[adenozine]

Man, I've always actually kinda wondered about this.

I know it's macabre, but I think about human migratory routines and when different groups clashed back when life was so primitive and brutish, they're must've been those tendencies to rape and sexually conquer the opposition.

Surely that is reflected in the genetic ledger of time. What a crazy insight. Genetics is such an interesting field. It's bonkers there's just strings of data that we can read the past through.

[gen220]

I encourage you to explore the early history of the pre-Roman Empire peoples. These were largely mythologies that the romans retroactively constructed for themselves (i.e. they had the opportunity to omit the raping and kidnapping in retellings, but chose not to).

It’s full of “and then tribe X invaded and the land of Y, took their women and enslaved their men”. Back and forth for centuries. This behavior was cyclical, inevitable, and universal, until violence was monopolized and institutionalized.

We’ve come a long way, I guess. Still have work to do.

[tsimionescu]

I think GP was thinking about early humans, back when other species of humans still existed.

From what I understand, the most common view is that in hunter-gatherer times there was much less inter-group violence than there was after the advent of agriculture, simply because there was much less of a notion of territory and any need to defend it before agriculture was a thing.

[lebuffon]

"pre-Roman Empire peoples"

Do you mean the Bible?

"Only in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite, as the LORD your God has commanded you,...? Deut. 20:16..

[adenozine]

That's an interesting scripture for this situation! Very insightful.

I was thinking actually quite a bit earlier than a lot of the Hebrew historical times, like species that were more apelike.

[abathur]

Humans and proto-humans have presumably done most of the fundamental things we do for a very long time.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/colored-pigmen...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_findings_for_hominid_...

There was inevitably conflict, but I'm skeptical of the "tendencies to rape and sexually conquer the opposition" framing. AFAIK there isn't much evidence for large amounts of inter-group violence. A paper like https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23751 lays out a contra case that the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence--but I think it is a reason to be cautious about what we project back on those populations.

[ves]

You don’t even have to go back that far; the, uh, productivity of Ghengis Khan and the mongols generally is widely discussed.

[adenozine]

Oh well I mean sure, there's a similar case with colonists and slaves too, right?

I think at some point in the far past though there might have been a wider gap, genetically, between the two forces meeting. I haven't had time to read the whole article in detail, just skimmed it.

Anyhow, thanks. You're right, there's definitely been plenty of mandatory diversification before.

[082349872349872]

We're told that when Ghengis Khan said Ahnold's famous Conan line, he wasn't just interested in "hearing the lamentations" of their women...

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/23975/what-was-t...

[m463]

You know, the title of this article puts a slant on this investigation by choosing the word tryst.

Why couldn't they have been meaningful relationships?

[carabiner]

All mammals rape. And murder, and steal. Dolphins torture each other. You don't think it's all sunshine and rainbows in the wilderness, do you?

[dragonwriter]

> All mammals rape

2. John does not rape.

3. Therefore, John is not a mammal.

[shard]

1. ∀ Species ∈ Mammal, ∃ at least 1 member of Species that rapes

2. John does not rape

3. ∴ John is not the raping member of a Species of Mammals

Pardon any misuse of symbols, it's been a while.

[dragonwriter]

So, the first member of any mammal species must, ipso facto, be a rapist?

[bigbubba]

What would the 'first' of a species be, in an objective sense? As I understand it, speciation is a gradual process. Trying to pin down exactly where the change occurs is like trying to pin down precisely where a rainbow gradient shifts from green to yellow. You can pick a point and declare that to be the demarcation line, but discrete categorization in this way seems inherently arbitrary.

Even seeming straight forward metrics like "can they produce viable offspring" isn't so black and white, since between 'yes' and 'no' exists a continuum of 'maybe's. In very rare cases even horses and donkeys can have fertile offspring, e.g. mules that aren't mules (the typical infertility of mules has lead to the occasional use of the term to describe any infertile hybrid.)