Y-Chromosome Bottlenecks and Making Peace with the Awful Human Past

DNA-based unravelling of history is one of the great amazements of our time: 

  - Birds are dinosaurs!

  - Most of us are partly Neanderthal!

  - The humans who actually killed off Neanderthals left no descendants themselves!

  - We can now trace great migrations of pre-literate peoples…

  … and the long-term effects of harem masters like Genghis Khan. 

  - One particular woman, her bones found in a cave, had a human mother and Denisovan father, a story worth telling - (imagining) - in a novel or three…

  - Our ancestral Mitochondrial Eve lived 400,000 years ago. And much more…

Arguably the most fascinating recent discovery is the Y Chromosome Bottleneck. A violent transition that seems to have flowed everywhere across Europe, Africa and Asia, occurring wherever and whenever farming became widely practiced. In the Near East, the cradle of agriculture, that was from 7000 to 5000 years ago, a stretch when (for some centuries), only one in 17 male humans got to breed, while women were apparently unaffected. 

Well... unaffected genetically. 

That is a huge, recent discovery, whose implications have yet to be fully plumbed. Though a first order theory is obvious. Grain was storable food and stored grain became an irresistible lure for raiders, thieves and then genocidal takers. Indeed, this is when we see fortifications surround almost all Neolithic villages. And burial pits filled with victims of evident violence. (But with almost no skeletons of young women, a fact with blatant implications.) 

There is an alternative theory, of gradual, much less violent success/failure attrition of bloodlines, instead of all-out bloody raid wars. But that seems a desperate grab at narrative shifting. Anyway, both theories can only explain the Y Chromosome effects if these villages and clans (again, all across Africa and Eurasia) were patrilineal.

Here is a pretty good summary of known facts about the y-bottleneck and related theories.

(Aside: Note that all through the Americas, wherever Spaniards conquered, today most Y chromosomes are Iberian while nearly all mitochondria come from Native lines. I leave to some of you the unpleasant implications. (I’d love to see a similar chromosomal appraisal of Native peoples in English speaking areas.))

Alas, I must demure from both theories for the Y-Bottleneck. Neither is sufficient to explain it. I’m here to accuse these brilliant genetic detectives of thinking too close to the problem, ignoring vital factors. 

They assert that the correlation with agriculture means one thing -- that the allure of stealing grain was enough to explain the violent exclusion of 16/17ths of males from reproduction. Among many other flaws, this notion does not explain why the violence stopped. Or at least ebbed to much lower levels. And that is a glaring flaw. As is the notion that a tribe with only 6% males is going to either be raided for grain surplus or do much raiding.

I have another theory (naturally). It is also directly correlative with agriculture, but in more ways than just rival clans or villages raiding for stored grain. Because this was when two more innovations arrived. Beer… and kings. 

No, not the Great Kings of Ur and Uruk and Jericho etc., who would arrive later. I mean earlier versions depicted in the second story-chapter of James Michener’s novel THE SOURCE. A ‘king’ with a modest two-story wooden palace in a village of ramshackle huts with just a couple of hundred inhabitants, enforcing his will on the locality with a standing ‘army’ of just thirty or so big bullies with stone adzes. 

Until then, a tribal chief might have two wives and get to act tough… but he was still answerable to the Tribe as a collective. He could be deposed by vote at the campfire. Stomp on others too hard and he’d pay a price. 

Only now, in a large farming village with a much bigger population -- and thirty or forty bullies at his command -- the king could safely ignore popular opinion among the peasants. Now, he could simply order that a man be killed, as matter of whim. Or a ruling of the gods.

Want a peasant’s pretty wife? Kill him. Marduk ordained it!

  Did that fellow get rowdy and dangerously drunk on beer? Into a ditch with him. Baal's will.

  Did that one run away from the last raiding party? He won’t get a second chance.

  Do my thirty soldiers want more women? Take some on the next raid… 

…or just take them here at home.

This explains other things than the Y-bottleneck and the absence of young women from those horrible death pits. It also would explicate why humans are more resistant to alcohol than most mammals. For a thousand years after the invention of beer, lots of bilious drunks got killed, fast. The petty king pointed at him and made the oild throat-slitting gesture and that was that.

Too theoretical for you? All of what I just described did happen within oral and written accounts, in areas where agriculture arrived later. Watch Jason Momoa’s TV series THE CHIEF OF WAR, which paid close attention to historical accuracy. You’ll quickly and vividly get the picture.

   == The end of a horrible era ==

So what about my earlier objection? That we need an explanation for why the Y-Bottleneck stopped?  

The reason it ended is simple. And again, agriculture is key.

Despite all the murder, populations kept rising. Farming got more productive. Villages merged or were conquered. Soon you had large towns, then the first cities. And atop those cities were Kings. The real thing, now. Real palaces and temples and armies of hundreds… and rival kings, just upriver, who kept pissing in the water, to spite you and your gods. You need a bigger army! 

