ABSTRACT
Family organization in band societies was remarkably uniform. The dedicated ethnologist can find more variation in structure in a single complex society, such as Greece or Spain, than in all the hunting and gathering bands known to modern ethnography. Hunting was important everywhere in band societies. That hunting-gathering societies tended to be egalitarian is asserted both by theorists and by ethnographers discussing particular cases. Egalitarianism, of course, does not mean the absence of distinctions based on age or sex, nor does it preclude the recognition of people with special virtues or abilities. People in all band societies formed long-lasting, ideally permanent sexual unions, and they usually had some feeling that it was wrong, or at least undesirable, to have sex outside these unions once one entered into them. But the infraction thus committed was usually not a serious one, because the consequences were usually not great.
