@hawkeye10,
The discussion on mariage is interesting. Maybe marriage (defined as a long term partnership or union between a man and a woman) was invented after the period in question, as a solution to the problem of excessive domination of the gene pool by a few powerful males. Thinking out loud here, but that's how it goes:
Let's assume that the practice of one dominant male screwing all the females of the clan, a classic among primates e.g. gorillas, was prevalent among paleolithic people. The practice can be seen as a way to accelerate evolution by allowing access to fertile females only to the most successful males in the clan. It must have a name already but I don't know it. Oligoandry? (oligo=few + andros=man)
Now let's assume that, by becoming better and better at agriculture, these clans practicing 'oligoandry' became larger and larger. More and more people live under the rule of one 'big male', and this big male keeps screwing any female he can put his hands on, beating other males up when he finds them doing it, and keeping most available food for himself, his kids and most attentive females and minions, with only enough for survival given to the peons. This could explain the 1/17 ratio.
But shrinking that ratio that far may have created severe consanguinity problems, after a few generations. Imagine a village where only one male fathers all or nearly all the kids during a period of, say, 10 or 15 years, and then when he gets too old, his son (who else) does the same for another 10 years, etc. After a few generations, this village will have very high consanguinity levels.
Which leads me to this idea of the invention of marriage as a possible solution to this problem. Marriage could be the way humans managed to solve the competition for females problem in ever larger communities, by allocating certain females exclusively to certain males and thus setting limits to the rights of the headman to screw everybody.
