Earlier quoted context omitted.
War has rarely had a significant effect on populations, certainly nothing like the effect of disease. Although many men in the ancient world died by violence (as they do in pre-political societies and failed states today) killing with stone tools is pretty difficult and dangerous, so constant warfare that killed enough men to account for a 17:1 reproductive ratio for long enough to leave its mark today would have mad…
> and a 17:1 ratio suggests a system that was capable of actually excluding, not just nominally excluding, the vast majority of men from reproducing. It doesn't actually imply that, because many of them could have reproduced, but not had offspring that survived to reproduce for sufficient numbers of generations. Modern DNA won't distinguish that from didn't reproduce. So, the fact that the vast majority of men of the…
Thinking about limit-case scenarios, if the bottleneck lasted long enough, this could be a matter of 5% of the men having 1+epsilon male offspring and 95% having 1-epsilon male offspring. For even relatively modest values of epsilon that would give quite a large deviation in the population, given enough time.
The article suggests this went on for about 2000 years (8000-6000 BCE) which is 100 generations, so if epsilion was 0.05 then the favoured class would have fathered 99.5% of the male population at the end of that time (most of whom would have fallen into the unfavoured class over time, of course.) Because all women reproduced (more or less) I think they just fall out of the calculation.
So you are correct.
[Edit: the article actually suggests it was as much as 4000 years, so an even smaller disparity could work.]