I've just discovered the Y-chromosome bottleneck

[GarlicAnything]

When reading that patriarchy's approximately 5,000 years old, I haven't found serious justifications for it. Arguments seemed mostly to be about men being buried with posher grave goods (but women have been buried with equally swanky goods after that) and a reduction in 'venus' icons (but we don't know what they were for, and goddess worship doesn't prove anything anyway).

It never occurred to me to look at DNA. Here it is, though it happened more like 7,000 years ago. Google says:

The Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck was a sharp drop in male genetic diversity that occurred globally between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago. 1, 2]

What Happened

• Genetic collapse: Diversity in the male Y-chromosome dropped so fast that it looked like only one man reproduced for every 17 women.
• Only men affected: Mitochondrial DNA (passed down through mothers) showed normal, steady growth. This rules out general disasters like famines, plagues, or climate change. 1, 2, ]

Why It Happened
Scientists link this event to the shift from hunter-gatherer groups to farming and agro-pastoralist cultures. Two main ideas explain the drop: 1, 2]

• Patrilineal warfare: Early research suggests that wealth and power grew in male-dominated clans. Competing clans fought wars where entire family lines of men were killed, wiping out their specific Y-chromosomes. 1, 2, 3]
• Peaceful social structures: Newer models show that strict patrilineal and patrilocal systems (where land and names stay with male kin groups) can naturally reduce Y-chromosome diversity over time through normal social fission and unequal reproductive success, without requiring massive violence. 1, 2, 3]

One man reproduced for every 17 women! No matter what narrative we superimpose on this, it's quite an unpleasant picture. 17 women getting pregnant for each impregnator. Men indisputably took control over women and dictated which men they could reproduce with.

I think the 'peaceful' patrilocal societies must've been established by force, since I can't imagine women all over the world cheerfully leaving their homes to join strangers' harems.

Y-chromosome diversity recovered in a rapid spate of 'star-shaped' explosions from 5,000 years ago, when cities and city-states became the norm. People from what had been discrete rural settlements moved to the cities and mingled, then the city-states started fighting each other and taking each other's populations as prisoners. This resulted in more men and genetic mixture, with the star shapes being patterns of Y diversity radiating out from the city centres.

Sadly, it doesn't look like the men gave up controlling women's reproductive options and living conditions, although far fewer of them had as many as 17 wombs at their disposal.

Women made a patchy comeback at times. Now archaeology's giving up its sexist assumptions and re-examining grave finds, it's becoming clear that many societies throughout history have been female-led and matrilocal. I'm happy to note that this seems especially the case in Britain - our Celts buried more 'warrior queens' than they did in mainland Europe, for instance, though of course there's still much more to be discovered.

Couldn't you also assume that women rejected most of the men as fathers to their children and only the 'best' men got to reproduce with loads of women. If women were in control, maybe they didn't need or want one man to themselves if they had their own resources.

I like this idea 🙂 It doesn't explain the patrilocality, though. And the deeply patriarchal cultures of the city-states had to come from somewhere.

Unless ... hang on, I'm letting my imagination run with it! Men, despite their genetic diversity, are generally crap so the women get fed up of supporting them. They get together in groups to seek out non-crap men, whose farms are better than theirs, and move in with promises of many babies.

Crap men are obviously pissed off about the successfully expanding farms, well-run by non-crap men and capable women, and their big families. They keep trying to muscle in. They get murdered.

This continues all over the ancient world until the crap male DNA has been exterminated and the successful farms have expanded to become cities. These continue to be run on co-operative principles, eventually developing into administrative mini-states with enormous food stores, manufacturing systems and infrastructures (women are good at this type of organisation). At the point where they cities have become repositories of huge wealth, the men get together and say:

In the times of our ancestors, each man had 17 women! Now the women get to pick and choose, some of us can't even please one enough to shack up with her. And who decided women should be in charge of all the food stores and tithing systems? Not men, that's for sure! We're bigger and stronger than women, right? Let's take the stores and take the women. Let's put ourselves in charge and show the women how powerless they really are!

... I've extrapolated the last paragraph from Maria Gimbutas and some analyses of Inanna's story (an uppity retainer rapes her and she is devastated).

Love this!

Thank you 😘

I studied this a little at university.

I think your later post above might get close to the truth. Except instead of “crap” write “poor” and instead of “non-crap” write “rich.”

