"Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be."
-Temple Grandin
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…
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.
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.
58 comments:
Remember what I said about the pervasiveness of the 'believing is seeing' school of magical thinking ?
Well, when it comes to explaining 'Y Chromosome Bottleneck' and the relative paucity of adult female skeletons from a particular time period, our fine host immediately defaults to 'bad men & feudalism monopolized women', as he has long ago decided that Men & Feudalism are BAD & Women are GOOD.
Yet, how does this theory explain the relative paucity of adult female skeletons from this time period ?
A better explanation could be a severe shortage of adult breeding females, possibly caused by a disease like Herbert's "White Plague", which would in no way affect female genetics in terms of their absent Y chromosomes, giving rise to 'Survivorship Bias' and account for the relative absence of adult female skeletons from the same time period.
And, since I am a proponent of the 'seeing is believing' school of science, perhaps we can accept that 'Men & Women are Equally Bad', as exemplified by the recent Massachusetts decision to legalize full-term infanticide by elective abortion up to the moment of birth.
Or, we could even agree that 'Women are far worse than Men', as seen by the many pink clad feminists who currently demand a 'Not Guilty' verdict for Lindsey Clancy, even after she confessed many times to murder of her own children.
It's also possible that agriculture production just led naturally to a change in diet, after the gourmands of the period discovered that a preponderance of wine & fava beans pairs extremely well with delicious young female flesh.
I personally recommend a nice Chianti.
Best
_____
I put it to you that Male Competition, Toxic Masculinity & Men (in general) created our technological Human Civilization in its Totality, largely for the benefit of their female partners & their mutual posterity, and it's literally insane to discard historically-proven male productivity & its associated impulses in the vain pursuit of some sort of meek, genderless & inoffensive communal utopia.
Bronze age kings were no fun either.
Approximately 80% of homicide victims in the United States are male, with a victimization rate of roughly 9.3 to 12.8 per 100,000 males annually. That's a violent death rate for American males today at about 0.01%
Evidence from skeletal remains in European studies shows that, while not universal, violence was common, with over 10% of individuals in some areas exhibiting unhealed, weapon-related trauma. Some researchers, such as Steven Pinker, estimate around 15% of deaths in pre-historic, small-scale societies were violent.
So in round numbers, the Bronze Age was about 1,000x more violent than modern society.
'
Which puts a new light on what the Greeks did to the Trojans, what Joshua did to the Canaanites, and what the Assyrians did to everyone.
Nuts.
Locum started with an interesting premise, swerved off into the ditch, then made a tacky joke.
Anyone familiar with the Ancestral Pueblans (previously known as Anasazi) and their relatively sudden cultural disappearance? There are a number of theories, one or several of which may be true: a Great Drought which made agriculture nearly impossible, too many people for the carrying capacity of the area, internecine fighting, the list continues. During the 13th century, various groups staged vicious raids on each other, leaving literal piles of bodies, all genders and ages, in some places, under the dramatic and defensible cliff dwellings. Often stockpiles of corn were torched, although that seems like a strange thing to do if you yourself were starving; OTOH, there is evidence of occasional cannibalism. The best guess is that while everything fell apart, people simply picked up and left an area that had become too hard to live in. A difference which might explain the equal-opportunity killing is that to the best of our knowledge, the tribes of that time, like their modern descendants, were matrilineal. Just a somewhat interesting and possibly relevant infodump.
Celt I'm not sure your maths is fully correct. You are comparing annual rates with lifetime rates. Still the difference between then and now was big, very big.
RIP Dolly Parton.
Thank you Tennessee
"Often stockpiles of corn were torched, although that seems like a strange thing to do if you yourself were starving"
Popcorn?
Dang! The wrong 80-year-old.
Since TheMadLibrarian referenced the southwestern 'Pueblo Culture', I'm returning the favour by referencing the Chacoan Culture, the ancestral homeland of the Puebloans, a civilization which flourished about 1000 to 1500 years ago, built multistory stone buildings, a geometric roadway system extending hundred of miles, an elaborate irrigation network, farmed a giant extinct species of turkeys & flourished about 1,000 to 1,200 years ago until it was wiped out by Climate Change.
https://www.nationalparks.org/explore/parks/chaco-culture-national-historical-park
https://www.worldhistory.org/Chaco_Canyon/
Climate Change is also credited with turning a vast tropical paradise, complete with elephants & hippopotami, into Death Valley about 10,000 years ago and, boy, that just proves that Climate Change is a Time-Traveling Fool because 'The Science' knows that only the human sin of fossil-fuel use can change the global climate.
