8 ms·

Clan Wars Blamed for Ancient Collapse of the Male Chromosome

26 points by ilamont 8y ago

stonewhite 8y ago
While I do think this is an interesting argument, I fear that this may somehow be spinned into the toxic masculinity narrative. edit: I'm getting downvoted for adding to an argument with an unpopular opinion? It would be more educative of people responding to me to tell how I'm wrong, instead of just downvoting.
- andrewclunn 8y ago
  Isn't that an argument from final consequences? Whether bottleneck for the Y chromosome is based on female sexual selection or wars between patrilineal clans (or potentially some other as of yet unknown cause), we shouldn't accept the likelihood of an explanation based on it's relation to political narratives of today.
- bthrm 8y ago
  Anybody who uses that narrative as a point against men is stupid. Men were made to fight. We would be cavemen still if it weren’t for the competitiveness of males.
  - nerdponx 8y ago
    You're probably right, but you might be underestimating the number of stupid people out there.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    Raising "made to" in a discussion of evolution is missing the point. We are who we are because we survived the filters, but that doesn't imply any particular purpose or intent let alone that we have to stay this way.
- tom_ 8y ago
  Perhaps people just don't believe you'll believe it when they tell you. Perhaps they instead suspect you will argue the toss, back and forth, endlessly, like the proverbial muddy pig fight (that only the pig enjoys). This belief could be wrong, but would it better explain the behaviour?
  - stonewhite 8y ago
    I do believe you are on point. Yet this is not exactly reddit or facebook and I'm not a baiting troll (as can be seen from my comment history etc.)
wcoenen 8y ago
Redirects to history.nl for me, with no article to be found. (I'm not even in the Netherlands, and my browser doesn't ask for Dutch via Accept-Language.)
- yk 8y ago
  Redirects to history.de for me. (Which is correct in some geofencing sense, using a vpn solves the problem.) Sort of fun to have a light challenge to obtain documents THEY (history.com) don't want you to see.
- skjerns 8y ago
  I'm in the Netherlands, and have the same problem
- bthrm 8y ago
  Same here in Spain. Utterly retarded.
- scrp 8y ago
  Redirects to www.historytv.se in sweden
- shawn 8y ago
  For everyone having trouble accessing the article, here's a paste: https://pastebin.com/raw/S229NyJW https://pastebin.com/raw/S229NyJW Actually, it's interesting reading an article with just text and nothing else. It kind of makes me want a text-based browser mode that works on modern sites.
  - dao- 8y ago
    You mean Reader View? I believe Safari pioneered this, Firefox has it too. Not sure about Chrome and Edge.
    - black6 8y ago
      Chrome will do it, but Google doesn't like to make it easy for you to remove content/noise. In Windows you have to add --enable-dom-distiller to the end of "Target" in the shortcut properties. Then it shows up as "Distill page" in the drop-down menu. Edge has reader mode, but it won't work for every webpage (seems to not work for the noisiest ones, where you really want it).
jSully24 8y ago
I thought this was a parody on the impact of video games to our current population. I was wrong.
kentosi 8y ago
I'm not an expert in this domain, but something seems a little off to me. Are we saying that all male populations around the planet 5000 to 7000 years ago were engaged in serious clan wars, or are we just focused on the Asian and/or African continents? What about populations in Australia, the Pacific Islands and other places?
- Spooky23 8y ago
  I think the argument is more that primitive societies were, well, primitive, and the societies that didn’t advance were wiped out. Remember that women had a shelf-life in those days due to childbirth mortality. They were a hot commodity (literally) and were taken as property to be married/raped. The men were redundant, either put to the sword or put to work.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  I'd suggest reading the Nature article linked in the top comment by hn user mazsa. Alternatively, you can follow the links and read the actual papers outlining the data. But in answer to your question, the actual data says none of those things. The data says ONLY that male populations DECREASED long long ago. And they decreased throughout the world. Europe, MidEast, Asia, Africa, Americas. (Though the numbers indicate that whatever happened, more of it happened in Europe and MidEast regions than anywhere else. Consistent with data that hunter-gatherers proximate to agriculturalists fared particularly poorly in this regard.) The reasons presented to explain this decline are just hypotheses. But they, (clan wars), are plausible to me. (Given my lay understanding of history. Which means exactly nothing. As in most science, it's the data that's meaningful here, and that's what you should pay attention to.)
