8,000 years ago, 17 women reproduced for every one man
psmag.com
psmag.com
>In the ancient empire of the Incas, sex was a heavily regulated industry. The sun-king Atahualpa kept fifteen hundred women in each of many “houses of virgins” throughout his kingdom. They were selected for their beauty and were rarely chosen after the age of eight—to ensure their virginity. But they did not all remain virgins for long: They were the emperor’s concubines. Beneath him, each rank of society afforded a harem of a particular legal size. Great lords had harems of more than seven hundred women. “Principal persons” were allowed fifty women; leaders of vassal nations, thirty; heads of provinces of 100,000 people, twenty; leaders of 1,000 people, fifteen; administrators of 500 people, twelve; governors of 100 people, eight; petty chiefs over 50 men, seven; chiefs of 10 men, five; chiefs of 5 men, three. That left precious few for the average male Indian whose enforced near-celibacy must have driven him to desperate acts, a fact attested to by the severity of the penalties that followed any cuckolding of his seniors. If a man violated one of Atahualpa’s women, he, his wife, his children, his relatives, his servants, his fellow villagers, and all his lamas would be put to death, the village would be destroyed, and the site strewn with stones.
>As a result, Atahualpa and his nobles had, shall we say, a majority holding in the paternity of the next generation. They systematically dispossessed less privileged men of their genetic share of posterity. Many of the Inca people were the children of powerful men.
>In the kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa, all women were at the pleasure of the king. Thousands of them were kept in the royal harem for his use, and the remainder he suffered to “marry” the more favored of his subjects. The result was that Dahomean kings were very fecund, while ordinary Dahomean men were often celibate and barren. In the city of Abomey, according to one nineteenth-century visitor, “it would be difficult to find Dahomeans who were not descended from royalty.” The connection between sex and power is a long one.
Indian palace life and architecture,for example, were built around the availability of unending lines of concubines for the Shah!
The other hypothesis that I read was that men were seen as more disposable and used for riskier work (e.g. hunting, war), leading to higher death rates amongst males. There's this article that gets submitted on HN once in a while which elaborates on this but I can't find the link right now :( (edit: here it is http://www.denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm)
"Seen as..." should always prompt the follow up question: by whom?
Are you thinking of this: http://www.denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm
That is how I interpret the article.
That farming centralized power due to being able to store food. So it gave rise to feudal societies that could indenture workers and mass armies.
You speak as if in the past tense, but 95% of workplace deaths are men.
At least if we look on this from perspective of evolutionary theory of sex[1], which states that males are subject of natural selection and it is the main reason behind inventing sex differences in evolution. Unsuccessful males are cheaper to population than unsuccessful females, so there are less unsuccessful females and more unsuccessful males. From ETS perspective this reasearch an evidence of evolution, if there are no differences in reproductive ability between males and females, than evolution is stalled. But we see such a difference, than it is possible that evolution is goes. And probablity of it is bound to likelyhood of ETS to be true.
I wander, what the selection factor is?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodakyan%27s_evolutionary_the...
These societal rules are self-propagating because men can't break them since they're denied access to women by physical obstacles (walk around in a middle eastern muslim village and you'll understand why, although it's sort of visible in many movies).
Women can't break this since if any woman or group of women tries to they get gang raped in the street.
In case you're wondering families will not divide inheritance but will choose (or even adopt) a favorite son who'll continue the business. That doesn't necessarily mean the rest get kicked into the street (happens, though).
There is a ton of "illegal" sex in these societies though because there are masses of women who are technically the property (that's what it boils down to, may be called married, but even in muslim societies where it technically is marriage they don't bother saying a woman is married, they just say she's "this guy's") of a man, but haven't so much as seen the guy for years, so if almost any man can get close to them it probably isn't too hard to convince them to have intercourse.
Walking around in these villages, one thing becomes very obvious : this is not the way to go about creating a peaceful society.
And I do not like the idea to speculate about societies and how to build them properly starting from some evolutionary reaserch. It is different levels of abstraction. It is complex to do it right, while stretching your mind over several levels. It needs a broad knowledge, high intelligence and a lot of time spent in thinking and discussing matters with others highly intelligent and broadly educated.
Look, between evolution theory and sociology there are physiology, neuroscience and psychology. There are a lot of progress lately in psysiology and neuroscience, but psychology almost 150 years struggling to become an empirical science. There are some progress, but it is not convincing. Also I'm not sure that psysiology and neuroscience progress is sufficient to talk about brigde between theory of evolution and sociology. There are tremendous amounts of work for scientists ahead, which must be done before we can start to reason about society from evolutionary perspective.
If you drop that assumption, and take "sperm competition" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_competition) into account, other scenario's than "wealth-and-power" are possible.
Such as: groups of hunter gatherers had frequent orgies, but due to "sperm competition", a few of the man fathered all children.
In that case, scientists must have been very much not looking indeed. Someone give me a coherent explanation, please, of how cultural patterns could possibly ever avoid affecting the composition of the next generation.
Edit: I find it annoying that I'm getting downvoted for just saying I once read an article that studied similar phenomena. To be clear, I think polygamy is a horrible thing, especially in countries where women have far from equal rights. That doesn't mean that the circumstances that make it systemic shouldn't be studied.
Edit 2: I realize that I didn't particularly contribute anything enlightening to the conversation with this comment either. In that case, downvote away. :)
The young women left behind have few good choices for husbands, and so are forced to choose (or have the choice made for them by their parents) between becoming spinsters (i.e. not marrying and living alone or with their parents into adulthood), or becoming an older man’s second wife (or third, etc.). This causes all kinds of resentment between the multiple wives and often leads to abusive relationships, but is still arguably a better outcome for some of the young women than being stuck unmarried in a context where supporting yourself as a single person is extremely challenging.
Apparently, millions of people (10% in a large region and 0.5% globally) are direct descendants of Genghis Khan, one of the worlds greatest conquerors - and also one of the most prolific breeders[1].
“Lots of men have lots of sons, by chance. But what normally doesn’t happen is the sons have a high probability of having lots of sons themselves. You have to have a reinforcing effect[1]”. You need to have a prolific breeder spread out over a large geographic area whose sons are also more likely to have many kids.
Maybe 8,000 years ago something similar happened.
[1]https://www.nature.com/news/genghis-khan-s-genetic-legacy-ha...
"Researchers uncover several reasons why boys are 'weaker sex'"
https://www.upi.com/Researchers-uncover-several-reasons-why-...
"Why is infant mortality higher in boys than in girls? A new hypothesis based on preconception environment and evidence from a large sample of twins."
Ok, but this accounts for a few percentage ponts difference, not 17 to 1.
Additionally there would have been huge inundation of the coastal areas that were previously human occupied.
The creation of new opportunities and the chaos of the disruption of old settled communities may simply have meant that there was a multi-generational selection for successful adventurous cowards!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum#/media/Fi...
Can anyone explain more on this? Specifically how is the time axis worked out from a study of present-day volunteers?
Presumably the changing bits must be in junk DNA otherwise mutation rates would be affected by selection pressure.
Still, samples from 450 people seem like too small a number of achieve a good estimate.
Makes you wonder about the other 16 guys, though
The unequal structure of society that naturally comes about from capitalism, an unevenness that has become even more prominent in modern mixed-economies where heavy state intervention in the economy is combined with market ideology, seems to have been far more extreme and socially destructive back in the stone age when we were all 'living off the land' and not exploiting resources to support a consumer centric culture...
So much of the "naturalist fallacy" and "appeal to nature" is based on a misunderstanding or idealized view of nature.