviours, such as tendencies to enter into endogamous marriages and to isolate from the rest of the population (Mondardini Morelli 1988;Manfredini, Breschi, and Mazzoni 2010)-the absence of records for this group probably has little impact on the results in any case.…”