[ExI] And What About the Vikings? (was "an aboriginal human...")

[Lee Corbin]

Keith wrote

> Here is some from Araz Gat's article....
> As Kimber (1990: 163) writes with respect to Aboriginal Australia:
> 
> The red ochre gathering expeditions... were normally all-males 
> parties, and although cordial relationships between groups were 
> sought, fighting appears to have been a common hazard faced by 
> travelling parties. One entire party, with the exception of one man, 
> is recorded as having been ambushed and killed in about 1870, whilst 
> in about 1874 all but one of a group of 30 men were 'entombed in the 
> excavations'.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> Between groups, the picture is not very different, and is equally 
> uniform. Warfare regularly involved stealing of women, who were then 
> subjected to multiple rape, or taken for marriage, or both. According 
> to Meggitt (1962: 38), if the Walbiri 'were able to surprise the ...
> 
> <snip>
> 
> Polygyny greatly exacerbated women's scarcity and direct and indirect 
> male competition and conflict over them. Indeed, a cross-cultural 
> study (Otterbein 1994: 103) has found polygyny to be one of the most 
> distinctive correlates there is of feuding and internal warfare. ...

A simple question for you and all the followers of these and similar
ideas:

     If via time machine a modern day Swedish 1-day old baby boy
     was swapped for a 10th century 1-day old baby boy, with no
     parents or medical personel being aware of our switch, could
     we or should we expect the two growing boys and young men
     to be somewhat ill-suited for their societies?

     In other words, if one had to speculate as to the genetic
     differences, in-born characteristics especially along the
     lines of tendencies to cooperative and non-violent behavior
     vs. gross insensitivity and very violent behavior, were Swedes
     then the same as Swedes now?  Or, keeping Clark's studies
     in mind, might there have been significant selection pressures
     since the 10th century that profoundly affect behavior?

     Naturally, I am only asking for guesses based upon long term
     study of different societies and reproductive fitness.

Thanks,
Lee


> I am not trying to make Australian Aboriginals out as either better 
> or worse than other hunter-gather people.  Indeed the material I cut 
> about other groups was very similar.  The point is that 
> hunter-gatherer life was no bowl of cherries.  Western colonizing 
> states came along and imposed their own historically (evolutionary?) 
> developed limitations on violence and infanticide--which had the 
> predictable effect on population growth in places where the 
> environment could not support a larger population in a 
> hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
> 
> Are such peoples worse off or better off than they were pre 
> contact?  I could frame the question in terms such as life 
> expectancy, but is that even the right metric?  I simply don't know.

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