Comments on "Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck"

I compare "Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck" with "Patriarchy and the origins of women’s oppression" by Sue Bull.p>

Bull (2023) write:

But the clan system started to break down under the pressure of a family system propelled by husband headed family units based on the individual labour of men in ploughing and herding. Boyle goes on to say: “Private property first developed through a gradual privatisation of communal property by an elite that used religion and war as cover and justification. In the process, women, like slaves, land and livestock, become their private property.”

It is in this context that inheritance became critical. Now, men wanted to prove that their children were their own, so monogamy intensified for women and their confinement became a growing requirement. Brewer notes: “inheritance led to accumulation of wealth over generations, developing the social hierarchies of class, status and power… It is ironic that while the discovery of farming by women at the beginning of the Neolithic period was such a positive leap forward, by the end of the Neolithic it had changed into a negative outcome for women… their subordination and powerlessness in the developing class society and all class formations from that time onwards.” In other words once women lost their direct role in agricultural production, they lost their status, power and equality as well.

It is likely that all of this was developing before and during the first fully formed class society of ancient Sumer, about 5000 BC, and patriarchy was developing too.

Emphasis Mine

Bull (2023) contends that the emergence of the patriarchy was a consequnce of the change of gender roles during the transition to agriculture from hunter-gatherer. Bull quotes Boyle saying that private property was the primary driver for the establishment of the patriarchy.

Zeng et.al. (2018) notes that:

In human populations, changes in genetic variation are driven not only by genetic processes, but can also arise from cultural or social changes. An abrupt population bottleneck specific to human males has been inferred across several Old World (Africa, Europe, Asia) populations 5000–7000 BP. Here, bringing together anthropological theory, recent population genomic studies and mathematical models, we propose a sociocultural hypothesis, involving the formation of patrilineal kin groups and intergroup competition among these groups. Our analysis shows that this sociocultural hypothesis can explain the inference of a population bottleneck. We also show that our hypothesis is consistent with current findings from the archaeogenetics of Old World Eurasia, and is important for conceptions of cultural and social evolution in prehistory.

Emphasis Mine

It would appear that the emergence of the patriarchy had a devasting impact on males as only about 6% were able to pass on their genes across the Y-chromosome bottleneck. What is more interesting that cultural changes were able to emerge after about a 1,000 years to remove that bottleneck. That cultural change was able to preserve elements of patriarchy while expanding the percentage of males able to pass on their genes.

This improved model of the patriarchy has been able to survive for about 6,000 years. This longevity means that patriarchy solves cultural problems. In order to overthrow the patriarchy, one must devise alternate solutions to the cultural problems that the patriarchy currently solves. And these alternate solutions need to be acceptable to enough males that the cultural changes gain traction.

The question is what cultural problems patriarchy solves. This needs further investigation.

References

Bull, S. Patriarchy and the origins of women’s oppression, 16 July, 2023, https://links.org.au/patriarchy-and-origins-womens-oppression

Zeng, T.C., Aw, A.J. & Feldman, M.W. Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck. Nat Commun 9, 2077 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-04375-6