mkirklions 8y ago
tl;dr, over the course of 1,000 years clans fought themselves over resources and only a few families/males survived. As a result, a male may have hundreds of children. This is somewhat similar to the Genghis Kahn situation where millions of people has his DNA. Btw, I didnt think this was a surprise.
dubhrosa 8y ago
Why is the war hypothesis considered more likely than say a widespread, long lived contagious disease that had significantly higher mortality in males than females? If there was a period of widespread warfare for sustained periods, it's hard to see how "clans" would continue to engage in warfare beyond say 50% loss of the fighting forces. Wouldn't some women have joined the clan fighting forces also if it was an existential struggle? Why wouldn't clans have submitted to their conquerors and joined forces against common enemies - which was the pattern in many historical accounts of widespread warfare.
- hashkb 8y ago
  Well, there are more wars than plagues in recorded history. Also, I'm not familiar with many male-only plagues.
- philipodonnell 8y ago
  You're giving way too much credit to what a war looked like >5K years ago. There were no "fighting forces", there was just however many men there were, maybe 20-30 in a clan. IIRC from people studying tribes before western civilization arrived, clan warfare was pretty much about getting 2-3 neighboring clans to temporarily gang up another clan's village, kill all the males + women who resist or sell them into slavery, raze the village and then split the remaining women up amongst the victors. Rinse and repeat amongst the victors themselves and it's just not that much of a stretch to eliminate 50% of the men from an area.
- newest_user_ 8y ago
  I haven't read the original article to see if they address your question -- but generally a trained expert can tell if a disease ravaged someone by markers left of their skeletal system (increased iron deposits, lack of calcium, etc.) Knowing that, if we wanted to test the hypothesis that it was a disease then we would expect to see those markers on either a majority of males or we would see an equal distribution with the male skeletons trending younger then female ones. After the disease passed (like black death did) we would see male average life spans increase and a decrease in the disease markers.
- paidleaf 8y ago
debacle 8y ago
Those Y shaped chromosomes in the splash art made my eye twitch. For anyone curious, your Y chromosome is not Y shaped.
- hashkb 8y ago
  And the helix in the background... At least the cave painting of the battle proves the research is valid.
mazsa 8y ago
Original: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6
fifnir 8y ago
Great, I get redirected to "https://canalhistoria.es/" https://canalhistoria.es/" instead of the article. Smart devs who can read IPs strike again...
enlightenedfool 8y ago
"5,000 to 7,000 years ago wasn’t the best time to be a male". Not now either. In a different way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrhHkQhglig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrhHkQhglig. Of course, no one cares. Once we build a sperm in lab, we can get rid of men for good.
- PrimHelios 8y ago
  Go back to /r/blackpill. Hackernews isn't the place for this kind of thing.
vivekd 8y ago
I admit don't fully understand Y-chromosome lineage, but from a layman's perspective this doesn't seem to fit. Imagine 5 - 7000 years ago humans first started experimenting with animal husbandry, and sedentary lifestyles in meaningful numbers. This would expose humans to new diseases that would wipe out large portions of the population, similar to what happened in North America when white settlers first arrived. Imagine that certain genetic traits, found primarily in the y-chromosome makes people more susceptible to these diseases. Or even that genetic traits found on the x-chromosome, helped people fight off these diseases. Wouldn't that create a similar bottleneck to what the scientists found now? Also, since this study uses Y-chromosome DNA, isn't it possible that there was a similar bottleneck of the female population that we simply haven't been able to detect through DNA analysis? Granted there were a lot of depictions of warfare in this time period, but I don't see how that makes it different from any other period in human history.

