Jerry Monaco
(4) Kinship systems that are both extensive and symbolic or symbolized, both in the present, across generations, and across life-times. As far as I know only modern humans have the capacity to recognize and represent this kind of kinship system
For Charles only this last is a "real" kinship system.
^^^^ CB; Don't try to speak for me. I think missing link species are where culture, language and kinship developed. Missing link species are not identical with chimps ( of course).
The cross and multiple generational dimensions of kinship are their qualitative essence. They are the leap, the discontinuity that Godelier finds absent.
^^^^^
By the way I am not making up this idea that we can analyze our nearest cousins in terms of kinship systems. Maurice Godelier points out in his critique of Levi-Strauss that chimpanzees and bonobos already live in societies that exhibit constraints and processes of human kinship systems. You might want to call it a simple kinship system. Godelier is one of the few Marxist anthropologists I know who actually pays attention to primate studies. The NLR reviewer of Godelier's book *_*Métamorphoses de la parenté._ puts Godelier's conclusion as follows: "The passage from nature to culture with *homo sapiens* thus cannot have been a sudden, discontinuous transformation, but must have been more evolutionary in nature." **
^^^^^^ CB; Well, yes, I have to listen to Godelier.
As to the discontinuity, there is a discontinuity in the long run between chimplike ancient species and humans. This is like Darwin noting that there is an absence of "intermediate" species between the species he looks at.