…and not those belonging to Sydney Sweeney, either. This is serious stuff — and before you consign it to the “TL;DR” trope, allow me to draw you to this thought-provoking couple of paragraphs:
The development of farming and then animal herding greatly increased the number of humans—which continued to have evolutionary consequences for our species—and created productive assets (farms and animal herds) worth fighting over. Successful male teams (typically organised as clans) wiped out unsuccessful male teams and took their women as spoils.
Hence, there is a dramatic bottleneck in male lineages but not in female lineages. This pattern stopped with the development of chiefdoms and especially states, though not so much on the Steppes, whose states were more like super-chiefdoms and where intense competition over resources (and women) continued.
The whole article should be required reading for all faculty members in every university in the West.
What a great line (from the article):
“Men insult each other but they don’t mean it. Women compliment each other but they also don’t mean it.”
Just finished reading “Proto” by Laura Spinney about the Indo-European languages and she also touches on this bottle neck. The book can be a little confusing, but interesting in the way they track languages, genetics, and culture to determine the directions of migrations that bought the different languages to different regions of Europe and the sub continent.