Quote Originally Posted by denuseri View Post
Actually we do have an excellent idea of how our early beginings were where as marriage is conserned.
Lots of people have ideas, nobody has a scrap of evidence. The only thing we know for certain is that no other primate forms pair-bonded couples, so if you are going to claim that hominids evolved this behaviour, you need something more than an idea.

Odd factoid for you:
I don't think you meant what you actually said here, see the definition of the word: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/factoid http://www.thefreedictionary.com/factoids
Marriage customs involving monogamy developed in groups of humans that had little to no contact with each other for thousands of years independently and "predeominated",
Again, where is your evidence? Humans migrated apart, for the most part, before the last Ice Age. Do you have evidence that they were polygamous (or something) before the migrations, and became monogamous afterwards?
sugesting that as with many other human behaviors a certian level of hard wireing is involved into our sexual and yes our marriage prefrences.
You are contradicting yourself here. If monogamy is genetically determined (which I suppose is what you mean by "hard-wired" then humans would always have been monogamous. If it developed in the last few thousand years, then it's ipso facto cultural not genetic.
And perhaps you need to be more specific in your query where as the institution of marriage is conserned if your trying to equate the modern urban westernized version of marrige as stereotypical for marriage in general as nessesarally as a bad thing with all those pendulating children... you may need to re-think your approach.
So far as I can translate this into English, I think you're saying that thir was mistaken to suppose that marriage has always resembled the present day Western model. But in fact she was saying the opposite, that it's others who are mistaken to think this.

Divorce rates have always went up in societies that afford personal freedom a higher status over the good of the group as they become more decadent and succesfully urbanized, Rome being one of many excellent examples.
It's a long time since I've seen the expression "decadent and urbanised" used in all seriousness. It's true that urbanisation is generally agreed to go along with greater individualism (though I'd be interested to know if this is also true of, say, Japan,) but have you evidence that the breakdown of marriage goes along with urbanisation?

There is a great deal of evidence from folklore that until Xianity imposed strict rules on marriage for moral reasons, rural marriages were a good deal more casual and subject to change by mutual consent. There are sermons on record by early Xian missionaries and bishops, deploring the country folk's lack of respect for the sanctity of marriage, which suggests that rural life did not go along with strict monogamy.