300 kya first Homo sapiens
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens
Based on Schlebusch et al., “Southern African ancient genomes estimate modern human divergence to 350 ka to 260 ka[2] Fig. 3(H. sapiens divergence times)
Southern African ancient genomes estimate modern human divergence to 350,000 to 260,000 years ago
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H. sapiens most likely developed in the Horn of Africa between 300 kya and 200 kya.[7][8] all modern non-African populations are substantially descended from populations of H. sapiens that left Africa after that time.
There were at least several “out-of-Africa” dispersals of modern humans, possibly beginning as early as 270,000 years ago, including 215,000 years ago to at least Greece,[9][10][11] and certainly via northern Africa about 130,000 to 115,000 years ago.[12][13][14][15][16][17]These early waves appear to have mostly died out or retreated by 80,000 years ago.[18]
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The “gracile” or lightly built skeleton of anatomically modern humans has been connected to a change in behavior, including increased cooperation and “resource transport”.[38][39]
144 kya Genetic bottleneck
Human population reduced to less than 5,000 individuals.
70 kya Out of Africa
the mounting evidence that Homo sapiens actually left Africa at least 120,000 years ago, not 60,000, possibly that painting proves not that Neanderthals could draw but that modern humans got to Spain earlier than thought.
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Gene sequencing has changed all this. The African Eve hypothesis, that we are all descendant from one woman and about a half dozen men living in the Kenya/Tanzania region, is strongly supported by data from mitochondrial DNA (inherited only maternally) and by Y-chromosome data (inherited only paternally).
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Grasslands emerged on six continents only after the cataclysmic celestial impact 66 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs and coincided with dramatic tectonic shifts that altered global biogeochemical cycles and drove continental-scale rain shadows.
The most significant “recent” wave took place about 60,000–70,000 years ago,[7][8] via the so-called “Southern Route”, spreading rapidly along the coast of Asia and reaching Australia by around 65,000–50,000 years ago,[19][20
Notably, although fully modern humans were already present in southern China at least as early as ~80,000 years ago, there is no evidence that they entered Europe before ~45,000 years ago. This could indicate that H. neanderthalensis was indeed an additional ecological barrier for modern humans, who could only enter Europe when the demise of Neanderthals had already started. http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2015/10/modern-humans-in-china-80000-years-ago.html
genetic evidence suggests humans may have gone through a population bottleneck of between 3,000 and 10,000 people about 70,000 BC, according to the Toba catastrophe theory. Volcano
Analyses of mitochondrial DNA have estimated that the major migration from Africa occurred 60,000–70,000 years ago,[51] consistent with dating of the Toba eruption to around 75,000 years ago.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5604018/
This story is similar to that of modern Eurasians, who also separated from an African population and then experienced a population size bottleneck and split into regional populations. The modern Eurasian diaspora seems to have been foreshadowed by another one, which happened more than half a million years earlier.
Upper Paleolithic 50,000 – 10,000 YBP ie: last third of stone age
19 kya Magdalenian period
The Magdalenian was a prehistoric Upper Paleolithic culture in western Europe that existed from approximately 19,000 to 14,000 calibrated years before present (cal BP). It represents the final major phase of the Paleolithic era, characterized by sophisticated tools made from bone and antler, permanent or seasonal settlements, and a flourishing of art like cave paintings and engravings. The culture is named after the archaeological site of La Madeleine in southwestern France.
15 kya Agriculture
In Old World archaeology, Mesolithic is the period between the Upper Paleolithic and the Neolithic It refers to the final period of hunter-gatherer cultures in Europe and Western Asia, between the end of the Last Glacial Maximum and the Neolithic Revolution. In Europe it spans roughly 15,000 to 5,000 BP; it is associated with a decline in the group hunting of large animals in favour of a broader hunter-gatherer way of life, and the development of more sophisticated and typically smaller lithic tools and weapons than the heavy chipped equivalents typical of the Paleolithic. Depending on the region, some use of pottery and textiles may be found in sites allocated to the Mesolithic
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About 13,000 years ago, more than three-fourths of the large Ice Age animals, including woolly mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed tigers and giant bears, died out. Scientists have debated for years over the cause of the extinction, with both of the major hypotheses — human overhunting and climate change — insufficient to account for the mega die-off. Maybe a comet?
