Kazakh boys playing on there bicycles. Olgii, Western Mongolia, 2015.

Among traditional herders, each married couple occupied its own tent, and sons usually received their share of the family herd at the time of their marriage. The usual pattern was for one son, often, but not necessarily, the youngest, to inherit the headship of the parental herd and tent, while other sons formed new families with equivalent shares of the family herd; daughters married out to other families. Adult sons and brothers often continued their close association as members of the same herding camp, but they could leave to join other herding camps whenever they wished. In the 1980s, herders were likely to continue to work closely with patrilineal kins, and many of the basic level suuri, a subdivision of the negdel herding camps, consisted of fathers and sons or groups of adult brothers and their families. Herders no longer inherited livestock from parents, but they did inherit membership in the herding cooperative. If cooperative officials granted custody of collectively owned animals and permission to hold privately owned stock on a family basis, which was how private plots were allotted in Soviet collective farms in the 1980s, then it would be to the advantage of newly married sons to declare themselves new families. Arkhangai Province, Mongolia, 2015.