And. for the record, I LIKE TACKY JOKES, even though TML's references to the Puebloan's 'matrilineal' and 'cannibalistic' tendencies made my Hannibal Lector & Swiftian Modest Proposal joke somewhat less funny by zeroing in the obvious truth behind cannibalism as a potential cause of an evolutionary human bottleneck.
But, right here & right now, let's all agree to blame the Male Patriarchy forever & ever for humanity's many flaws because 'men are BAD', mkay ??
Best
Here's another datum to process: men can handle twice the alcohol that women can. Ask any frat boy how to have your way with her, and he'll answer: get her drunk. I see in this a glimpse into the deep past, namely how the Y bottleneck ended. The 16 out of 17 men discovered a magic potion, namely beer, that'll make her lose control before he loses ability. This workaround to the big-man sexual monopoly meant that men who swooned late, and women who swooned early, were favored reproductively in the next generation. Also, a magic sex potion would persuade even the proudest of hunters to farm wheat for beer.
I suspect the bottleneck explanation isn't as simple as anyone wants it to be. Multiple factors could be at work.
No matter the "cause", the effect isn't that males die. It is that they fail to reproduce successfully. That could mean death, but it can also mean anything else between castration and what children they do have failing to produce grandchildren. If they have any children who then fail to have more, the original father would still measure as having failed in terms of the bottleneck because the real measure is whether (and by how much) their Y chromosome is present in the modern population countless generations later.
Sure. Beer and petty Kings would do the trick. How much would that matter? Hard to know, but petty Kings can be responsible for all sorts of shenanigans.
Don't neglect the fact that this bottleneck also happens to coincide with when we were domesticating grains. Early yields were nutritionally sucky. Fermenting them would have unlocked needed calories at the cost of surrendering some of them to yeasty beasties. Alcohol is definitely a poison to which some of our ancestors developed partial immunity, but poor nutrition also leads to early death and reproduction failures. Early harvests could have reduced life expectancy even without fermentation and nothing does more damage to a child's reproductive chances than having one or both of their parents die young.
I STRONGLY suspect we got out of the bottleneck using a collection of useful coincidences. Some of us became more alcohol tolerant, but the nutritional value of all those domestic grains eventually rose at about the same time. Later generations of farmers ate better because the ancestors put in the sweat to domesticate the crap out of anything that would grow.
I suspect beer was actually a net positive and only lightly involved in the bottleneck. Petty kings were likely more involved.. Worst, though, would have been having your father die young for any reason at all. Fathers have a lot to do with whether their sons are reproductive successes and matter almost not at all when it comes to their daughters. There is a reason why many cultures treat women almost as property.
Alfred yes, beer could have added effects than getting bilious drunks killed. Yes, men who could hold their beer might also have made better seducers.
In both cases you get males who can control their susceptibility becoming favored, real fast.
...sigh... desperate to attribute thoughts I never expressed, poor loc ignores the core science here. that women suffered NO major population fall and almost all got to breed. Sigh. More jibberjabber.
Bigger question. How come I get all these ideas and can only get folks to heed them here, among 20,000 on FB and through novels. I must get back to novels!
I'll look at this later (I hope) as one of my spawn won't stop talking. Once in a while I look up old bands I used to listen to when I was a wee undergrad, and was pleasantly surprised to find one that is still around. One of their newer songs sounds like the sort of thing some people here might find amusing. It's called Kleptocracy, I'll paste the lyrics here for anyone who is curious but isn't a fan of the musical genre:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzNvDQ7Iav8&list=RDtzNvDQ7Iav8&start_radio=1
Kleptocracy
Go!