In a hunter gatherer society there isn’t really such a thing as wealth. Everyone has only the clothes on their back, some tools and a day or two of food. Most men are valuable to women, and vice versa.

In a settled agricultural society wealth is land and livestock. Some men end up rich and the landless ones are penniless labourers. Women naturally gravitate to the landed ones because the penniless ones can’t support them or any children. It’s nothing to do with being “crap” in the modern sense of “doesn’t emotionally support me or properly parent his children.”

This dynamic was written about by Rousseau three hundred years ago, and has been common across the globe. Some of the stories in Genesis (the early part of the Christian/Jewish bible, written in the Bronze Age) provide good examples of this. Regardless of whether the individuals in the stories were real, they provide helpful examples of how Bronze Age Middle Eastern people understood these dynamics to work.

Violence also plays a part. After a Bronze Age battle the winning men would often kill all the adult males on the losing side, enslave the women and children, and take them as slaves (sex slaves). You can see examples of this in The Odyssey, currently very topical. Homer doesn’t especially remark on this, he just assumes this is what always happens after a war - it’s clearly normal behaviour for him. That’s another way you get a reduction of male genetic diversity and a continuation of female genetic diversity.

These are both very brutal dynamics. But I wouldn’t cast them as being pro-men. In both cases the majority of men are losers - they end up single and penniless, or dead in a war. Women are also losers, especially the ones who are enslaved and raped. The winners are a small number of men who win the battles or own the land.

Unfortunately those men are likely our ancestors.

That's so interesting, @MaidsRoom, thank you! My imagined story wasn't really like the truth, I think, because I attributed agency to the women who moved to the men's locations. It's more likely they were raped and force-marched hundreds of miles by the very men they'd seen murdering their parents, brothers, partners and children.

Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age people may have had no idea about DNA, but they certainly understood about propagating their 'seed' at the expense of other tribes' men - and they were pitiless about it. Patriarchy was born in blood and semen.

It's not very logical. As people realised when starting to build Bronze Age empires, you can get more done by enslaving men as well. Allow them to breed with enslaved women, and you get an endless supply of human machinery at very low cost. There are persuasive arguments that the drive to eliminate rivals is hard-wired back to the earliest life forms, but this doesn't really explain male domination or why gene replacement isn't universally seen in hunter-gatherer societies.

Over here, while the Fertile Crescent was developing sophisticated metropoles, Britain was quietly hunting-gathering, experimenting with collective living and small-scale landscape management ... until 6,100 years ago. Neolithic agriculturalists arrived en masse, originating from Anatolia (Turkey) via Spain, and they completely replaced all the DNA. Apart from some tiny holdouts in Scotland, none of our previous ancestry survived.

This may have been due to disease. It could also be that these farming tribes had been progressively forced out of settlements by the expanding empires and, having reached a full stop at the edge of the available world, dug in hard with their murder skills. They weren't interested in breeding with the natives, apparently, so they must've arrived with their own families.

A thousand years later, it happened again. Technologically-advanced Yamnaya people, originating in the Steppes, surged across Europe, changing cultures and heritage everywhere they went. In the 600 years it took them to reach Britain, their genes and habits had mixed with women they met along the way. But they didn't mix here: once again, the resident population's DNA was wiped out, missing only about 10% in remote mountainous areas. It's likely they carried an early version of the plague, to which they were resistant.

The Yamnaya were a male-dominated, warlike and hierarchical society of animal herders. A large percentage of modern European men share direct Y-chromosome lineages tracing back to just a few ancient steppe individuals. So few that 60% of Western European men carry haplogroup R1b, originating from just one Yamnaya man.

We still speak derivatives of their language. Our cultures hold shadows of their religion. And we're still trying to shake off their commitment to the dominant male.

While the Yamnaya did push south into the Caucasus mountains, the landscape and heavily fortified Near Eastern empires beyond the mountains stopped them so they went west (and east) instead. The southern states couldn't go that way because of deserts, but they did attack the Mediterranean. Basically, Europe couldn't escape organised patriarchal armies and any peaceable, equitable societies were doomed.

I realise I've gone on a long digression but more than welcome further input!

Absolutely loving this thread! I’m writing a book about this exact subject and there’s so much here. As states formed, centralised and expanded, rulers systematically broke the power of women. Organised religion played a particularly strong role in this, teaching that women were lesser than men.

The truth, however, tells the opposite story. States that survived excluded women from power because women are very, very good at politics. Giving women power tends to cause states to fracture into smaller political units, headed or influenced by women. This is why, across history, you’ll see so many rebellions led by women.

