Abstract
Anthropologists comprehensively study marriage practices because of the cross-cultural consistency of marital institutions and their consequential influence on many aspects of human societies, including social, political, economic, and biological realms. The evolutionary ecology approach attempts to understand the wide-ranging variation in marriage practices in terms of adaptive cultural strategies in local ecologies. Observed variation across and within societies in marriage systems, conflict between men and women, arrangement of marriages, marital property exchange, and postmarital residence reflects differences in fitness-enhancing behaviors and strategies under different environmental conditions.