4 ms·

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

• 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.)