In China, although the word "marriage" appeared after the fact of marriage, we can already see "because of a faint marriage, we live together with each other" ("Xiaoya · I Walk in the Wild" ) In this way, the "failed marriage" here refers to marriage.In addition, the word marriage also represents husband and wife, or refers to both parties of in-laws. The word "family" did not appear until the Southern and Northern Dynasties. However, the word "family" which is synonymous with "family" is also related to the original characters of "hun" and "yin" ("marriage" and "marriage"). ), which can be seen in the oracle bone inscriptions unearthed in the Yin Ruins.Later, Mozi, a thinker at the end of the Spring and Autumn Period, said: "Governing a country in the world is like governing a family", and its meaning is also very clear.

We now generally refer to the combination of a man and a woman as a marriage, and this combination also formed a husband-wife relationship confirmed by the social system at that time.The common living unit among relatives arising from marriage, blood relationship or adoption is called family.The family is closely related to marriage. Marriage is the prerequisite for a family, and the family is the result of marriage. Family relations include marriage relations. Marriage and family is a social form that appears only when human society develops to a certain stage.In ancient times, human beings didn't know what marriage was or what family was, and there was a long period of chaotic living together.Human beings in the early stage of primitive society had extremely low productivity. During this long period of millions of years, no marriage and family system existed in any sense, and people lived a life of unrestricted and messy sexual relations.With the slow development of society, human beings have gradually evolved from the state of disorderly marriages to various groups of marriages and pairs of marriages: consanguineous families characterized by intermarriage between blood relatives (but excluding those between different generations) ; a group of sisters who are their common husbands and common wives (but excluding brothers and sisters in sexual relations) subconsanguineous family (i.e. Punaluan family); paired spouses are relatively stable for a long or short period of time Land cohabitation, husband and wife live in pairs of families; and so on.With the disintegration of the public ownership economy in the primitive society and the establishment of the private property system, the family in the strict sense appeared. This is the monogamous family composed of the father's surname as the main body.The process of the occurrence, development and evolution of human marriage and family, as American ethnologist Morgan (AD 1818-1881) revealed in the book "Ancient Society", the family "is a dynamic element, it has always been Not standing still, but passing from a lower form to a higher form as society progresses from a lower to a higher stage".

The ancient ancestors of our country, like other nations in the world, have also gone through the stage of group marriage and pair marriage. They have experienced the development from being homeless to having a family, from knowing only their mother but not their father, to having a family that ensures the bloodline of their father. process.Due to differences in national habits and geographical environments, the history of the development and evolution of marriage and family in the Chinese nation has its own differences and uniqueness.