26 points by ilamont 8y ago

While I do think this is an interesting argument, I fear that this may somehow be spinned into the toxic masculinity narrative. edit: I'm getting downvoted for adding to an argument with an unpopular opinion? It would be more educative of people responding to me to tell how I'm wrong, instead of just downvoting.

andrewclunn 8y ago
Isn't that an argument from final consequences? Whether bottleneck for the Y chromosome is based on female sexual selection or wars between patrilineal clans (or potentially some other as of yet unknown cause), we shouldn't accept the likelihood of an explanation based on it's relation to political narratives of today.
bthrm 8y ago
Anybody who uses that narrative as a point against men is stupid. Men were made to fight. We would be cavemen still if it weren’t for the competitiveness of males.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  You're probably right, but you might be underestimating the number of stupid people out there.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Raising "made to" in a discussion of evolution is missing the point. We are who we are because we survived the filters, but that doesn't imply any particular purpose or intent let alone that we have to stay this way.
tom_ 8y ago
Perhaps people just don't believe you'll believe it when they tell you. Perhaps they instead suspect you will argue the toss, back and forth, endlessly, like the proverbial muddy pig fight (that only the pig enjoys). This belief could be wrong, but would it better explain the behaviour?
- stonewhite 8y ago
  I do believe you are on point. Yet this is not exactly reddit or facebook and I'm not a baiting troll (as can be seen from my comment history etc.)

wcoenen 8y ago

Redirects to history.nl for me, with no article to be found. (I'm not even in the Netherlands, and my browser doesn't ask for Dutch via Accept-Language.)

yk 8y ago
Redirects to history.de for me. (Which is correct in some geofencing sense, using a vpn solves the problem.) Sort of fun to have a light challenge to obtain documents THEY (history.com) don't want you to see.
skjerns 8y ago
I'm in the Netherlands, and have the same problem
bthrm 8y ago
Same here in Spain. Utterly retarded.
scrp 8y ago
Redirects to www.historytv.se in sweden
shawn 8y ago
For everyone having trouble accessing the article, here's a paste: https://pastebin.com/raw/S229NyJW https://pastebin.com/raw/S229NyJW Actually, it's interesting reading an article with just text and nothing else. It kind of makes me want a text-based browser mode that works on modern sites.
- dao- 8y ago
  You mean Reader View? I believe Safari pioneered this, Firefox has it too. Not sure about Chrome and Edge.
  - black6 8y ago
    Chrome will do it, but Google doesn't like to make it easy for you to remove content/noise. In Windows you have to add --enable-dom-distiller to the end of "Target" in the shortcut properties. Then it shows up as "Distill page" in the drop-down menu. Edge has reader mode, but it won't work for every webpage (seems to not work for the noisiest ones, where you really want it).

jSully24 8y ago

I thought this was a parody on the impact of video games to our current population. I was wrong.

kentosi 8y ago

I'm not an expert in this domain, but something seems a little off to me. Are we saying that all male populations around the planet 5000 to 7000 years ago were engaged in serious clan wars, or are we just focused on the Asian and/or African continents? What about populations in Australia, the Pacific Islands and other places?

Spooky23 8y ago
I think the argument is more that primitive societies were, well, primitive, and the societies that didn’t advance were wiped out. Remember that women had a shelf-life in those days due to childbirth mortality. They were a hot commodity (literally) and were taken as property to be married/raped. The men were redundant, either put to the sword or put to work.
bilbo0s 8y ago
I'd suggest reading the Nature article linked in the top comment by hn user mazsa. Alternatively, you can follow the links and read the actual papers outlining the data. But in answer to your question, the actual data says none of those things. The data says ONLY that male populations DECREASED long long ago. And they decreased throughout the world. Europe, MidEast, Asia, Africa, Americas. (Though the numbers indicate that whatever happened, more of it happened in Europe and MidEast regions than anywhere else. Consistent with data that hunter-gatherers proximate to agriculturalists fared particularly poorly in this regard.) The reasons presented to explain this decline are just hypotheses. But they, (clan wars), are plausible to me. (Given my lay understanding of history. Which means exactly nothing. As in most science, it's the data that's meaningful here, and that's what you should pay attention to.)

