[ExI] The Great Culling

[Stuart LaForge]

A year or two ago, Keith Henson turned me onto this mystery. Between  
9000 and and 7000 years ago, women enjoyed a 17:1 reproductive success  
rate over men across the planet within the same 2-3 thousand year  
span. This suggests that for every 1 man that successfully reproduced,  
16 failed and left no offspring. It coincided with a series of  
cultural and technological innovations including agriculture, animal  
domestication, and copper smelting. It is a big mystery why this  
happened and reasons proposed include a virus that affected only men.

The popular opinion is that somehow on every continent a small tribe  
of "winners" emerged and amassed large harems of women through war or  
some other persuasion politics. But if so, why no infidelity? How did  
they so efficiently prevent so many men from breeding other than by  
exterminating them?

For comparison, bull elephant seals that spend all their time fighting  
over females and then having sex with them, the "winners" only have  
reproductive ratio of 14:1.

Here are some links:

https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success
https://www.livescience.com/62754-warring-clans-caused-population-bottleneck.html

I am attaching the most compelling figure in the Genomics Research  
paper that first brought this mystery to light. Can you see that crazy  
sharp dip in the male breeding population like it was cut with a  
knife? Fortunately, the article is available for free without paywall  
here:

https://genome.cshlp.org/content/early/2015/03/13/gr.186684.114.abstract

With all the UFO/UAP chatter going on, I wonder if it is a bad time to  
point out that the pattern we see is similar to what you would see if  
a selective breeding experiment were carried out world-wide by a  
superior species. Where technology was used to kill or neuter the  
males with undesirable traits.

This is called culling in the selective breeding business. What I am  
trying to point out is although a lot of cultural and technological  
advancement was occurring at the time, was this innovation the cause  
or effect of the selection for a few successful males almost  
simultaneously across multiple continents.

A lot depends depends on whether the genetic, cultural, and  
technological innovation is the cause of the selective pressure or is  
the selective pressure actually the cause of world-wide cultural  
innovation? Rafal? Keith? Anyone?

Stuart LaForge

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