We Know Little About the Origins of High Patriarchy and the Extinction of Most Y-Chromosome Lineages ca. 5000 Years Ago, But...
Comment of the Day: Interesting from Graydon. But I do not see textiles as the problem. Yes, in the Odyssey Penelope, Kalypso, the 50 maidservants of Alkinous, Kirke, and the nymphs who are called Naiads are all spoken of as at their looms. Yes, the mother of Nausikaa, the 50 maidservants of Alkinous (again), Penelope (again), and the maidservants of Odysseus are all spoken of as at their spindles. Yes, in the Iliad Khryseis, Helen, Andromakhe, "a woman" are all spoken of as at their looms. yes, Andromakhe (again), "the fair spinster", and Kritheis are all spoken of as at their spindles. Textile work is (or does not have to be) not drudgery—it is (or can be) a very social activity, for to an experienced seamstress or spinner of weaver the cognitive load of the task is not large enough to discourage conversation.
Instead, I blame the Yamnaya: the Aryans, the Indo-Europeans, the Masters of the sword, the wheel, and the bow, who spread fire and sword and the chariot and the steed from Gibraltar and Cape Finisterre to the Deccan and even to the upper reaches of the Yellow River: Graydon: Feminism in the Long 20th Century: An In-Take from "Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the Long 20th Century": "If you look at the DNA information and compare it to historical timelines, patriarchy comes in after a period of clan-based warfare that wipes out most Y-chromosome lineages and does nothing to the diversity of X-chromosome lineages...
...It does this everywhere there's genetic data. The human trick is ganging up on problems, and there has obviously been heavy social selection for forms which create legitimacy for mass violence by elevating men as a category. This is not so much the invention of the idea of kings (there are a lot of ideas of kings) as the invention of the social notion of a father-of-all, extending the senior man in the clan to the senior man of a not-necessarily-related group.
What it's done economically is redefine women as slaves; you might (e.g., "white women") have a "may legitimately get an heir upon" and a "may not get an heir upon" category split, or you might not. This is of enormous economic value (e.g., childcare is still something no one will pay appropriately for if you consider the degree of skill and responsibility, not even as much as nursing gets (under) paid). This is where the whole concept of chattel slavery comes from; the idea that you could treat some male captives as though they were women comes later and is modeled on the status of women.
Why? Because what came through about that time is textiles. You need someone to do the unremitting drudgery, you need a very simple set of rules (because you're doing this with an illiterate society where a thousand people is a big settlement and ten thousand is a major city), and you need to be able to reward the enforcers (with an absolute right to sex without having to consider consent). The system perpetuates itself amazingly well for thousands of years.
It starts to change only when a machine-based textile industry breaks the economic relation between having clothing and consigning the female of the species to spinning.
Post-20th century creates a flexibility of co-operation contest, but it also creates a movement to forcibly simplify society back into women-as-chattel because all the existing power networks both assume and require that condition.
David Reich: Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (New York: Pantheon: 9781101870334: "In mitochondrial DNA data, all the studies found that most couples living in a population today have a very low probability of sharing a common ancestor along their entirely female line in the last ten thousand years... as expected if population sizes were large throughout this period...
...But on the Y chromosome, the studies found a pattern that was strikingly different. In East Asians, Europeans, Near Easterners, and North Africans, the authors found many Star Clusters with common male ancestors living roughly around five thousand years ago... the period in Eurasia that the archaeologist Andrew Sherratt called the “Secondary Products Revolution,” in which people began to find many uses for domesticated animals beyond meat production, including employing them to pull carts and plows and to produce dairy products and clothing such as wool. This was also around the time of the onset of the Bronze Age.... The Y-chromosome patterns reveal that this was also a time of greatly increased inequality, a genetic reflection of the unprecedented concentration of power in tiny fractions of the population that began to be possible during this time due to the new economy. Powerful males in this period left an extraordinary impact on the populations....
From ancient DNA combined with archaeology, we are beginning to build a picture of what this inequality might have meant. The period around five thousand years ago north of the Black and Caspian seas corresponds to the rise of the Yamnaya, who, as discussed in part II, took advantage of horses and wheels to exploit the resources of the open steppe for the first time.... Marija Gimbutas has argued that Yamnaya society was unprecedentedly sex-biased and stratified. The Yamnaya left behind great mounds, about 80 percent of which had male skeletons at the center, often with evidence of violent injuries and buried amidst fearsome metal daggers and axes. Gimbutas argued that the arrival of the Yamnaya in Europe heralded a shift in the power relationships between the sexes. It coincided with the decline of “Old Europe,” which according to Gimbutas was a society with little evidence of violence, and in which females played a central social role as is apparent in the ubiquitous Venus figurines....
Any attempt to paint a vivid picture of what a human culture was like before the period of written texts needs to be viewed with caution. Nevertheless, ancient DNA data have provided evidence that the Yamnaya were indeed a society in which power was concentrated among a small number of elite males. The Y chromosomes that the Yamnaya carried were nearly all of a few types, which shows that a limited number of males must have been extraordinarily successful in spreading their genes.... The descendants of the Yamnaya or their close relatives spread their Y chromosomes into Europe and India, and the demographic impact of this expansion was profound, as the Y-chromosome types they carried were absent in Europe and India before the Bronze Age but are predominant in both places today.
This Yamnaya expansion also cannot have been entirely friendly, as is clear from the fact that the proportion of Y chromosomes of steppe origin in both western Europe and in India today is much larger than the proportion of steppe ancestry in the rest of the genome. This preponderance of male ancestry coming from the steppe implies that male descendants of the Yamnaya with political or social power were more successful at competing for local mates than men from the local groups. The most striking example I know of is from Iberia in far southwestern Europe, where Yamnaya-derived ancestry arrived at the onset of the Bronze Age between forty-five hundred and four thousand years ago. Daniel Bradley’s laboratory and my laboratory independently produced ancient DNA from individuals of this period.28 We found that approximately 30 percent of the Iberian population was replaced along with the arrival of steppe ancestry. However, the replacement of Y chromosomes was much more dramatic: in our data around 90 percent of males who carry Yamnaya ancestry have a Y-chromosome type of steppe origin that was absent in Iberia prior to that time. It is clear that there were extraordinary hierarchies and imbalances in power at work in the expansions from the steppe....
When whole-genome data are used to reconstruct the size of the ancestral population of most agricultural groups in the last ten thousand years, they document population growth throughout this period, with no evidence of the Bronze Age population bottlenecks detected from Y chromosomes. This is not what one would expect from averaging the mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosomes. Instead, it is clear that the Y chromosome was a nonrepresentative part of the genome where certain genetic types were more successful at being passed down to later generations than others.... In this period, it began to be possible for single males to accumulate so much power that they could not only gain access to large numbers of females, but they could also pass on their social prestige to subsequent generations and ensure that their male descendants were similarly successful. This process caused the Y chromosomes these males carried to increase in frequency generation after generation, leaving a genetic scar that speaks volumes about past societies...
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#commentoftheday
#inequality
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