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

If you guys are interested in this stuff, I highly recommend "The Red Queen" by Matt Ridley.

http://amazon.com/Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature/dp/006055...

Since a lot of early civilizations seemed to be very slave heavy I wonder if that had anything to do with it. Agriculture requires more labour which leads to more slaving. Male slaves would work the fields with less of a chance for reproduction, and the landowners/slaveowners would have their pick of the female slaves.

"somehow, only a few men accumulated lots of wealth and power, leaving nothing for others"

Yeah, thank god we're past this as a species

"In more recent history, as a global average, about four or five women reproduced for every one man"

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the same as saying one man, on average, will father a child with about four or five different women? I suppose given the timescale being discussed, "recent history" may mean the last few centuries, but this average still sounds very high to me.

This is a great passage from the Red Queen, that might explain what was happening at the time:

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.