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> about 30 percent of Yanomamö men and 10 percent of women died from human violence That's around 20% of the population in total (assuming 50 / 50 chance of ma
by avodonosov 4y ago
> about 30 percent of Yanomamö men and 10 percent of women died from human violence
That's around 20% of the population in total (assuming 50 / 50 chance of male and female birth)
> The Yanomamö simply killed each other efficiently enough to keep populations down.
Is 20% loss really enough to keep populations down?
If every woman has 3 children, then populations inceases by 50% in each generation. Losing 20% will not keep the population stable.
What if every woman has more children?
Missing in the pictore presented by the article is the birth rate, and other causes of death.
It is not evident the wars are keeping the Yanomamö population stable.
Also I don't believe animal populatios are stabilized by conflicts within same species.
And I heard from a hunter that the population of wild boars and other hunting animals depends mostly on food availability.
- narag 4y agoChild mortality is a huge problem now. https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality#child-mortality-is-an-everyday-tragedy-of-enormous-scale-that-rarely-makes-the-headlines https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality#child-mortality-i... And as close as my grandparents' generation, half of their siblings died before ten.
- pfannkuchen 4y agoAlso the idea that a non-catastrophic reduction in the male population would affect the size of the next generation is probably wrong. If we assume a lack of strict monogamy, that is (probably a reasonable assumption?).
- avodonosov 4y ago> The Yanomamö had the habit of stealing each others' women for polygynous unions
- scotty79 4y agoReduction of number of males results in women getting stolen and probably even more men getting killed in the process. So the population of given group will significantly reduce.
- pfannkuchen 4y agoNot if the other groups’ males are killed at a similar rate.
- scotty79 4y ago> That's around 20% of the population in total (assuming 50 / 50 chance of male and female birth) Author mentions that primitive societies living in abundance don't have 50/50 most likely to female infanticide. If low number of working women can provide resources it's more important to have more male warriors to defend the group. Excess of women would just get stolen by another group if men numbers in the group got too low.
- avodonosov 4y agoI don't see that in the text, could you quote the exact phrase?
- scotty79 4y agoIt's in their next post: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/why-do-humans-ever-develop?sd=pf https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/why-do-humans-ever-devel... I think this next post contains many more interesting observations than this one. In 1970 anthropologist William Divale compiled sex ratio data from 112 primitive societies. He found that among societies practicing war, sex ratios were on average very male-skewed among children and much less male-skewed among adults. The probable explanation Divale found was sex-biased infanticide.