Alyawarra marital age differences
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by Woodrow W. Denham 15:50, 6 July 2008 (PDT)
Don't have specific data on age at any marriage except for marriages that occurred while I was in the field. Reconstructing dates of marriages in the field with people who don't use calendars and don't have anything that even vaguely resembles a "marriage ceremony" is at best fictive history.
Have lots of data on mean age differences between H-W, which serves as a slightly fuzzy proxy for age at first marriage. Another fuzzy proxy emerges if I work backwards from current ages in 1971 to year of birth of oldest known child, and do the subtractions.
- Hu-Wi mean age diff = 14 years.
- Mo-Ch mean age diff = 28 years
- Fa-Ch mean age diff = 42 years
Women begin to marry at about 14-15 years and rarely stop having babies before their mid-40s. Men begin to marry at about 26-28 years and rarely stop siring babies before their mid-70s.
Don't know of any women who married or began to reproduce before 14, a few who had their first known children in their mid- to late teens, and some who never married and/or never had any children at all.
Don't know of any men who married younger that 24 (a couple of cases at 24), by far the majority in their late 20s and early to mid 30s, some in their 40s. No evidence of old men who never married, but I do know a few who never had children.
I'm comfortable with 14 and 28 as the best answers to your question (age of mother/father at first childbirth), but I wouldn't be surprised if half a century of precise observational data showed the average to be a year or two older than my current best estimates of 14 for females and 28 for males.
See: Williams, B. J. 1975 "Age differentials between spouses and Australian marriage systems" American Antiquity 40(2):38-45. (no electronic copy accessible)
