June
08
/ 2018
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 -
