Good job unpacking a complex topic. I suspect the neolithic farming revolution magnified this evolutionary trait. What I would like to know is whether the same is true of involuntary human labor resources. Killing a man in battle, then taking his wife to help farm your manioc, is a sound survival strategy in the Stone Age. If you are Mesopotamian, you might have the revolutionary idea to keep the man alive and put him to work, too. Maybe by the time you have built a civilization for your children, they will have enough resources to obsess over their looks and invent bank accounts. We are such dreamers, we humans.
I see several references in their argumentation to Catholic missionaries. This makes me wonder to what extent their argumentation has been crafted specifically to target those missionaries.
I see how that could potentially be a factor for the specific quote from missionary Claude d'Abbeville on the Tupinambá, but I don't see any reason to think that would be the case for any of the other accounts discussed.
I seem to remember you sharing somewhere a chart that compares the variance of reproductive success of males vs females across many societies. Do you recall the table?
I'm interested in the neolithic y chromosome bottleneck. Some of the models that explain this make claims about reproductive success that are quite fantastic (1:17 effective male:female reproductive population size). I'd like to compare that to even the most extreme documented cultures.
Good job unpacking a complex topic. I suspect the neolithic farming revolution magnified this evolutionary trait. What I would like to know is whether the same is true of involuntary human labor resources. Killing a man in battle, then taking his wife to help farm your manioc, is a sound survival strategy in the Stone Age. If you are Mesopotamian, you might have the revolutionary idea to keep the man alive and put him to work, too. Maybe by the time you have built a civilization for your children, they will have enough resources to obsess over their looks and invent bank accounts. We are such dreamers, we humans.
I see several references in their argumentation to Catholic missionaries. This makes me wonder to what extent their argumentation has been crafted specifically to target those missionaries.
I see how that could potentially be a factor for the specific quote from missionary Claude d'Abbeville on the Tupinambá, but I don't see any reason to think that would be the case for any of the other accounts discussed.
I seem to remember you sharing somewhere a chart that compares the variance of reproductive success of males vs females across many societies. Do you recall the table?
I'm interested in the neolithic y chromosome bottleneck. Some of the models that explain this make claims about reproductive success that are quite fantastic (1:17 effective male:female reproductive population size). I'd like to compare that to even the most extreme documented cultures.