It doesn't matter who you voted for
They bought the man that you elected
Selling liberty and martial law
Installed the one that you rejected
And all the presidents and kings and queens
The revolution had ejected
Stole the money through the backroom door
To Deutsche Bank undetected (go)
And the Kremlin and the KGB
Under golden bed disinfected
Got the gossip on the GOP
And the candidate they selected (go)
Saudi money over Central Park
Khashoggi's body got dissected
With dirty slogans on the red bus door
The narcissist stole the exit (go)
It doesn't matter who you voted for
They bought the man that you elected (go)
Selling liberty and martial law
Installed the one that you rejected (go)
And all the presidents and kings and queens
The revolution had ejected (go)
Stole the money through the backroom door
To Deutsche Bank undetected (go)
the core science here.(is) that women suffered NO major population fall and almost all got to breed.
That 'almost all' women got to breed during the Y bottleneck, that's a helluva assumption there with a paucity of supportive data, unless you have an accurate population census from before & after said bottleneck, when all we have is a mathematical estimate that suggests a female-to-male reproductive ratio of 17 to 1.
Is our fine host aware of some sort of super secret female genetic marker of which the typical medical specialist is unaware, aside from the postulated Mitochondria Eve which gifted identical mitochondrial DNA to ALL human women about 200,000 years before said bottleneck ?
And, what if some sort of disaster suddenly reduced the adult female breeding pool by 30, 60 or 90%, leaving most men without a breeding partner at a ratio of 17-to-1, couldn't some future doofus conclude that ALL surviving woman (who gave birth to surviving progeny) got to breed?
And, that's the very definition of 'Survivorship Bias', when one concludes that the women who gave birth to surviving progeny represent ALL WOMEN, not just the survivors.
Best
______
BTW, short stories are far superior to the novel, as brevity creates intensity and length allows for mostly digression.
The Trump years saw the deaths of my two favorite performers: Dolly Parton and David Bowie.
Nice!
What I don't understand is: Deutsche Bank's Supervisory Board has some members - like Siegmar Gabriel and certain Union leaders - who should be a guard against the forms of malpractice always accused of.
On the other hand, some board members are connected to American financial institutes:
https://investor-relations.db.com/corporate-governance/organizational-structure/supervisory-board?kid=aufsichtsrat.redirect-en.shortcut&language_id=3
Yet, no leaks of classified information concerning black money (though that could and would be a felony in some cases).
Total change of subject, but has anyone else noticed how crappy Reddit in particular and social media in general have gotten?
One of my favorite reddit links was a weekly posing on subreddit r/collapse based on the collapse this week substack. But now the poster who has been doing this weekly for almost a decade has been forbidden to post his copied content.
https://lastweekincollapse.substack.com/p/last-week-in-collapse-august-16-22
I know how he feels..
I've posted on reddit for over a decade (having 10,000+ karma at one point) and have been permabanned for unknown reasons. None of the mods (assuming they are even human anymore) will tell me why..
And don't get me started on the twin floods of forced ad placements and AI slop in the comments section.
Please never change Dr Brin you are last refuge on an internet that has gone rancid.
Another example of internet fora going downhill, Quora. In its earliest inception it was excellent. Over the years and through several distinct changes it has changed drastically and is now largely bots. And the worst bots, worse than the catfishers and other scams, are the Quora AI bots that Quora now uses to not only create questions, but to write answers.
The latest change they've made is that the criteria for what answers users are shown have been weighted in favor of Quora's AI generated answers. Top writers that used to win writer of the year awards and get 10s to 100s of thousands of views per answer saw their reads drop by up to 70% almost overnight. Even much smaller fish, such as I, noticed this sudden change. A consistent frequency of my relatively infrequent answers used to pretty reliably get a decent number of reads, and then suddenly almost nothing.
There are still some good people writing good stuff there, but you have to work to find their stuff. AI is ruining everything.
True, certain years in anyone's lifetime will see peak violence. But overall, on average, the Bronze Age was an incredibly violent time. A time when Yahweh, who would later get a complete rewrite in the New Testament as a God of universal love and compassion, could command the following:
Deuteronomy 7:1–2, 20:16–17
When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you— 2 and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally.[a] Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. 3 Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons,
Deuteronomy 25:17–19,
“Remember what Amalek did to you son the way as you came out of Egypt, 18 how he attacked you on the way when you were faint and weary, and cut off your tail, those who were lagging behind you, and he did not fear God. 19 Therefore when the Lord your God has given you rest from all your enemies around you, in the land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance to possess, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven; you shall not forget.
Exodus 17:14
14 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Write this on a scroll as something to be remembered and make sure that Joshua hears it, because I will completely blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven.”
