As I’ve mentioned before, the famous Out of Africa (OoA) migration was likely preceded by an Into Africa migration, or at least, a Moving Through Africa migration.
Near as we can tell, based on the science at our disposal, H sapiens (humans, us,) evolved in Africa and then spread out from there.
But genetics (and other evidence) suggests that the oldest human split lies not between Africans and non-Africans, but between the San (aka Bushmen or KhoiSan) people of southern Africa and pretty much everyone else in the world.
But hold on. One frequently sees comments to the effect of “All modern humans descended from the San” or “The San are the most ancestral population alive today.” Bollocks. Look, you and your cousin are both descended from your grandparents. Your cousin is not ancestral to you, your grandparents are ancestral to both of you. You did not descend from the San because the San are living right now in southern Africa. They are not an ancient people known only from the architectural record, like the Yamnaya or Minoans. (Unless, of course, your parents actually are San. Then of course you are descended from the San.)
So what does this mean?
Humans–H Sapiens–arose around 200,000 years ago, somewhere or other in Africa. Around 100,000 years ago, the San split off from everyone else, and stayed isolated for almost 100,000 years.
The San look like this:
Some anthropologists refer to Bushmen as “gracile,” which means they are a little shorter than average Europeans and not stockily built
And their homeland is down in the green:
Modern distribution of major African language groups
Their historic range was probably much larger than it currently is–note the little green dot over in Tanzania.
Here’s a different map’s opinion on the subject:
And here’s a map showing the locations of art attributed to the San / their ancestors:
Whether the San started in southern Africa, and everyone else left for northern Africa, leaving them behind, or the San started in northern Africa and then left for the south, leaving everyone else behind, I have no idea. Either way, one group left the other, and the split persisted, more or less, for almost a hundred thousand years.
I’ve mentioned before that the San are notably lighter-skinned than Africans from closer to the equator, like the Bantus:
Bantu mother and child
Probably because the sun is just really harsh at the equator. You can see the current distribution of Bantus in orange on the brightly-colored map above.
Now, back to the story. Shortly after, the Pygmies split off, which I’m not going on to natter on about here because you can read the post I wrote about it. Around 70,000 years ago, some guys left Africa to explore the rest of the world. Around 40,000 years ago, some of those guys split, more or less, into Asians, Europeans, and their descendants.
Among other things, this means that the Batus are more closely related to Koreans, Australian Aborigines, and Native Americans than to the KhoiSan peoples. This is because the ancestors of the Bantus and the ancestors of everyone-not-from-Africa split up around 70,000 years ago, whereas the ancestors of the Bantus and the ancestors of the KhoiSan split 100,000 years ago.
If this is confusing, think about it like this: you and your brother are closely related, because you are only one generation away from your common ancestor, your parents. (In this case, Europeans and Asians are like siblings.) You are related to your cousins, but less closely–you share half your DNA with a sibling, but only 12.5% with a cousin. You and your cousin are two generations away from your common ancestor, your grandparents. In this case, Bantus are cousins to siblings Europeans and Asians. Your second-cousins are descended from your great-grandparents. (If you have cousins, and you both have kids, those kids are second-cousins.) Second cousins share only a quarter as much DNA again–3.13%. The San are like your second-cousins. They are also second-cousins to your brother, and also second cousins to your cousins. All of the siblings are more closely related to each other than to their cousins; all of the cousins are more closely related to each other than to their second cousins; Bantus are more closely related to Koreans than to the San.
Please note that this is all a massive, massive over-simplification–obviously there are lots of groups in Africa other than the Bantus and the San–like the Yoruba. But “everyone in Africa other than the San and the Pygmies and people who’ve had Arab and other admixture” gets really clunky.
If you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed that the green and orange regions on the map above look awfully close together. How have the San been so isolated for so long if they’re living right next to the Bantus?
About 3,500 years ago–96,500 after they split–the Bantus did this:
Paths of the great Bantu Migration
1 = 2000–1500 BC origin 2 = ca.1500 BC first migrations 2.a = Eastern Bantu, 2.b = Western Bantu 3 = 1000–500 BC Urewe nucleus of Eastern Bantu 4–7 = southward advance 9 = 500 BC–0 Congo nucleus 10 = 0–1000 AD last phase (from Wikipedia)
The Great Bantu Migration.
Why? I don’t know.
With their larger builds, superior weapons, and more complex social systems, the Bantus appear to have dominated the shit out of everyone they met, until they massacred the wrong guys:
Yes, they ran right into the Afrikaneer (Dutch) Boers, trekking northward from Cape Town, South Africa. And the Boers had guns.
Never bring a spear to a gun fight.
In the end, though, the Bantus won. They have the overwhelming numbers, after all.
Nelson Mandela
The San are still around, but their territory has dwindled severely; some managed to survive in the Kalahari desert, a place just too harsh for anyone else, but even this has not protected them, as farmers and ranchers have moved in and they’ve been forced into more sedentary lifestyles.
