Tribal structures are resilient.
europe used to have tribes, just like arab and african societies today, migrating hither and thither, fighting over territories and regularly going to war with one another.
there were german tribes …
… gallic tribes …
… iberian tribes …
… british tribes …
… irish tribes …
… etc., etc.
but by the high middle ages, most of these were gone. what happened?
i got five words for ya: the holy roman catholic church (and, later, many protestant churches).
the church BANNED cousin marriage — and fiddled with a lot of other mating regulations like divorce and such. no more polygamy, either!
lookie here from avner greif (“Family structure, institutions, and growth – the origin and implications of Western corporatism”):
“The conquest of the Western Roman Empire by Germanic tribes during the medieval period probably strengthen the importance of kinship groups in Europe. Yet, the actions…
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oogenhand 
Good.
Europeans advanced; went from being bones-in-noses painted feathered tribes, to being settled peoples, nations; went from little fiefdoms to liberal democratic nation states.
Does anyone think the Arabs are truly better off, in their backwards shithole countries?
I don’t.
That’s what cousin marriage and polygyny etc. get you.
We don’t have that; instead, we have functional, 1st world societies; we’ve done right what they’ve done wrong.
On the other hand, if the state is failing to uphold the law(anarcho-tyranny), it is very convenient to have four brothers, twenty cousins and thirty second-degree cousins to back you up in clashes with other groups.
Well, yes, there is that… 🙂
The Dutch have large families, and much intermarriage of the kind where two brothers marry two sisters, that kind of thing. So much overlapping; some higher-than-average prevalence of physical disabilities / mental retardation, typical of inbreeding populations… (That’s the other downside of familial intramarriage…)