1 Samuel 15:2–3
2 Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘I have noted what Amalek did to Israel din opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. 3 Now go and strike Amalek and edevote to destruction1 all that they have. Do not spare them, fbut kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’ ”
Joshua 6:21
21 They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.
Joshua 8
Then the Lord said to Joshua, “Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged. Take the whole army with you, and go up and attack Ai. For I have delivered into your hands the king of Ai, his people, his city and his land. 2 You shall do to Ai and its king as you did to Jericho and its king, except that you may carry off their plunder and livestock for yourselves.
24 When Israel had finished killing all the men of Ai in the fields and in the wilderness where they had chased them, and when every one of them had been put to the sword, all the Israelites returned to Ai and killed those who were in it. 25 Twelve thousand men and women fell that day—all the people of Ai. 26 For Joshua did not draw back the hand that held out his javelin until he had destroyed[a] all who lived in Ai. 27 But Israel did carry off for themselves the livestock and plunder of this city, as the Lord had instructed Joshua.
Numbers 31:1-18
The Lord said to Moses, 2 “Take vengeance on the Midianites for the Israelites. After that, you will be gathered to your people.”
13 Moses, Eleazar the priest and all the leaders of the community went to meet them outside the camp. 14 Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle.
15 “Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. 16 “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
(cont.)
This was normal warfare in the Bronze Age southwest Asia. And everyone else was as bad or worse than the Israelites. The royal annals of the Assyrian empire openly boasted of extreme brutalities, including mass flaying, impaling, blinding, and the total destruction of rebellious cities.
Today we call that strategic bombing.
Hundreds of thousands of people from conquered populations were systematically uprooted and relocated across the empire to break local national identities and assimilate regions.
Today we call that "ethnic cleansing", something the Israelites suffered in the Babylonian Exile and are now inflicting on the Palestinians.
It's ruining everything because it's not AI. It's a parlor trick.
And yes I know that the Canaanites. Midanites and Amelikites all survived these supposed exterminations, reappearing later in the Old Testament, but that's not the point. And its not locker room hyperbole like "we murdered the other school's basketball team", though Bronze Age god-Kings did a lot of hyperbole.
What matter is the intent, even if the Israelites lacked the follow though to complete their mass slaughter and then exaggerated about it later. The God of the universe commanded that this be done. What matters isn't what the Israelites imperfectly accomplished, what matters is what Yahweh intended.
Speaking of hyperbole, the fact that there is no ancient Egyptian record of the Exodus doesn't mean it never happened.
No Pharaoh was ever going to record a humiliating defeat.
There is something to be said of the theory that Moses was an Egyptian nobleman and priest of the Pharaoh Akhenaten. Freud claimed that after Akhenaten died and his monotheistic sun-worship religion was suppressed, Moses chose a group of Semitic slaves (the Israelites), led them out of Egypt, and gave them Akhenaten's monotheistic religion.
Akhenaten died just before the Bronze Age Collapse around 1200 bc. You can easily imagine a subsequent power struggle in the Egyptian priesthood between tractional polytheists and upstart monotheists. The polytheists won and the few remaining monotheists like Moses had to flee.
With the Bronze Age collapse, the fall of Troy, and the Exodus all occurring more or less in the same century, a group of exiles could have made their escape in all of the confusion of the collapse. Combine that with the purely natural series of events that triggered the ten plagues of Egypt (see my previous post) and you have the story of the Exodus.
scidata,
I get what you mean, calling this current stuff Artificial Intelligence is inaccurate and deceptive. The actual capabilities are a big step forward and can be extremely useful. But pretending they are true AI and trying to use them as if they are, and developing dozens of computing centers that each use the power of a small city, that does run the gamut from parlor trick to self deception. IMO.
Breaking on the Stephanie Miller show.
Actor Tim Curry dead at age 80.
Yesterday, we heard that Dolly Parton also died at age 80.
These things come in threes, right?
"The God of the universe commanded that this be done. What matters isn't what the Israelites imperfectly accomplished, what matters is what Yahweh intended."
That's some evidence for Dave Sim's interpretation that YHWH* is not really the same entity as God Almighty, but an earthbound spirit who tries to pretend to be God and is convinced that he/she/it is in fact God.
* YHWH in the Hebrew Bible, translated as "The LORD God" in the King James version.
