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Prehistoric Man Hunting Bears by Emmanuel Benner the Younger.

Neolithic Male Genetic Diversity Plummeted – Here’s Why

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Starting about 7,000 years ago, something weird seems to have happened to men: Over the next two millennia, recent studies suggest, their genetic diversity - specifically, the diversity of their Y chromosomes - collapsed. So extreme was that collapse that it was as if there was only one man left to mate for every 17 women.

Anthropologists and biologists were perplexed, but Stanford researchers now believe they've found a simple - if revealing - explanation. The collapse, they argue, was the result of generations of war between patrilineal clans, whose membership is determined by male ancestors.

The outlines of that idea came to Tian Chen Zeng, a Stanford undergraduate in sociology, after spending hours reading blog posts that speculated - unconvincingly, Zeng thought - on the origins of the "Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck," as the event is known. He soon shared his ideas with his high school classmate Alan Aw, also a Stanford undergraduate in mathematical and computational science.

"He was really waxing lyrical about it," Aw said, so the pair took their idea to Marcus Feldman, a professor of biology in Stanford's School of Humanities and Sciences. Zeng, Aw and Feldman published their results May 25 in Nature Communications.

"Woman Triumphant" by Rudolf Cronau. (1919). (Public Domain)

"Woman Triumphant" by Rudolf Cronau. (1919). (Public Domain)

A Cultural Culprit

It's not unprecedented for human genetic diversity to take a nosedive once in a while, but the Y-chromosome bottleneck, which was inferred from genetic patterns in modern humans, was an odd one. First, it was observed only in men - more precisely, it was detected only through genes on the Y chromosome, which fathers pass to their sons. Second, the bottleneck is much more recent than other biologically similar events, hinting that its origins might have something to do with changing social structures.

Certainly, the researchers point out, social structures were changing. After the onset of farming and herding around 12,000 years ago, societies grew increasingly organized around extended kinship groups, many of them patrilineal clans - a cultural fact with potentially significant biological consequences. The key is how clan members are related to each other. While women may have married into a clan, men in such clans are all related through male ancestors and therefore tend to have the same Y chromosomes. From the point of view of those chromosomes at least, it's almost as if everyone in a clan has the same father.

That only applies within one clan, however, and there could still be considerable variation between clans. To explain why even between-clan variation might have declined during the bottleneck, the researchers hypothesized that wars, if they repeatedly wiped out entire clans over time, would also wipe out a good many male lineages and their unique Y chromosomes in the process.

Cave art in Magura cave from between 10000-8000 years ago. (Public Domain)

Cave art in Magura cave from between 10000-8000 years ago. (Public Domain)

Computing Clans

To test their ideas, the researchers turned to mathematical models and computer simulations in which men fought - and died - for the resources their clans needed to survive. As the team expected, wars between patrilineal clans drastically reduced Y chromosome diversity over time, while conflict between non-patrilineal clans - groups where both men and women could move between clans - did not.

Zeng, Aw and Feldman's model also accounted for the observation that among the male lineages that survived the Y-chromosome bottleneck, a few lineages underwent dramatic expansions, consistent with the patrilineal clan model, but not others.

Now the researchers are looking at applying the framework in other areas - anywhere "historical and geographical patterns of cultural interactions could explain the patterns you see in genetics," said Feldman, who is also the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor.

Feldman said the work was an unusual example of undergraduates driving research that was broad both in terms of the academic disciplines spanned - in this case, sociology, mathematics and biology - and in terms of its potential implications for understanding the role of culture in shaping human evolution. And, he said, "Working with these talented guys is a lot of fun."

Top image: Prehistoric Man Hunting Bears by Emmanuel Benner the Younger. Source: Public Domain

The article, originally titled ‘Wars and clan structure may explain a strange biological event 7,000 years ago,’ was first published on Science Daily.

Stanford University. "Wars and clan structure may explain a strange biological event 7,000 years ago." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 29 May 2018. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180529185356.htm

References

Tian Chen Zeng, Alan J. Aw, Marcus W. Feldman. Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck. Nature Communications, 2018; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-04375-6

 

Comments

Not sure how it debunks his argument. The fact that women are stolen from the other tribe doesn't mean that the theft wasn't sanctioned by mothers of the stealers. There is plenty of evidence that mothers were the ones who arranged marriages in later, more civilized times in many societies. And while i am not extrapolating and say, that it is a direct result of some prehistoric heritage (nor i even agree with original poster), but i do say that matrilineal society makes much more sense when you have few females and many males. It is much easier to trace your lineage and solidify the tribe around the common heritage in this circumstances, especially in the age where there was no DNA paternity testing.

Tuatha there is evidence in the early myths of all cultures of wife stealing and cattle rustling; supported by archaeological evidence to as early as 5000BC cf Prehistoric Massacres. "The twin vices of women and cattle in prehistoric Europe." There are primitive tribes in South America who still carry out inter-tribal wife rustling - it makes good sense for genetic diversity and also compensates for equal birthing of females and the many female deaths in childbirth. https://web.archive.org/web/20080611045553/http://perfectirishgifts.com/...

As usual with this sort of speculation, it begins back to front & upside down by imagining that patriarchy as the baseline.
With that error all else becomes ludicrous, like preCopernican constructions of elaborate mechanisms trying to depict the heavens based on the Earth at the centre.
When matrilineal society is recognised as the base of human development, it is so much clearer that the dearth of men is just a result of their unsuitability for close settlement.
Try reading Marija Gimbutas or, more recently Richard Rudgley.
Or, for a real cleansing of the mental lens, Elaine Morgan.

Why do you assume this? The etymology of 'war' is a dispute over cattle. At it most basic level food (or resource to exchange for food). Remember this is 5000BCE, farming is prolific (people no longer need to feed themselves by hunting (a male pursuit) and gathering (a female pursuit). There are two potential strategies open to a clan (grow and store what you need) or take a weaker clans resources (food) by force. Say, your winter store of food has been taken, there are three potential responses: 1) perish 2) go and get it back (by force) or take a weaker communities food. When one clan raids another, it tends to escalate to adjacent territories quite quickly, becoming global. However simple the model, if one or another clan is adopting a raiding strategy, it escalates to adjacent territories or to other areas if they acquire enough resource (or others) to grow and continue this strategy. To counter these communities need to organise themselves to protect themselves from raids and into what happened next: societies and city-states, paying a small amount of your harvest in tax to provide soldiers to defend the state - as appose to the risk of having it all taken away. Which appears to be what happen next. It would explain why people begrudgingly gave labour and or a percentage of their output to those that organised this protection. Clan raids could grow like a virus, but ultimately are doomed if they kill off the host (food production), then returns to a steady state, but interestingly there may have been a practical need to organise communities into clans and then into societies to defend your way of life.

And of course this happened on a world wide sacle, don't be silly

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