| > When Napoleon Chagnon told his Marxist colleagues that the Yanomamö made war over women, the Marxists faced a choice: Either revise the whole foundation of what they thought they knew about humanity. Or declare that Chagnon must have gotten something wrong. Eyebrow raising statement. As someone with Marxist sympathies I don't agree or know what he's talking about. What is true is whenever it is argued that anthropology points to pre-agriculture humans living surprisingly healthier less labor intensive lives than expected and etc. it becomes a political fight where some reel back and pull out the "Nasty, brutish, and short" Hobbes meme. The Yanomamo and their extreme murderousness are always the go to push-back example. It's obviously a stand in for a left/right "is capitalism right and the natural state of man" thing and I do think it lead to a motivated reasoning to attack Chagnon's character (he just provoked them. They're outliers!), but I don't see where a Marx view is upended. > This is probably a general rule: In a society where children are difficult to feed, dedicated fathers focusing on feeding their children will have an evolutionary advantage. In societies where mothers can feed their children without much assistance, men who strive for many children with several women will have an evolutionary advantage. Another interesting and potentially radical line. Maybe a motivator this being posted? One could argue that current society, in a world were single motherhood is increasingly easy, is re-trending towards this way. Which, as pointed out, is actually the norm for mammals. Humans are a weird exception in not being harem maters. > I absolutely do not intend to single out the Yanomamö as unusually unindustrous. To the contrary, I think they represented a kind of human default. I think that humans have mostly existed in a stage of population equilibrium, ... the result becomes an equilibrium that can go on for thousands of years. As per the title. I ain't no anthropologist but if we are talking Anatomically Modern Humans vs Behavioral Modernity I think there's another equally or more uncomfortable and unPC answer, rather than this thesis. Just because anatomically modern humans 300k years ago had the same skeletons as modern man doesn't mean they had the same brains. What happened was probably an event horizon brain evolution. Not that men were stuck in an unproductive, antisocial women hording social equilibrium for hundreds or thousands of years until they weren't. |