On being just complicated enough.

One would suppose that as human cultures have become more complex, in the course of their evolution from paleolithic to modern industrial levels of organization, the various sub-systems kinship, economic organization, political structure, etc.-of which the original cultures were composed would also have become more complex. In particular, in the realm of social culture, one would expect that as the size of kindreds and bands increased with rising life expectancies, and as new social groups came into existence, a more complex system of kinship terminology would develop to specify the (presumably) increasingly complex varieties of relationships among kinfolk. But we are faced with a paradox. Despite the early expectations of anthropologists that (to quote Service9)