States that survived also knew how to break, dispossess and enslave most men, as well - as another poster observes. Stepping up to the task, religion also taught that lesser men deserved less power. Until the arrival of democracy, then, feminism had no way of making itself heard.

Democracy, though, is a fragile thing. Most parts of the world have never known it, and it struggles to survive in conditions of deep inequality.

Where does this leave us now? In a dangerous place. The Bronze Age playbook is looking horribly resurgent.

If we want to hold on to feminism, then, we have to hold on to democracy. And to do that, we have to address issues that democratic societies have tended to ignore - inequality and the exclusion of mothers from the labour market, especially. Time is running out, and the future looks pretty bleak, otherwise. The Yamnaya didn’t have nukes.

I seem to recall learning at university that the same amount of land can support ten times as many agriculturists as hunter gatherers, so presumably that was also a factor in population replacement.

I’ve also heard that Basque is the only surviving language descended from that spoken by the pre-Yamnaya (I still think of them as the Beaker folk) farmers.

thank you so much for this thread - it is blowing my mind - i don’t have a sense of a lot of rebellions being led by women - is this because culturally they have been written out in favour of men who claim credit ?

Yes - the abundance of food, and resulting high population, is why agricultural societies could afford to sacrifice whole generations of young men to war. The cult of militarism became the core of political power. Hunter-gatherers, by contrast, only resorted to all-out violence as a last resort.

It’s been a bit disappointing to see many feminist historians overlook this chain of causation, arguing that population growth only happened because the women were forced to have lots of children.

I can’t see how this stacks up. Food makes women fertile, sex - before reliable contraception - makes women pregnant. Women quite often like food and sex. They sometimes even (whisper it) like having children. As women’s power was lost, they certainly also lost a lot of control over their bodies, but it’s bizarre to imagine that without patriarchy, they’d simply opt out of motherhood.

Plonking my arse on this fascinating thread to read later.

One hundred per cent, yes. Haven’t got time just now to write more, but some examples - the Boston Tea Party was planned and designed by women. Women played a key role in the events leading up to the French Revolution. And going further back, the Wars of the Roses is - in many ways - a story of powerful aristocratic women calling the shots. Boudicca, the Nubian rebellion - on and on it goes. Misogyny conceals a deep and well-founded fear of female power.

There is a question about what is the natural order of human aggregation ?

Is is clan, village, tribe, city. Or as the past 10,000 years might suggest ... empire ?

Because if it is empire what does it say for our futures ?

Quite a lot of people will say that it’s empire - as you say, this is how humans have aggregated. But if you accept that, you have to accept empire with all the trimmings: conquest, enslavement, and the unequal dignity of all people.

This isn’t just an unpleasant prospect. It’s also an unworkable one. Empires were phenomenally wasteful of human capital, throwing away the talents of almost all women, and most men. And old-school empires got away with it, because they didn’t need intellectual capital. They needed armies, nobles and a peasantry.

This is not going to work today. Cyber-attack, not massed infantry, is coming to define warfare. Dealing with climate change requires innovation, which requires a well-educated populace, not a toiling and obedient mass. And enmeshed global supply-chains means that grand designs on invasion impress nobody. They simply place a burden on everyone else. If you doubt this, ask the bond markets what they think of Trump’s latest crusades.

There’s no future in the past. But will we see this in time?

I think this (and the other evidence) tells us that there was a period in relatively recent history where societies adopted a particularly extreme form of patriarchy. It doesn't tell us that before that period human societies were egalitarian or female-dominated.

Quite a lot of people will say that it’s empire - as you say, this is how humans have aggregated. But if you accept that, you have to accept empire with all the trimmings:

Do we have a counterfactual to show how humans may have developed in any other way ? Or is "empire" an emergent property of humans ?

conquest, enslavement, and the unequal dignity of all people.

mean nothing if no conquest, no enslavement and equal dignity result in the species failing. We have no idea how other hominid species socialised (if we assume they did). Maybe they were all lovely and nice to one another.

It would be superficial to characterise hunter gathers vs. farmers as quality over quantity. But if you do, then history suggests quantity wins every time. Not sure how that carries us forward though. 🤔

Yes - there's a really good study which shows that in hunter-gatherer societies, the key determining factor as to the status of women relative to men is a high likelihood of conflict over resources. Where food is very scarce (or only intermittently abundant), men defuse the risk of violence by organising into strict hierarchies. Women, it seems, are used as prizes to reinforce the hierarchy.