There is a big problem facing men who want to have harems.
Fratricide.
All those sons are potential rivals for the throne and no emperor has the time to be a good father to his male offspring. That produces a family full of ambitious psychopaths
Its the primary reason the Parthian empire (Rome:s eastern rival) fell. Constant civil wars and assassinations between half brothers tore the empire apart.
The Ottoman empire solved this problem by strangling every half brother of the heir to the throne eliminating potential rivalries.
But it also eliminated the point of having many sons and spreading your genes to future generations.
The one man who avoided this problem seems to be Ghengiz khan. 20% of Asians can supposedly can claim him as an ancestor.
Now that is an evolutionary success story.
This may be of interest here.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/26/fake-thinktank-israel-ai-propaganda
TL:DR
In-depth analysis of a website apparently designed to influence LLM and their chatbots' behavior by shaping source training material. Worth pondering even disregarding the Israeli connection since this is well within the means of most governments and oligarchs.
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.))
You overlook something.
While rape and prostitution might have been a thing, I would also say that settlers married converted women, because Terra Nova had a surplus of males.
Also, patriarchs had their madames with the knowing and blessing of their wife; to an extend, this is still part of mediterran and catholic culture.
While I won't whitewash the Spanish conquest and oppression, it had more layers to it.
In contrast, protestant settlers, already deep in a philosophy of racial dominance, treated the Native Americans differently. They chose annihilation over assimilation. Up to the last century, I might add.
Heh. It's probably been said a bazillion times... but shouldn't you be writing more stories? Your novels speak of your politics in a form more will read while we are a tiny small audience.
I'm not poking you, though. Do what makes sense to you. It's not as though you aren't writing at all. 8)
You obviously haven't ready the papers from the last decade or so.
mDNA has a reasonably well known mutation rate. Same goes for our Y-chromosome. We can make estimates for what the sample variety should look like using samples from various historical sources. The dead still speak to us essentially..
Everything looks like somewhat steady mutation rates for both until you work back about 6K years. The exact window depends on where you get your dead bodies, but the broadest one is from 8K to 4K years ago. Most everywhere on Earth we see an oddity for the Y-chromosome suggesting the male/female ratio for non-breeders jumped from our typical 3-4:1 to about 15-17:1. For some reason, male children suffered an elevated risk of failing to reproduce.
A LOT of DNA has to be sequenced to get good sample sets, so the earliest papers were kinda fuzzy on the timeline. We have a lot more data now and can see something odd happened shortly before humanity invented writing systems and right in the middle of the era when we were domesticating what became our modern food sources.
They found a way to make StarShip look small.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTIaZaDn-84
Lovely poetry! Though kinda unkind to the thousands of sincere and honest civil servants and... yes... 50%+ of Democratic politicians.
Alfred why bother with a jibbering dope? Everything he doesn't understand is because others who do understand it... don't
Well at least you have COntrary Brin...
Der Oger, almost nothing that you said there is functionally true, alas no time to instruct.
Dolly & Tim Curry weregreat in Country Horror Garter Show.
From PBS:
It’s estimated that as many as 25-50 percent of Native American women were sterilized between 1970 and 1976.
Link: https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilization-and-eugenics-programs-in-the-united-states/
That, Sir, is a form of genocide, I believe.
Apparently, CIA director Ratcliffe visited Moscow to warn Russia to refrain from attacks on NATO countries. Things could get ugly fast, especially If we look at how Putin heeded the warnings of the last director visiting Moscow, and the current shape of the alliance.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/26/cia-russia-nato-moscow-ratcliffe-01051848
10,000 years ago, Death Valley was transitioning from a cooler, wetter Ice Age environment into the hot, arid desert seen today. The glaciers were in retreat releasing massive amounts of fresh water into the North American environment.
Its not that the climate never changes. What matters is the rapidity of change today caused by human greenhouse gas emissions. What once took Mother Nature millennia is now being accomplished in decades by a CO2 atmospheric percentage that the Earth has not seen since the Miocene Epoch 14 million years ago, a time when the Northern Hemisphere was completely ice free.
Humanity didn't evolve in this hot house environment. Our species was not designed to survive in it. No modern humans or members of the genus Homo lived during the Miocene epoch; instead, this era saw the first appearance of early hominins (bipedal apes on the human lineage) and a great diversity of ancestral apes.
