[ExI] The Great Culling

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Fri, Jun 11, 2021 at 9:12 AM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> 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?


### A couple of years ago I hypothesized on this list that the Yamnaya
culture triggered a phase transition starting about 10k years ago, by first
developing superior war technologies that allowed long-range warfare, which
gave the Yamnaya males the ability to slaughter other males and take their
women. Since increased geographical distance between the winner males and
the captive females optimized their mating distance, the resulting
offspring were phenotypically superior to parental populations, allowing
them to further expand by slaughtering ever more men and taking ever more
genetically distant females, eventually leading to their overrunning almost
all of Europe, Middle East, and India. Similar but smaller expansion/phase
transition waves occurred also in other parts of Asia. The present article
does not show anything dramatically new but it does provide a comprehensive
view of this transition across the world.

Interestingly Africa was least affected by the transition. No horses, no
big wars?

So no, I don't think this was an alien breeding plan but rather some
enterprising nomads figuring out how to fight from horseback in formation
using bow and arrows in superior numbers to attack the men of small
isolated tribes without taking many losses so as to keep going at it for
thousands of years, until they ran out of less organized men to kill. In
other words, this Great Culling of Men was due to the invention of
organized war run by professional warriors.

Rafal

Rafal
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