#RepealThe19th

[pbrower2a]

(10-14-2016, 01:24 PM)sMikebert Wrote: Men are stronger than women?  Why?  Because we are not a monogamous primates.  Polygamous primates (e.g. gorillas) feature males who are much larger than females. Monagamous apes (like orangutans) feature same-sized males and females.  In-between primates (e.g. chimps, humans) feature males that are somewhat larger than females.

Young men, of course. Older men? To the sidelines if they have survived. Marvin Harris may have seen the hunter-gatherers living the good life because they cannot accumulate capital -- but surely their lives were as Hobbes put it, "nasty, short, and brutish". Just think of what happens if the big cat (jaguar or leopard) turns the predator into prey.

I suggested that men were more likely to do the hunting for big game, a very macho activity that pays off well and gets men away from women and girls for long times.

Quote:In hunter-gather societies, the gatherers, often females are responsible for providing most of the bands food needs.  The larger sized males evolve their size to fight for and then hold on to mates.  If I had to guess, I would think the reason why men engaged in hunting is that it was a way to keep them busy and out of the female's hair and also to allow them to settle the "who gets to fuck who" problem with minimum mayhem.

They collect the vegetable food and perhaps some small game. But many of them have babies and small children to which to attend.

Quote:Human evolved ginormous brains for managing social relationships. Like chimps we fought wars, with is the primary function of males in early human bands.  We got good at organizing into larger social groups, far, far beyond anything that chimps can do, and from that has come our cultural greatness.

The hunter-gatherer world collapsed at times -- when climate change forced people to try herding or agriculture. At one time the Sahara was fertile grassland and not the brutal desert that we now know. Fertile grassland which has flowing rivers is wonderful terrain for hunter-gatherers.




Note that 'extreme' (nearly barren) desert was then restricted to the Namib Desert, where cold currents offshore precluded rainstorms inland. Today the permanent subtropical high pressure system prevents almost all rain due to sinking air that cannot rise into rainstorms throughout North Africa.


Africa is now like this:



Arnold Toynbee explains how the dense populations in the Nile Valley came to be: the Nile became the only fresh water still available in a wide band from Mauritania to Egypt. While North Africa was mostly grassland (except for the northern Maghreb), the Nile Valley was an inhospitable place with thickets too dense for people to live easily enough. As the Sahara desiccated, people had to migrate northward into the Maghreb, south into tropical Africa, or into the Nile Valley -- or perish. To live in the Nile Valley people had to go to heroic efforts to cut the thickets and control the water for irrigation. But once they could cut the thickets and expand farmland along the Nile, people could live well enough again. The Nile went from being a barrier of thickets to the artery of life. But people living in the Nile Valley could no longer be hunter-gatherers. Those people would be the Egyptians of antiquity. They would need bureaucracy, hierarchy, record-keeping, food storage, domestication (including cats), to keep their system going. That's civilization.

I love this source for information on the ecology of times up to antiquity; people might want to bookmark it, especially for use in school projects:

http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nerc.html