11 kya end of Last Glacial Period (end of Pleistocene Epoch)
The Holocene is the name given to the last 11,700 years* of the Earth’s history — the time since the end of the last major glacial epoch, or “ice age.” Since then, there have been small-scale climate shifts — notably the “Little Ice Age” between about 1200 and 1700 A.D.
Estimates of the population of the world at the time agriculture emerged in around 10,000 BC have ranged between 1 million and 15 million.[20][21]
Around 10 kya, cattle were domesticated from as few as 80 progenitors in central Anatolia, the Levant and Western Iran.[1]
There is some evidence for settlements among foragers in the Near East, often near wetlands, around 12,000 BC, and field agriculture from about 10,000 BC. But the earliest evidence of states dates from 4000 BC, with permanently settled towns.
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“For at least 4000 years, there were settled communities but no evidence of state power”
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Around 12,000 BC, the world’s population stood at between two and four million; by 2000 BC, it was around 25 million. But the vast majority of people had no contact with states as late as the end of the 15th century – Europe’s middle ages.
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Scott describes the creation, from around 4000 BC, of what he calls “late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camps”. Faced with a shortage of wild resources, these made use of domesticated animals and plants. Life in these settlements was much tougher than foraging, and the daily drudgery, chronic illness and epidemics brought on by increased reliance on domesticated species are apparent in skeletal remains and sudden collapses in population.
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The populations in Scott’s camps developed even better craft skills and social cohesion.
Early state development around the world has another defining feature, a staple diet of cereals. By contrast, agricultures based on tubers or pulses have no fixed harvest period and create no stockpiles.
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8200 kya – 300 year mega-drought (and cold)
The Late Neolithic Genetic Bottleneck 5 kya – 7 kya
Male Y-chromosome diversity plummeted globally (Africa, Europe, Asia), while female mitochondrial DNA showed continuous growth, suggesting extreme reproductive disparity where few males (perhaps 1 in 17) reproduced. This dramatic loss of male lineage diversity is linked to the rise of patrilineal social structures and competition between male kin groups, potentially involving wealth/power accumulation or conflict, drastically reducing male effective population size despite overall population growth.
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Patrilineal segmentary systems provide a peaceful explanation for the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck – we propose an alternative hypothesis by modelling a segmentary patrilineal system based on anthropological literature.
Here we test the hypothesis that the Y-chromosome bottleneck is the result of a global shift towards patrilineal systems, associated with the transition to new subsistence systems on all continents over the past 12,000 years. Supporting this hypothesis, previous work has shown that kinship systems covary with production systems. Marlowe12 showed that patrilocality is over-represented in contemporary non-forager populations (mainly farmers and herders) compared to forager populations (60% and 34% of populations, respectively). Similarly, patrilineal descent is over-represented in non-foragers compared to foragers (47% and 14%, respectively). This has been famously summarised by Aberle: “the cow is the enemy of matriliny”.
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According to structural functionalists, patrilocality and patrilineality arise when resources can be accumulated. Indeed, with movable property, prosperous men can offer a bride price to the parents of marriageable young women, rather than moving in with their in-laws for bride service.
By 3000 BC, we have the first definitive evidence of city states, with kings, bureaucracies, compulsory labour, taxation and punishment for non-compliance.
Lisa Sparks who during the 2004 World Gangbang Championship slept with no fewer than 919 men in just 24 short hours
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/802330.Blood_Relations
Review has discussion of Malinowski’s influence on anthropology and displacement by sociobiology (E O Wilson), then primatology.
A fully evolutionist theory of culture had to await the publication of Richard Dawkins’ book ‘The Selfish Gene’.
http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/sites/default/files/pdf/pub_chris_thesis.pdf (1987)
Chris Knight: Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (1991)
Integrating perspectives of evolutionary biography and social anthropology within a Marxist framework, Chris Knight rejects the common assumption that human culture was a modified extension of primate behavior and argues instead that it was the product of an immense social, sexual, and political revolution initiated by women.