But those darn local lords keep killing the peasant males that you need to fill your ranks for the next campaign!  

So, you outlaw the practices that led to the Y-bottleneck. 

No more inter-village 'raiding.' You crack down on local lords and bullies, enough to save most of the men to work the fields and then join the ranks of your army during war season… and in so doing you also win gratitude and love from the peasants. 

(BTW this scenario is very close to the one elucidated by Karl Marx, whose class and caste historiography was much better than his predictive economics.)

Again, Watch THE CHIEF OF WAR – based on true stories and true culture. And yes, Kamehameha typified exactly the transition that I just described, from capricious whim-murder to due process and law, under a great King.

     == Are we truly that awful? ==

This theory explains the Y Chromosome Bottleneck far better than the mere raiding of grain silos. And yes, it’s even nastier! It implies that human males have a dark heritage that we must fight and continue to rise above. 

Hey, a lot of us are trying! 

Only please tell me how lions or stallions or bull moose or peacocks or orcas are any better? Mom Nature is not sweet! 

In fact, we have already proved that we can be nicer, finding ways to curb those feral, viciously gene-serving appetites. Sometimes. Under right conditions. Which is what technology and constitutions and ethical teachings are for. And maybe – carefully – we might even do some editing of the worst genetic imperatives. (As I portray in Glory Season.)

But it begins with knowledge. With science. With understanding.

If we are to do even better, it must start by looking, clear-eyed and bravely – at the hand that we were dealt.  Then betting and investing on rising out of Nature’s vicious mire.

== Kings were an improvement, but … ==

So, what agriculture giveth, it taketh away… and then giveth again?

Perhaps, in some bucolic, neolithic era, some tribes followed the much-touted matrilinear, Mother-Goddess tradition. The famous Venus figurines might have been dedicated to Her, instead of serving as stone age pornography. Maybe. Indeed, before agriculture emphasized the brute strength of males in the fields, gatherers certainly provided more calories than was brought back to the fire by preening, bragging hunters. Again, we know this from real life examples.

But agriculture did come. And with it likely our most violent era. Until the male-reproductive-maximizing frenzies of minor, petty ‘kings’ finally got tamed -- a little -- by actual Kings. 

Again, I’m not the first to consider this – some of it Karl Marx posited as obvious… an ongoing tussle between feudalism and monarchy that you can see illustrated in another film, from the 1960s, THE WARLORD.

That tussle mattered, certainly… and it didn’t. If peasants fared a little better – and merchants more-so – under kings, it was without any effort to get their their consent. Priests and propagandists of Baal, or Indra, or Patmos, or Huitzilopochtli, or Kū, or FoxNews preached that pyramids of inherited power are good and ordained. And it sure seemed destined to be so, as feudalism/royalty dominated every continent where people did farming. 

Rivals were squelched, Rival thinking was repressed. The strong and the feral clever maximized their reproductive power, as all males do, in all species, only now amplified hundreds-fold. And actual progress was glacially slow. Or nil.

Indeed, this is number two on my long list of catalogued explanations for the Great Silence in our galaxy, often called the “Fermi Paradox.

        == It may be a big reason why we are alone! ==

The male reproductive/competitive imperative is so pervasive on Earth that it seems likely to hold true on other worlds, for the same self-reinforcing reasons. It may anchor down most intelligent species. If kings and lords and priests and presidents and Big Brothers get powerful technologies to reinforce their power, then that society may become locked up, trapped into inherent stupidity, forever.

On Earth, only one civilization ever meaningfully escaped that trap, and the Enlightenment might be a temporary fluke, soon to be shut down by a return to 6000 years of nescient rule by kings and owner lords and their inheritance brats. 

We teeter right now on that precipice. An edge that – perhaps – few other sapient species even get to approach. And if we topple back into that ancient, pervasive pattern – this time reinforced with total surveillance and Orwellian controls – then we will join all the others out there, trapped in rigid pyramids of power that get genetically reinforced, until no other way is even imaginable. 

(See Robert Silverberg’s fine novel NIGHTWINGS.)

With criticism of power repressed, no one will pioneer new and better ways… while our home planet gradually (or swiftly) decays.

     ==  A narrow path to escape ==

And yes, that means our current meme-political-social struggles may be far more important than we realize! 

If humanity succeeds at maintaining a flat-fair, competitive/cooperative, egalitarian, scientific Enlightenment Civilization, then we might reify the dreams of science fiction and get out there!

A myriad other worlds in this galaxy may be waiting for our heirs – both organic and cyber – to go and rescue them from the traps of Darwin and Nature.

Our ancestors clawed their way up from muck and disease and ignorance and pain and countless despicable or well-meaning mistakes, until we are at last ready (I hope) to make all that suffering count for something. 

The gruesome past beckons us to do better. The future summons us to send forth rescuers. 

The present is a critical crisis for a Hero Generation to solve…

… and that, too, may be a clue.