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Analysis of DNA uncovers a rough dating scene after the advent of agriculture

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Re: Analysis of DNA uncovers a rough dating scene after the advent of agriculture

#81

Post by deciplex »

Perceval wrote: post #78
evincarofautumn wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Iron democratized violence compared to the bronze age Could you expand on this? If I have the resources to make an iron sword and you don’t, I can cut your bronze spearhead like butter. That doesn’t seem particularly democratic.

During the Bronze Age, bronze weapons and armor were rarer. It cost more to mine and work bronze, and it cost more to buy a panoply. Therefore the distribution of those possessing the top-of-the-line violence capacity was concentrated in a narrow martial elite. The Iron Age broadened the number of people who could afford a panoply, because iron was easier to mine and cheaper to work (once they figured out how). The d…

Yep, that's why you meant "due to the higher cost of forging bronze weapons".

Re: Analysis of DNA uncovers a rough dating scene after the advent of agriculture

#82

Post by deciplex »

tjradcliffe wrote: post #35
netcan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these seem possible, to some extant for humans. First, war kills males. A lot of war could potentially kill the majority of males. Second, infanticide exists within the historical record. SO does slavery, castration, polygamy etc. It doesn't seem far fetched to imagine a highly polygamous society where the majority of men are denied partners by one or more of these.

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…

> Bigger, more muscular bodies require more fuel, so bigger men starve to death more frequently than smaller men during bad years, which all the data we have on pre-political peoples suggest were not infrequent.

Take a group of ten males. Restrict their access to food such that eventually a few of them will die. What are some characteristics that the surviving males will share? One of them is not "they are physically weaker than the dead males".

Re: Analysis of DNA uncovers a rough dating scene after the advent of agriculture

#83

Post by ricree »

evincarofautumn wrote: post #77
Perceval wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sparta maintained a 10:1 ratio of helots to Spartans, and that was in the early iron age. I imagine the ratio could have been substantially worse in the neolithic and bronze ages. (Iron democratized violence compared to the bronze age, due to the lower cost of forging iron weapons. I'm sure neolithic violence had a different socioeconomic basis, but greater centralization of violence doesn't seem implausible.)

> Iron democratized violence compared to the bronze age Could you expand on this? If I have the resources to make an iron sword and you don’t, I can cut your bronze spearhead like butter. That doesn’t seem particularly democratic.

>If I have the resources to make an iron sword and you don’t, I can cut your bronze spearhead like butter

Bronze isn't particularly worse than iron, when it comes to making weapons. Its primary drawback is its scarcity, compared to iron.

Re: Analysis of DNA uncovers a rough dating scene after the advent of agriculture

#84

Post by Perceval »

deciplex wrote: post #81
Perceval wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During the Bronze Age, bronze weapons and armor were rarer. It cost more to mine and work bronze, and it cost more to buy a panoply. Therefore the distribution of those possessing the top-of-the-line violence capacity was concentrated in a narrow martial elite. The Iron Age broadened the number of people who could afford a panoply, because iron was easier to mine and cheaper to work (once they figured out how). The d…

Yep, that's why you meant "due to the higher cost of forging bronze weapons".

Thanks, edited.

Re: Analysis of DNA uncovers a rough dating scene after the advent of agriculture

#85

Post by fsloth »

def_illiterate wrote: post #49
tormeh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hunch that this ancient way of warfare is still the optimal way to destroy a culture and achieve total victory. Not that it's acceptable in any way, but imagine if the US had done this in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is heart-wrenching to think about, but I think it would have worked.

An argument could probably be made that it worked fairly well in subduing East Germany after WWII.

I new that those things happened there but not that this was was so widespread! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_G...

"estimates of the numbers of German women raped by Soviet soldiers have ranged up to 2 million"

Re: Analysis of DNA uncovers a rough dating scene after the advent of agriculture

#86

Post by simonh »

bilbo0s wrote: post #60
swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One other hypothesis I can think of is the advent of barbarian warfare. Many parts of the old testament details how brutal life was, where various tribes are constantly at war and conquering other tribes. Even several generations of warfare, where each village sacked involved killing the men and abducting the women, would filter out y-chromosomes to see such a large disparity.

This is the actual explanation. With one caveat... slavery. Basically, agriculture allowed people to specialize. This included specializing in killing. (Soldiers). You would use these specialists to conquer other lands. Which, in turn, provided slave labor to increase production in agriculture and other sectors. So the conquered females would be used as "rewards" for the conquerors. And the conquered males would be u…

> In fact, the 17 to 1 figure is so low that I question whether they aren't missing something ???

In a specific region at a specific time yes, I'm sure you can maintain a higher ratio, but the statistics we're talking about are global. We're presumably not talking about a single multi-continental mega-spartan society, but many regional societies that happened to be shaped by the same economic and cultural forces.

Within those societies they may have had very high slave ownership ratios, but there would always be some regions not under such strict control, or border areas between them where things get messy. For a start, if this stratification of society was based on agriculture, you'd only get it in regions that were agriculturaly productive.

Re: Analysis of DNA uncovers a rough dating scene after the advent of agriculture

#87

Post by bluenose69 »

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #15

I've suspected as much would happen during the agricultural revolution, but I did not expect such a huge disparity. If the 51% male/female ratio did not change, then 16 out of 17 males must have either been killed, enslaved, or been left frustrated. This would imply a highly patriarchal society where the local king and his cronies are the only ones fed, and to whom you would sell your daughters to. The only other exp…

Re the regions, Figure S4A in the supplemental material (1) suggests that patterns varied somewhat with geography.

1: http://genome.cshlp.org/content/suppl/2015/02/18/gr.186684.1...

Re: Analysis of DNA uncovers a rough dating scene after the advent of agriculture

#88

Post by Padding »

noiv wrote: post #3

Just started reading Harari's brief history of humankind and this gem perfectly fits in the rather unsettling story of our genetic pool. It is no longer the natural environment setting the conditions for who's fit to survive/chosen for reproduction but the present human culture which in turn is just the result of the previous. If I had to choose an algorithm as an analogy, I'd say it is a recursion waiting for stack…

What you're saying isn't wrong, but I doubt that societies where rulers have a monopoly on violence have existed long enough to have had an impact on evolution.

Re: Analysis of DNA uncovers a rough dating scene after the advent of agriculture

#90

Post by rockmeamedee »

littletimmy wrote: post #52

It sounds like a persistent theme through history is that a very few people at the top had a Lot of power, and most men and all women were oppressed. Feminists, take note: men are not privileged. Just those who were privileged were men. The fight must be against the few at the top.

First: The fight _is_ against the top. 'The top', more precisely the structure that enables 'the top', is the patriarchy that feminist have always been fighting against.

Second: Even thinking of it as 'the top', 'the few that get to have all the pro-creation' as another commenter wrote is bad. Because the 1700 concubines, they weren't treated fairly. They taken away from their parents at age 8, held captive for sex and raped if they didn't comply.

Feminists are fighting for the women first. But the structure that enables this hurts everybody.

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