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With the collapse of all possibility of menstrual synchrony and solidarity, male sexual-political power comes to prevail. But such has been the centrality of menstruation to the language of ritual potency that when men do gain the ascendancy, no alternative language is available to them in which to express their power. Consequently, ritually-potent men must prove themselves guardians of the sacred blood. They must abstain from sex and “menstruate” in synchrony with one another, turning the traditional menstrual sex-strike against women themselves. At this point, female menstruation no longer has the force of a collective sex-strike; men keep control over their wives even during their periods. Marriage is no longer a periodic union or reunion but a permanent bond. Under these circumstances, the fact that women nevertheless continue to bleed constitutes a residual problem to be dealt with on male terms. With their blood still perceived by men as supernaturally dangerous and as a potential source of female ritual collectivity, women as blood-makers are deliberately and artificially isolated from one another. The result is that women experience their reproductive organs and processes no longer as sources of their power but as reasons for their exclusion from it. In short, threatened with rape, murder and other violent sanctions, women are ritually expropriated. They are forced to menstruate and give birth in isolation and seclusion, the potentiality for menstrual synchrony being suppressed and the collectivity and symbolic value initially associated with it being meanwhile appropriated by men.
Political power, in its incipient form as male sexual-political violence, takes over, cloaking itself however in its very antithesis – the non-violent, self-bleeding language of women’s ritual rule. This, it is argued, is perhaps the paradox of all paradoxes which anthropology has needed to unravel as the precondition for an understanding of how human gender-relationships cross-culturally have evolved.
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Finally, it is argued that each local manifestation of this global “supermyth” is a package in which, at the most fundamental level, two opposite messages are combined. One message – the obvious one which is transmitted ideologically – communicates an awareness of the dominance of male power and its associated values. The other message is a concealed one, expressed only through the internal formal logic or syntax of mythology; this communicates an awareness of the ultimate roots of ritual power – its basis in the suppressed potencies of women. An aim of the thesis is to decipher this second message as a step towards inverting the sexual-political functions of myths and fairy tales with which we are all familiar.
Double standard
http://libcom.org/history/engels-was-right-early-human-kinship-was-matrilineal
Cultures of Multiple Fathers by Stephen Beckerman and Paul Valentine
Loss of a wanted child is enormously costly to any human mother, making it best not to divulge but precisely to confuse accurate paternity information, taking extra lovers to distribute illusions among multiple males.
Whether these males contest or collude depends on the balance of costs and benefits involved. Where males strive to contest paternity, females may have an interest in driving up the costs
“Women’s reproductive interests are best served if mate choice is a non-binding, female decision; if there is a network of multiple females to aid or substitute for a woman in mothering responsibilities; if male support for a woman and her children comes from multiple men; and if a woman is shielded from the effects of male sexual jealousy.
Male reproductive interests, contrariwise, are best served by male control over female sexual behavior, promoting paternity certainty and elevated reproductive success for the more powerful males. This profile implies that men choose their own or their sons’ wives, and their daughters’ husbands; that marriage is a lifetime commitment and extra-marital affairs by women are severely sanctioned; and that this state of affairs is maintained by disallowing women reliable female support networks, or male support other than that of the husband and his primary male consanguines.”[41]
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The point stressed by Engels is that only a decisive social breakthrough could have solved this problem:
“For evolution out of the animal stage, for the accomplishment of the greatest advance known to nature, an additional element was needed: the replacement of the individual’s inadequate power of defense by the united strength and joint effort of the horde.… Mutual toleration among the adult males, freedom from jealousy, was…. the first condition for the building of those large and enduring groups in the midst of which alone the transition from animal to man could be achieved. And indeed, what do we find as the oldest, most primitive form of the family, of which undeniable evidence can be found in history, and which even today can be studied here and there? Group marriage, the form in which whole groups of men and whole groups of women belong to one another, and which leaves but little scope for jealousy’.
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According to the ‘grandmother’ hypothesis,[53][54][55] the selective advantage of distinctively human postmenopausal lifespans is that it enabled older women to assist their adult children in caring for and provisioning grandchildren. In genetic terms, a woman can never be as certain of her son’s offspring as she can of her daughter’s.
Female Status in Patriarchies
https://unherd.com/2021/09/the-truth-about-afghan-women/
A woman’s standing does not improve until she has adult sons; that gains her the right to lord it over her daughters-in-law, who instead of female solidarity, can expect one more tyrant.
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According to UNICEF, half of all deaths of Afghan women between the ages of 15 and 49 were attributable to untreated complications of pregnancy and childbirth — statistics straight out of the Middle Ages.
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But in Afghanistan, there was a clear overhang of males.
The reasons were no mystery. Good food and medical care were given first to boys and men. This made girls far more prone to illness and malnourishment, which led to stunted growth and immature bodies. Couple this with child marriage, and you have 12 and 13-year-old girls being impregnated, losing the baby, being berated for their failure and made to try again.