11 ms·

One other hypothesis I can think of is the advent of barbarian warfare. Many parts of the old testament details how brutal life was, where various tribes are co

One other hypothesis I can think of is the advent of barbarian warfare. Many parts of the old testament details how brutal life was, where various tribes are constantly at war and conquering other tribes. Even several generations of warfare, where each village sacked involved killing the men and abducting the women, would filter out y-chromosomes to see such a large disparity.

bilbo0s 12y ago
This is the actual explanation. With one caveat... slavery. Basically, agriculture allowed people to specialize. This included specializing in killing. (Soldiers). You would use these specialists to conquer other lands. Which, in turn, provided slave labor to increase production in agriculture and other sectors. So the conquered females would be used as "rewards" for the conquerors. And the conquered males would be used to increase production across the conquering society via slave labor. So the explanation is pretty simple. In fact, the 17 to 1 figure is so low that I question whether they aren't missing something ??? Societies that developed later generally required enormous amounts of slave labor. That, coupled with the fact that there would have been an enormous amount of killing involved in taking the slaves in the first place, makes me wonder how the numbers turned out so evenhanded? I would have expected it to be an order of magnitude higher. But they did the study and have the data... so life must not have been quite as brutal as I thought it was. I suppose it is possible that life was brutal... and less desirable females simply may not have been taken? This happened a lot in our own history. Slave auction records show that some female slaves in America sold for as much as 100 times the rate of a "regular" female slave. (And even more in some private trades we have records for). We can speculate on why that may have been... but I think it's safe to assume that in a less sophisticated time they may have simply dispensed with females and males who were in some way undesirable, or were not likely to survive the journey back.
- Perceval 12y ago
  Sparta maintained a 10:1 ratio of helots to Spartans, and that was in the early iron age. I imagine the ratio could have been substantially worse in the neolithic and bronze ages. (Iron democratized violence compared to the bronze age, due to the lower cost of forging iron weapons. I'm sure neolithic violence had a different socioeconomic basis, but greater centralization of violence doesn't seem implausible.)
  - evincarofautumn 12y ago
    > Iron democratized violence compared to the bronze age Could you expand on this? If I have the resources to make an iron sword and you don’t, I can cut your bronze spearhead like butter. That doesn’t seem particularly democratic.
    - Perceval 12y ago
      During the Bronze Age, bronze weapons and armor were rarer. It cost more to mine and work bronze, and it cost more to buy a panoply. Therefore the distribution of those possessing the top-of-the-line violence capacity was concentrated in a narrow martial elite. The Iron Age broadened the number of people who could afford a panoply, because iron was easier to mine and cheaper to work (once they figured out how). The distribution of those with the ability to use force was a substantially broader elite, less concentrated than during the Bronze Age. When the ability to wield lethal violence becomes cheaper and available to a wider number of people, it's being "democratized." Samuel Colt's 1873 Single Action Army revolver is a more recent example of the democratization of violence capacity—“God made Men, but Samuel Colt made them all equal.” A similar argument can be made about the widespread availability of the cheap AK-47 following WWII.
      - deciplex 12y ago
        Yep, that's why you meant "due to the higher cost of forging bronze weapons".
        Perceval 12y ago
        Thanks, edited.
        evincarofautumn 12y ago
        That was the main source of my confusion.
    - ricree 12y ago
- simonh 12y ago
  > In fact, the 17 to 1 figure is so low that I question whether they aren't missing something ??? In a specific region at a specific time yes, I'm sure you can maintain a higher ratio, but the statistics we're talking about are global. We're presumably not talking about a single multi-continental mega-spartan society, but many regional societies that happened to be shaped by the same economic and cultural forces. Within those societies they may have had very high slave ownership ratios, but there would always be some regions not under such strict control, or border areas between them where things get messy. For a start, if this stratification of society was based on agriculture, you'd only get it in regions that were agriculturaly productive.

bilbo0s 12y ago

This is the actual explanation. With one caveat... slavery. Basically, agriculture allowed people to specialize. This included specializing in killing. (Soldiers). You would use these specialists to conquer other lands. Which, in turn, provided slave labor to increase production in agriculture and other sectors. So the conquered females would be used as "rewards" for the conquerors. And the conquered males would be used to increase production across the conquering society via slave labor. So the explanation is pretty simple. In fact, the 17 to 1 figure is so low that I question whether they aren't missing something ??? Societies that developed later generally required enormous amounts of slave labor. That, coupled with the fact that there would have been an enormous amount of killing involved in taking the slaves in the first place, makes me wonder how the numbers turned out so evenhanded? I would have expected it to be an order of magnitude higher. But they did the study and have the data... so life must not have been quite as brutal as I thought it was. I suppose it is possible that life was brutal... and less desirable females simply may not have been taken? This happened a lot in our own history. Slave auction records show that some female slaves in America sold for as much as 100 times the rate of a "regular" female slave. (And even more in some private trades we have records for). We can speculate on why that may have been... but I think it's safe to assume that in a less sophisticated time they may have simply dispensed with females and males who were in some way undesirable, or were not likely to survive the journey back.

Perceval 12y ago
Sparta maintained a 10:1 ratio of helots to Spartans, and that was in the early iron age. I imagine the ratio could have been substantially worse in the neolithic and bronze ages. (Iron democratized violence compared to the bronze age, due to the lower cost of forging iron weapons. I'm sure neolithic violence had a different socioeconomic basis, but greater centralization of violence doesn't seem implausible.)
- evincarofautumn 12y ago
  > Iron democratized violence compared to the bronze age Could you expand on this? If I have the resources to make an iron sword and you don’t, I can cut your bronze spearhead like butter. That doesn’t seem particularly democratic.
  - Perceval 12y ago
    During the Bronze Age, bronze weapons and armor were rarer. It cost more to mine and work bronze, and it cost more to buy a panoply. Therefore the distribution of those possessing the top-of-the-line violence capacity was concentrated in a narrow martial elite. The Iron Age broadened the number of people who could afford a panoply, because iron was easier to mine and cheaper to work (once they figured out how). The distribution of those with the ability to use force was a substantially broader elite, less concentrated than during the Bronze Age. When the ability to wield lethal violence becomes cheaper and available to a wider number of people, it's being "democratized." Samuel Colt's 1873 Single Action Army revolver is a more recent example of the democratization of violence capacity—“God made Men, but Samuel Colt made them all equal.” A similar argument can be made about the widespread availability of the cheap AK-47 following WWII.
    - deciplex 12y ago
      Yep, that's why you meant "due to the higher cost of forging bronze weapons".
      - Perceval 12y ago
        Thanks, edited.
        evincarofautumn 12y ago
        That was the main source of my confusion.
  - ricree 12y ago
simonh 12y ago
> In fact, the 17 to 1 figure is so low that I question whether they aren't missing something ??? In a specific region at a specific time yes, I'm sure you can maintain a higher ratio, but the statistics we're talking about are global. We're presumably not talking about a single multi-continental mega-spartan society, but many regional societies that happened to be shaped by the same economic and cultural forces. Within those societies they may have had very high slave ownership ratios, but there would always be some regions not under such strict control, or border areas between them where things get messy. For a start, if this stratification of society was based on agriculture, you'd only get it in regions that were agriculturaly productive.