Human civilization exists only because it started in an unusually stable climate equilibrium of the recent Holocene Epoch after the end of the last ice age. Civilization won't survive a return to hothouse conditions. Economies won't survive mass destruction from ever more extreme weather. Millions of humans won't survive inevitable "wet bulb events" generated by massive heat domes. 10s of millions more will die in mass migrations and widespread violence as governments collapse.
I would think a racist like yourself would be fighting against climate change if only to keep those darker skinned hordes that you so fear from flooding over the Rio Grande and the Med as they try to escape the hellish conditions of the Global South (like the millions of Syrian refugees that flooded into Europe and triggered the Brexit vote as Britain feared being swarmed by dark skinned people as a result of the EU's open borders policy).
And it is now inevitable because of idiots like yourself whose climate denial made it impossible to act in time and condemns our grandkids to a hell hole world.
Thanks Chat GPT
If the Earth's climate rapidly reverted back to that of the Miocene epoch (specifically the Middle Miocene Climatic Optimum about 15 million years ago), it would cause the collapse of modern human civilization. Humans have built every major city, agricultural system, and infrastructure network around the highly stable climate of the last 11,000 years.
A sudden shift to the Miocene baseline would introduce a warmer, drastically reorganized planet that cannot sustain a population of billions.
The Reverted Miocene BaselineGlobal Temperatures: Average global surface temperatures would rise by 3°C to 6°C (5.4°F to 10.8°F) above pre-industrial levels.
Atmospheric \(CO_{2}\): Carbon dioxide levels would sit between 400 and 500+ parts per million (ppm), a threshold humanity is rapidly approaching.
Sea Levels: Global oceans would rise by 23 to 40 meters (75 to 130 feet).
Poles: The Arctic would be completely ice-free, and the Antarctic ice sheet would severely retract, replaced by temperate forests
Phase 1: Immediate Infrastructure Drowning
Because a vast percentage of humanity lives near coastlines, a 40-meter sea-level rise would permanently submerge the world's financial, political, and cultural hubs.
Lost Cities: Tokyo, New York, London, Shanghai, Mumbai, Cairo, and Rio de Janeiro would become underwater ruins.
Supply Chain Severance: Nearly all of the world's primary shipping ports, coastal rail lines, and low-lying airports would be instantly eliminated.
Economic Implosion: The loss of real estate, maritime trading hubs, and industrial zones would trigger a permanent global economic depression.
Phase 2: Agricultural Failure and Mass Starvation
Humanity relies on predictable, seasonal weather patterns to grow specialized crops like wheat, rice, and corn. The Miocene climate would violently disrupt this stability.
Equable Climate Shifts: The temperature difference between the equator and the poles would flatten out dramatically. This would alter global jet streams, permanently shifting traditional rain belts.
Breadbasket Desertification: Regions that feed the world today—such as the American Midwest, the European plain, and parts of China—would face permanent drought or erratic, extreme monsoons.
Massive Crop Failures: Modern crop varieties would fail to survive the relentless, extreme summer heatwaves across mid-latitude zones.
Phase 3: The Refugee Crisis and Geopolitical Conflict
The displacement of billions of people due to rising seas and unlivable inland temperatures would shatter global governance.
Resource Wars: Sovereign nations would inevitably go to war over remaining fertile land, shrinking freshwater reservoirs, and habitable territory.
Uninhabitable Zones: Massive bands around the tropics and sub-tropics would reach wet-bulb temperatures lethal to human physiology, forcing billions to flee toward the warming poles.
Phase 4: Decentralization and a New Hominid Epoch
Humanity as a species would likely survive because of our technological adaptability, but organized global civilization would fragment into decentralized, localized societies.
Green Polar Settlements: Humanity's center of gravity would shift to the far north (Canada, Siberia, Scandinavia) and the newly exposed, greening edges of Antarctica.
Tech Regression: Without the interconnected global supply chains required to manufacture microchips, deep-sea drills, and advanced medicine, humanity would likely regress to agrarian, low-tech, or nomadic survival models.
An Irony of Evolution: In an ironic twist of deep time, the Miocene was the historic "golden age of apes" that fostered early hominid evolution. The remaining humans would find themselves living like their earliest ancestors—adapting to a lush, wild, and volatile greenhouse world.