The good news however is that relatively few HG societies seem to end up this way: sparse populations, ranging over wide territory, means that more often there's just about enough to go around, albeit at the cost of intense physical effort on the part of both women and men. Which, in its own turn, keeps the birth rate low by inhibiting ovulation.

The fascinating paradox is that by inventing agriculture, humans solved the problem of scarcity - but worsened the problem of conflict.

British anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, examined the size of communities in relation to a human brain's capacity for relationships. He says the ideal size is 150 people, but he's talking about the cognitive limit of personal connections. Communication technology - writing, transport, telephony - can massively expand effective networks. The humans within each network will still be operating to their personal limit of around 150, though.

Google's summary:

Why 150 is the Magic Number
Brain limit: Anthropologists found that the size of the human brain restricts how many stable relationships a person can track.
Social rules: Groups of 150 use gossip, direct communication, and peer pressure to manage behavior instead of formal police.
History: Ancient farming villages in the Middle East from 7,000 years ago naturally averaged around 150 people.
Modern groups: Military companies, church congregations, and traditional farming communities still use this size today.

Other Effective Community Sizes
50 people: This smaller tier works well for tight family groups, basic survival units, or splinter communities that need deep trust.
500 people: This larger tier represents a small village or school where people share an identity, but rely less on knowing everyone personally.
1,500 people: This represents a tribal network limit where members recognize each other as part of the same extended group.

Real-World Examples
Hunter-gatherers: Traditional nomadic clans historically average around 150 members.
Military units: The basic independent combat unit, the company, averages roughly 130 to 150 soldiers.
Christmas cards: Studies tracking how people send festive cards show the average recipient list hovers around 150.
Corporate structures: Some companies explicitly split factory teams into separate buildings once a single location exceeds 150 workers to maintain a family feel.

@ApplebyArrows - true, but we have hunter-gatherer societies today. They are not hierarchical in general, having both female and male leaders and high levels of community decision-making.

The Dunbar number does hint at some sort of limit of humanity - like the 1 in 20 figure, it seems to pop up in a lot of human activity,

However 2 groups of 150 makes 300 which has more chance of beating a solo 150 to the food/water/shelter needed to advance the species. Not sure if there is a higher level of Dunbar number for combined social groupings. Personally I'd be curious to know this, as it might give us a clue as to "How big is too big ?" A question to which history has some tantalising answers.

The rise of democracy is a pretty good counterfactual. It cuts against all received ideas about hierarchy and status. Looking at how it emerged, it's clear that the fall of feudalism could only take place after we shifted from a purely agricultural economy into one that was more based on trade, investment and capital. It's not a coincidence that the Enlightenment took place at the same time.

Cultures that remained wedded to theocracy, absolute rule and feudalism in general did very badly at the hands of cultures that escaped those limitations. China and the Islamic world, though they had been far in advance of Europe in the mediaeval era, were both defeated and controlled by European powers later on.

Of course, those European powers were themselves empires. But, being driven by forces that cut against feudalism, those same European cultures were the first to criticise the idea of empire, and to abolish the slavery that attends on empires. Democracy is weirdly fragile and powerful at the same time.

Similar to orang-utans. Matriarchal groups that allow males to visit. You could definitely see how a ‘high value’ male would be fathering the majority of the children in that situation. Maybe we should try it again….?

Great points, especially about women as currency.

I'll pick you up on the scarce resources supposition, though. The earliest Greek & Roman explorers (ie, those who could write) are reported as describing lush Northern European forests so full of game that a village only needed to hunt for a few hours a week. They may have been exaggerating (!) but, coming from countries that had already cleared much of their native forest, unspoilt wildwoods would have looked astonishingly fecund to them.

The Neolithic farming invasion, followed by Yamnaya grazers, destroyed over 50% of British wildwood. Dartmoor, the North Yorkshire Moors and East Anglia used to be thick forest.

Amazonian tribes don't have difficulty finding food.

Democracy is weirdly fragile and powerful at the same time.

And historically an aberration ...

Big assumption there. Look at African and South American groups who still follow their traditional systems. They have meetings, votes and various competitive structures not dependent on heredity or possessions. Traditional Native American tribes were gender-egalitarian, complementary, or matrilineal, as, I believe, were/are Inuits.

But - not prehistorically.