Il y a 8000 ans, 1 homme avait en moyenne 17 femmes

- Ven Mar 20, 2015 3:48 pm #167017 Je suis tombé sur l'article suivant :
[url]http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/17-to-1-reproductive-success[/url]

Pour les non-anglophones, ça explique que :

• des scientifiques de l'université de l'état de l'Arizona ont analysé le génome de 450 volontaires de diverses régions du monde


• ils ont recueilli 2 parties de leur ADN : une transmise exclusivement par le père, l'autre par la mère (pour les plus geeks : l'ADN du chromosome Y et l'ADN mitochondrial)


• en analysant la diversité dans cet ADN grâce à un gros ordinateur, ils ont pu compter le nombre de pères et de mères différents, et ainsi établir qu'entre 4000 et 8000 après l'invention de l'agriculture, pour 17 femmes qui se reproduisaient, seul 1 homme en faisait de même

Hypothèse 1 : pénurie de mâles dues à un virus qui toucherait exclusivement les hommes
Hypothèse 2 : un petit nombre d'hommes a accaparé toutes les richesses

Pour confirmer l'hypothèse 2, l'équipe de chercheurs a l'intention de rechercher des marqueurs culturels (et non pas physiques) qui auraient pu empêcher la majorité des premiers agriculteurs de se reproduire.

« Quelle malédiction a frappé l’Occident pour qu’au terme de son essor il ne produise que ces hommes d’affaires, ces épiciers, ces combinards aux regards nuls et aux sourires atrophiés, que l’on rencontre partout, en Italie comme en France, en Angleterre de même qu’en Allemagne ? Est-ce à ces dégénérés que devait aboutir une civilisation aussi délicate, aussi complexe ? Peut-être fallait-il en passer par là, par l’abjection, pour pouvoir imaginer un autre genre d’hommes. »
E. Cioran

- Ven Mar 20, 2015 3:57 pm #167018 [quote="Patrick Timsit"]Il y a quatre femmes pour un homme sur terre. Qui a piqué ma part ?

Si tu peux être amant sans être fou d'amour,
Si tu peux être fort sans cesser d'être tendre
[...]
Et si tu peux aimer tous tes amis en frère
Sans qu'aucun d'eux soit tout pour toi ;
[...]
Tu seras un Homme, mon fils.

- Sam Mar 21, 2015 12:19 am #167029 [quote]It's no coincidence that this coincides with the development of agriculture. War was made possible and profitable by agriculture. Working the land by hand is hard work and destroys your body. If you can get someone else to do it for you, then you're set.

With a long gap between planting and harvest season, and a supply of portable high-energy food that won't rot if you keep it dry, as a farmer you have a few months free to do other things. There are a lot of things you could do, but the most profitable thing you could spend the spring doing is going over to your neighbor's town with a bunch of your friends, butchering the men, killing or castrating the boys, and bringing the women and girls back so you can force them to work your land and rape them when you're in the mood.

With all these women doing the work, you can make some better weapons and armor and practice fighting with your buddies through the harvest and planting season and then go do the same thing next spring and get even richer.
There's no reason to stop. Hell, you're probably doing those heathen foreign women a favor. So you'll keep doing it until you get wiped out by famine, plague, or some other group manages to kill you and take your women.

I don't believe the men were around. They were probably killed or castrated and kept as slaves. I don't think there was a social order that could survive for 4000 years where 17 in 18 men were idle and poor and completely denied access to sex. It probably couldn't survive one year, maybe not even a month. And I don't believe that an order could exist where one man could keep 17 women faithful and raise only his own offspring with such a high number of eligible and willing men around trying to get some unless 17 in 18 men were castrated.

Also, the genetic lineage thing goes haywire when the 'civilized' world experiences genocides every few years. It's hard to trace it all back when constant genocide turns the genetic record into swiss cheese.

- Sam Mar 21, 2015 7:27 pm #167077 [quote] Stone Age societies could be pretty awful. From the Red Queen:
In the ancient empire of the Incas, sex was a heavily regulated industry. The sun-king Atahualpa kept fifteen hundred women in each of many “houses of virgins” throughout his kingdom. They were selected for their beauty and were rarely chosen after the age of eight—to ensure their virginity. But they did not all remain virgins for long: They were the emperor’s concubines. Beneath him, each rank of society afforded a harem of a particular legal size. Great lords had harems of more than seven hundred women. “Principal persons” were allowed fifty women; leaders of vassal nations, thirty; heads of provinces of 100,000 people, twenty; leaders of 1,000 people, fifteen; administrators of 500 people, twelve; governors of 100 people, eight; petty chiefs over 50 men, seven; chiefs of 10 men, five; chiefs of 5 men, three. That left precious few for the average male Indian whose enforced near-celibacy must have driven him to desperate acts, a fact attested to by the severity of the penalties that followed any cuckolding of his seniors. If a man violated one of Atahualpa’s women, he, his wife, his children, his relatives, his servants, his fellow villagers, and all his lamas would be put to death, the village would be destroyed, and the site strewn with stones. As a result, Atahualpa and his nobles had, shall we say, a majority holding in the paternity of the next generation. They systematically dispossessed less privileged men of their genetic share of posterity. Many of the Inca people were the children of powerful men. In the kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa, all women were at the pleasure of the king. Thousands of them were kept in the royal harem for his use, and the remainder he suffered to “marry” the more favored of his subjects. The result was that Dahomean kings were very fecund, while ordinary Dahomean men were often celibate and barren. In the city of Abomey, according to one nineteenth-century visitor, “it would be difficult to find Dahomeans who were not descended from royalty.” The connection between sex and power is a long one.

Je conseille d'ailleurs la lecture de "The Red Queen" (Matt Ridley). C'est un essai de génétique/biologie qui explique l'intérêt de la reproduction sexuée.

A mettre en perspective avec le dernier phone coaching ou Stéphane dit à Chloé que l'attraction physique ne se choisit pas, pour des raisons de "résistance aux bactéries".

Le postulat est le suivant : nous sommes attirés par la personne avec qui nous aurions une progéniture dotée de la meilleure immunité possible. Un groupe de gènes nommé HLA influencerait et l'immunité et les phéromones, d'où le caractère (apparemment) arbitraire de l'attraction physique.

« Quelle malédiction a frappé l’Occident pour qu’au terme de son essor il ne produise que ces hommes d’affaires, ces épiciers, ces combinards aux regards nuls et aux sourires atrophiés, que l’on rencontre partout, en Italie comme en France, en Angleterre de même qu’en Allemagne ? Est-ce à ces dégénérés que devait aboutir une civilisation aussi délicate, aussi complexe ? Peut-être fallait-il en passer par là, par l’abjection, pour pouvoir imaginer un autre genre d’hommes. »
E. Cioran

- Sam Mar 21, 2015 7:39 pm #167078 Il y a quand même, je pense, une majeure partie de l'attraction physique liée aux stimuli visuels. Surtout pour nous les hommes.

Lentius, profundius, suavius