Hello. Hope preparations for the con are going well.
I've been a bit busy myself the last few days so, although I've glanced through the posting, I haven't got around to commenting until now. A pity, since something I've been reading strikes a chord. Well, I'll see what you think.
So, the Y bottleneck. Every time this comes up I query where the indigenous Australians fit in (I'll refer to them as just 'Australians' here). This time, I note the bottleneck is specifically applied to Europe, Africa, and Asia. Not Australia. Fair enough. For the record, a 2016 study found the indigenous Y phenotype split off from the European about 50,000 years ago. Some Y exchange with India is noted but, generally speaking, there is no big influx until Europeans arrived. Strange, since there was some trade going on with peoples in Melanesia and the Indonesian Archipelago.
That the bottleneck occurred wherever farming developed is, at first sight, also in keeping with its absence in Australia. However, 'farming' in the Australian context is not something that Europeans would (or did) recognise. Australians did gather harvests, and they did form large communities at times, even permanent buildings. However, the usual mode of existence were collections of small clans moving from one established camp to another as seasons warranted. They travelled light, with heavier equipment stored at regular camp sites.
The indigenous experience with alcohol definitely backs up the idea of it sorting the lads out over time. This raises an interesting point: indigenous peoples were the first people known to mill flour. Grinding stones as old as 30,000 years have been found! And yet... no beer.
The book I'm reading at the moment relates to Aboriginal Astronomy ('Big Sky' a collaboration between Bruce Pascoe of 'Dark Emu' fame(?) and astrophysicist Prof. Ray Norris). It covers at least 65,000 years of history, and what I found relevant to this post was this passage Pascoe writes to describe how stable Australian civilisation was over that time:
[He starts by quoting an observer from nearly a century ago:]
"The blacks do not fight over land. There are no wars or invasions to seize territory. They do not enslave each other. There is no master-servant relation. There is no class division. There is no property or income inequlaity. The result is a homeostasis, far reaching and stable."
[Pascoe embellishes:]
First Nations' civilisation in Australia was highly structured. Responsibility for particular areas of the continent were mandated by a system of lores of First Nations groups. The complexity of these social and legal structures has never received proper consideration by the colonists. A culture that eschews kings and queens, armies, accumulation of wealth, slavery and property is rare in the world but has never been more important. Human flaws weren't eliminated, but they were better controlled by the underlying philosophy and political regimen.
[Another quote from another source:]
"With the bases for tribal interaction established and territorial borders drawn, there was food, land and property entitlementand identity for everyone. There were also rules for conduct, protection against adverse forces and immunity from illness - mankind had been organised into peaceful co-existence"
... ctd.
This is in stark contrast to Western culture, which could summed up with:
We burn the candle at both ends,
it will not last the night.
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends,
it casts a lovely light.
The Australian society described by Pascoe sounds idyllic. It's easy to dismiss it by saying it just never achieved the 'beer and kings' phase of development, but it strikes me as more complicated than that: where did 'lores of First Nations groups' come from, and how did it all hold together for 65,000 years (assuming it didn't develop later)? It was clearly fragile at the end: so much of it is now lost in the trampled mud of European conquest. And was it stale? Was the 'system of lores' another way to suppress the 'criticism of power' and stifle innovation? Was the end result just the 'fields of dreamless solitude' that Arcane's Viktor* found at the end of his 'Glorious Evolution'?
Well, this is why studying other societies is important: they provide lessons, and warnings.
* One of the most brilliant pieces of animated story telling you are ever likely to see, incidentally.
In this alcohol discussion, I would like mention one thing that could also have been a beneficial effect: It kept beverages free of germs, to a degree. Medieval city-dwellers almost always served watered-down beer, and the Romans did the same with wine even if they did much to improve quality). Dysenteria was a serious threat and end to many rulers and armies.
I used to be a writer for environmental and energy trade magazines (distributed energy, msw management, etc.) for almost three decades.
New owners figured out they didn't have to pay writers if they got the advertisers to write their own copy.
And now AI has taken over that job
Tony. All of that is accepted, but with one meta. Western GUILT over their g-grandparents' crimes and eagerness to study and make amends is THE salient fact about all this. Inclusiveness is indicative of taking steps toward worthiness for the stars.
