Polyamory Vs "Walking Marriages"

In my opinion, animals "work it out" by the weak ones simply getting killed. They don't seem to avoid incest, I used to go to the same place on vacation for years, and I saw a cat give birth to a litter, and the next year I was there the male kittens (now cats) were having sex with their mother and/or the female kittens (now cats).
There were a lot of cats, but after seeing them being born and growing and actively look for them, I'm pretty sure we were not mistaken that they were the same individuals.

A possibility is that you are less fertile with someone who is close to you in genes. Another thing is that the egg only lets in a sperm that is as different as possible, so it takes generations of inbreeding before any complications occur.

So the potential inbreeding in that culture really wouldn't be a big problem, it was simply something that came to mind when thinking about it.
 
Part of the culture is that the marriages are still based on love, there just isn't the societal pressure to make that last FOREVER. Like the one woman said - she finds it incredibly offensive when outsider men come in and assume she will sleep with them just because her culture allows a woman sexual freedom.

The fact that a woman can have multiple relationships with multiple men is only mentioned once (maybe twice?) that I remember, so my guess is that everyone knows who the fathers are in most cases. One man even said if he ever has a child, he would like to buy him/her clothes once in a while even though the main male support would come from uncles.
 
Any idea how our ancestors from the earliest times could have survived incestuous relations till they gained some knowledge of genetics?
 
Probably nature culling the weak. Anomaly? SQUASH. In a metaphorical way, of course. A novel, of all things, made the point to me:

Before a population reaches a certain technological level, it breeds in order to ensure the species survives. At that point in time, those who are unable to survive to adulthood self-select themselves out of the gene pool. For that matter, those who are unable to survive childbirth, ditto, even if the reason has more to do with poor nutrition than an inborn inability to birth live young and survive. We all have limiting factors. Even humans, though we are trying to escape them and be The Exception to what I'm sure is The Rule for a great reason.
 
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