mkirklions 8y ago

tl;dr, over the course of 1,000 years clans fought themselves over resources and only a few families/males survived. As a result, a male may have hundreds of children. This is somewhat similar to the Genghis Kahn situation where millions of people has his DNA. Btw, I didnt think this was a surprise.

dubhrosa 8y ago

Why is the war hypothesis considered more likely than say a widespread, long lived contagious disease that had significantly higher mortality in males than females? If there was a period of widespread warfare for sustained periods, it's hard to see how "clans" would continue to engage in warfare beyond say 50% loss of the fighting forces. Wouldn't some women have joined the clan fighting forces also if it was an existential struggle? Why wouldn't clans have submitted to their conquerors and joined forces against common enemies - which was the pattern in many historical accounts of widespread warfare.

hashkb 8y ago
Well, there are more wars than plagues in recorded history. Also, I'm not familiar with many male-only plagues.
philipodonnell 8y ago
You're giving way too much credit to what a war looked like >5K years ago. There were no "fighting forces", there was just however many men there were, maybe 20-30 in a clan. IIRC from people studying tribes before western civilization arrived, clan warfare was pretty much about getting 2-3 neighboring clans to temporarily gang up another clan's village, kill all the males + women who resist or sell them into slavery, raze the village and then split the remaining women up amongst the victors. Rinse and repeat amongst the victors themselves and it's just not that much of a stretch to eliminate 50% of the men from an area.
newest_user_ 8y ago
I haven't read the original article to see if they address your question -- but generally a trained expert can tell if a disease ravaged someone by markers left of their skeletal system (increased iron deposits, lack of calcium, etc.) Knowing that, if we wanted to test the hypothesis that it was a disease then we would expect to see those markers on either a majority of males or we would see an equal distribution with the male skeletons trending younger then female ones. After the disease passed (like black death did) we would see male average life spans increase and a decrease in the disease markers.
paidleaf 8y ago

debacle 8y ago

Those Y shaped chromosomes in the splash art made my eye twitch. For anyone curious, your Y chromosome is not Y shaped.

hashkb 8y ago
And the helix in the background... At least the cave painting of the battle proves the research is valid.

mazsa 8y ago

Original: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6

fifnir 8y ago

Great, I get redirected to "https://canalhistoria.es/" https://canalhistoria.es/" instead of the article. Smart devs who can read IPs strike again...

enlightenedfool 8y ago

"5,000 to 7,000 years ago wasn’t the best time to be a male". Not now either. In a different way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrhHkQhglig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrhHkQhglig. Of course, no one cares. Once we build a sperm in lab, we can get rid of men for good.

PrimHelios 8y ago
Go back to /r/blackpill. Hackernews isn't the place for this kind of thing.

vivekd 8y ago

I admit don't fully understand Y-chromosome lineage, but from a layman's perspective this doesn't seem to fit. Imagine 5 - 7000 years ago humans first started experimenting with animal husbandry, and sedentary lifestyles in meaningful numbers. This would expose humans to new diseases that would wipe out large portions of the population, similar to what happened in North America when white settlers first arrived. Imagine that certain genetic traits, found primarily in the y-chromosome makes people more susceptible to these diseases. Or even that genetic traits found on the x-chromosome, helped people fight off these diseases. Wouldn't that create a similar bottleneck to what the scientists found now? Also, since this study uses Y-chromosome DNA, isn't it possible that there was a similar bottleneck of the female population that we simply haven't been able to detect through DNA analysis? Granted there were a lot of depictions of warfare in this time period, but I don't see how that makes it different from any other period in human history.