Off to Worldcon! Hope to report from there....
It all seems to go back to the introduction of agriculture. Is there any evidence off the top of anyone's head that might suggest breeding crops for better yields, resiliency, etc. initially might have had some bad side effects?
Most men spent there time working in the fields, meanwhile the slackers were having sex with the women.
I'm kidding.
Maybe.
Agreed. Alcohol producing yeasts unlocked calories AND poisoned their environment making it difficult for other microbes to mess with us. All we needed was some minimal resistance to the poison which we've been slowly developing.
That's the underlying story of humanity's effort to domesticate our food supplies. Every step came with pros and cons. Nice-to-haves and wish-it-wasn't-so.
Definitely. Nutritional values sucked.
Consider the story of rice. The wild versions don't burst from their shells until the last moment. Humans who waited until that last moment lost a lot of the crop... but reaping early meant beating the grain out of the husk and suffering an immature version of it.
Later versions of rice eventually matured AND delayed bursting forth, but this took a LONG time to develop. When it did, it gave us time to harvest. Diet improved for rice eaters after that.
It worked the other way too. Just ask Lot and his daughters
Meh. I hope Dr Brin enjoys the complexities of Worldcon, because he most certainly does not understand complex involuted & interlocking biogenetic systems which can be said to be (obliquely) 'self-correcting', if only in the sense that significant errors undergo permanent automatic genetic deletion.
As Alfred says, Everything looks like somewhat steady mutation rates for both until you work back about 6K years, my sole point being that 'looks' can being deceiving, resulting in a category error if said 'Y experts' then misapply straight-line logic to calculate that the human Y chromosome (TMRCA) is exactly 160,000 to 338,000 years old and will disappear entirely in another 4.1 million years.
Of course, our very fine host combines the elements of both the zealot & the crackpot, as evidenced by his conflicting claims that ancestral humans were simultaneously praiseworthy heroes yet AWFUL toxic criminals (1) who built a terrible society of which he is terribly "proud to be a member", (2) who deserve 'Western Guilt' to atone for their grandparent's sociopathy, (3) who must reject their sinful humanity in order to achieve human 'perfection' and (4) who must don sackcloth & ashes in order to become 'worthy of the stars'.
Personally, I have little use for such messianic claptrap. I am likewise PROUD to be an imperfect human being... at this very moment in time... not despite but because of my very many flaws, as it is our flaws that make us human, which is why you'll get no more apologies from me & mine.
Best
__________
TheMadLibrarian's asks about agricultural-driven dietary adaptions.
From beer to dairy to grain, human beings were not initially able to tolerate & thrive on these foodstuffs. They had to acquire that ability gradually over time, as those who could not metabolize certain foodstuffs gradually died out & were replaced by the children of those who could, giving rise many racially specific adaptions.
Dairy & Alcohol Tolerance are mostly white Northern European genetic adaptions, gained from untold centuries of natural selection, and those who lack this specific genetic heritage are unable to tolerate these foodstuffs in even small amounts, as in the case of lactose-intolerant & alcohol-sensitive South Asians.
In contrast, Northern Europeans historically consumed less grain, hence their relative intolerance to cereal-based glutens, as evidenced by a 4 to 8 fold increased incidence of Celiac's Disease (aka Gluten Enteropathy) affecting those of Northern European extraction as opposed to Asians, Blacks & Hispanics.
25-50 percent of Native American women were sterilized between 1970 and 1976".... "Step up with wager stakes ! I would love to own a home in Germany. Bet absolutely everything! I'll let you live there, cheap. Some of the things you've been saying are half-truths. The rest are dizzy sanctimony hallucinations. And I mean diametrically opposite to true.
No time to detail. Worldcon summons us!
The 'meta' is certainly part of the renewed interest in aboriginal world views. Interestingly, aboriginal origin stories also refer to some sort of 'fall' that barred them from the sky (I don't think it's meant in a 'Von Daniken' way)
Anyway, off to the WorldCon stage with you! As thespians put it: 'break a leg.'
Pascoe refers to the seed of wild kangaroo grass as a 'superfood' that was cultivated over a much wider range than wheat, and has double the protein.
I suspect 60,000 years of land care, in any form. will have that sort of effect.
You STILL haven't read the papers. Obviously.
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