[ExI] The Great Culling

[John Grigg]

Rafal, what do you think caused the great near extinction of approximately
70,0000 years ago? Apparently, the Mount Toba eruption theory is no longer
seen as a thorough explanation of what happened...
The human race once came dangerously close to dying out — here's how it
changed us
https://www.businessinsider.com/genetic-bottleneck-almost-killed-humans-2016-

On Sat, Jun 12, 2021 at 2:05 PM Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> 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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