34 Comments

You should read about the Aka people of the Congo, where both parents play a very active and loving role in caring for children (and non-parents in the group also regard it as their role to do the same)

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Doubtful based on what happens in a highly armed, militaristic and imperialist capitalist society? Not very useful evidence, is it?

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You should read Sex at Dusk, it uses the same data to come to a completely different conclusion and does a good job of debunking it.

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How do these summaries match up or contrast with what's been reported about foragers in the book 'Sex At Dawn' by Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jethá?

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I believe some claims you made seems to be an incomplete view of the whole picture.

For example, you state that our male ancestors beat females. Anthropologist has stated it many time, Both females and males start up conflicts and physically beat the other sex. Arborigen in Australia is a good example of this.

Also, the male can have more wives because an older male means better security (he knows the rituals, sacred and profaned ground, what is dangerous or not, better contacts since it is a kin-oriented society, etc). It is not because he is a ''girl-collector''. The male is quite often really old when girls are being offered in marriage to him.

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"Modern hunter-gatherers have all been pushed into, or only survived in, marginal habitat"

This is actually false. Once again, Frank Marlowe is the go to guy for Forager Truth:

To test if forager habitats are marginal we can compare them to the habitats of agriculturalists using the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS)... Net primary productivity (NPP) measures yearly plant growth and can be calculated from satellite data... when we exclude those societies in colder climates... forager habitats are not less productive than those of agricultural societies in this sample.

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Btw, being critical shouldn't be interpreted as a lack of appreciation for an interesting effort.

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"...suggesting that ancestral foragers may have been even more polygamous than even our strict sample shows."

I think we can safely reject that idea, Robin. I wouldn't get carried away with conclusions drawn solely from N=5, much less if it contradicts stronger, convergent lines of evidence about the extent of polygyny in human history.

While we haven't strictly examined the data as a continuous variable, your "weak forager" data set of just 7 populations is notably identical to the plausible Marlowe numbers. The numbers become radically different only by dropping the Kung and the Semang, who are marginally "impure"

M Polygyny/F Polygyny/M Single

Aranda 60/78/44Botocudo 33/55/32Hadza 6/12/5Kung 10/19/9Mbuti 6/12/5Semang 1/2/0Tiwi 70/90/66

MEDIAN 10/19/9

Another point is that the African foragers -- who are probably closer representatives of human history-- all have mild polygyny levels, closer to what we would expect from the more general evidence of human historical polygyny.

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Jason, we look at the same SCCS dataset, but are much more selective about what counts as plausibly ancestral nomadic forager; we have 5 instead of 36 societies meeting our strict criteria. The overall trend is less polygamy as one moves away from ancestral forager criteria, suggesting that ancestral foragers may have been even more polygamous than even our strict sample shows.

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"They had huge inequalities in status and sex, but low material inequality"

"Huge" is probably an overstatement here, but inequality among foragers is probably larger than popularly appreciated. Several quantitative papers published this year have examined inequality among foragers. Modern Scandinavian countries probably best approximate the level of equality among foragers:

"Excluding the low coefficients for weight, the Ginis range from ≈0.2 to ≈0.5, and even when weight is included the a-weighted average is 0.25 (table 5). This value is the same as the income inequality in contemporary Denmark (0.25), the country with lowest such value in recent years (UNDP 2009). Thus, to the extent that our measures for this set of foragers are representative, wealth inequality is moderate: that is to say, very low by current world standards but far from a state of “primitive communism” (cf. Lee 1988)."

(Communist countries, on the other hand, killed a bunch of people to reach a goal of fictional primitive equality.)

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Here is the paper for that by the way. Importantly: "Although exclusively monogamous societies are rare, the majority of marriages within all but the most polygynous societies aremonogamous (mean = 100% – 20% = 80% monogamous)". This fits in with anatomical and genetic evidence. Contra the recent popular Baumeister claim, the female contribution to the gene pool is substantially similar to the male contribution. The consensus is that humans are a mildly polygynous species.

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"On average, about 35% of men have more than one wife, and 50% of women are in a polygamous marriage (vs. 3% and 7% in modern societies)."

This estimate for polygyny is much too high. The numbers are probably thrown off by the Tiwi. I recommend the work of Frank Marlowe for all things forager. For 36 forager groups in the SCCS he found that about 10% of men had multiple wives, about 20% of women were married polygynously, and about 10% of men were single. The three separate data points line up nicely.

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"Existing modern foragers are rare and interesting precisely because they never took up agriculture. That sounds like some serious non-representativeness."

Only if you imagine that they didn't take up agriculture because of some intrinsic characteristic of theirs. Diamond makes a strong case that, if they didn't, it was because the option wasn't really available to them. (E.g., they lived in the Kalahari Desert, etc.)

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Another issue is how accurate the basic data is. In the two cases where I have read of different ethnographers treating the same society (I've read that this is generally avoided so that more primative societies can be studied), the ethnographers sharply disagreed. (Samoa and Bushmen).

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I don't think you know what our distant forager ancestors were like. Present-day foragers are low-density populations, and not able to maintain large combat forces as a result, and hence they are pushed out of highly productive land areas onto marginal lands (mountains, deserts, tundra, jungle, remote islands); at the same time, have resource circumscription at work, they are probably denser than foragers during the long period when human beings were spreading out into unoccupied land areas. Some foragers, such as Pygmies, face violence and exploitation by settled populations adjacent to them. Simply to assume that the patterns of social behavior are comparable seems overoptimistic. It's like the people who talk about humans being "descended from apes" when in fact humans and other apes are descended from common, now extinct ancestors, or so I understand the matter.

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This agrees with everything I've read, and say in the longer paper cited above.

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