The book’s epilogue describes efforts to force the Bushmen onto reservations, where they have been encouraged to take up farming and herding. The account is depressing; the Bushmen seem to have been perfectly happy with their lives before, and ill-suited to agricultural toil. Alcoholism is rampant, as it is among everyone whose ancestors haven’t been distilling alcohol for thousands of years, and violent crime appears to be taking more lives.
Whether the San will continue existing or be completely absorbed by the unstoppable Bantu migration remains to be seen.
Very anecdotal observations of the people I know suggests that the conservatives are more likely to be “dysfunctional” than the liberals–ironically, in precisely the ways conservatives claim liberals are dysfunctional in.
The important thing here is to go beyond hand-wavey anecdotes and get actual data. It’s easy to find things like this: Red America vs. Blue America: state maps illustrate the difference, but these maps are significantly confounded by different ethnicities being concentrated in different parts of the country. For example, the high % of people who never graduated from highschool in SW Texas is probably due to Mexican immigrants, and so not germane to the present conversation.
“Their work confirms that one of the strongest factors predicting divorce rates (per 1000 married couples) is the concentration of conservative or evangelical Protestants in that county. …
“Yet even controlling for income and region, divorce rates tend to be especially high in areas where conservative religious groups are prominent. …
“So even though conservative Protestants are much less likely to cohabit, this didn’t make a difference. There was no evidence that cohabiting would have “weeded out” the less promising unions…
“a careful analysis of variations nationally reveals that this explains none of the association between religious conservatism and divorce. …
“Glass and Levchak found that the high divorce rate among conservative religious groups is indeed explained in large part by the earlier ages at first marriage and first birth, and the lower educational attainment and lower incomes of conservative Protestant youth.
“Explains Glass, “Restricting sexual activity to marriage and encouraging large families seem to make young people start families earlier in life, even though that may not be best for the long-term survival of those marriages.” In an earlier report to the Council on Contemporary Families, economist Evelyn Lehrer from University of Illinois at Chicago explained that every year a women postpones marriage, right up until her early 30s, lowers her chance of an eventual divorce.
“But people who live in conservative religious counties have a higher risk of divorce even when they are not affiliated with a conservative religious group.”
The HBD explanation, of course, is that Evangelical Protestantism is concentrated among dumber whites, and people who postpone marriage and childbearing are smarter and more competent at planning their lives. If you squint at the map, you may notice that Evangelical Protestants in the Deep South seem to have lower divorce rates than their religious brethren in Appalachia. (Is a finding of “Appalachians don’t act very smart” even interesting?)
But this is not necessarily an important detail in this particular conversation.
The important thing is that liberal atheists, Unitarians, and the like get divorced less than religious conservatives like Evangelical Christians.
And yet, these same Evangelicals have been protesting mightily against their very own divorces (among other marital novelties,) while blaming the whole business on liberals!
I’ve been looking for data on abortions, but can’t find any broken down by conservative vs liberal. Overall, it looks like conservatives get fewer abortions, but state regulations are an obvious confounder.
You know, this isn’t looking very good for West Virginia…
Okay, I was totally going to do math for you, but it turns out that someone has been keeping track of this data by race for me, so I’m going with that:
West Virginia leads, but the rest of the South follows pretty closely.
“But wait,” I hear you saying, “what if this is just a side effect of Northerners aborting their unintended pregnancies?”
Never fear, I have another map:
From The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy
Nope! White Southerners just get pregnant a lot.
It’s probably already obvious, but the folks getting pregnant are also rather promiscuous:
The data ain’t great, but it looks like Southerners are sluts. And New Hampshirites.
My suspicion, based on data I’ve seen elsewhere and will try to dig up later, is that dumber people have higher sex drives and mature faster than smarter people–so dumb people are much more likely to have sex while still in highschool. But even intelligent people from the South seem to have more sex than more liberal folks.
A friend of mine who grew up in one of the more conservative parts of the country, who has always prided themself on being morally upright and derided the permissive immorality of liberals, moved a few years ago to a much more liberal part of the country, and describes everyone there as, “A bunch of prudes.” Yes, the descendants of Puritans are sexually reserved and don’t like to be touched–who’d have thought?
So. Conservatives are more promiscuous, have more teen pregnancies, and more divorces. Even on a subject as trivial as weight, liberals are more likely to be part of the “fat acceptance movement,” but conservatives are more likely to actually be fat. I could go on, with other stats like educational attainment and GDP, but you get the idea: Conservatives walk one walk, but talk another.
This raises a question: If liberals are really better at doing the things conservative claim are moral, then is liberal morality really so “dysfunctional”?
The answer looks like: No.
(Those of you stressing out that gay marriage may be the downfall of civilization, take heart: it’s much more likely that stupid people fucking are going to be the downfall of civilization.)
Which raises the second question: Then why are Conservatives complaining about Liberal morality in the first place?
My theory: They aren’t.
In real life, liberals and conservatives don’t actually interact very often. They are concentrated in different parts of the country, are descended from different ethnic stock, and would rather their children married a non-white than a member of the opposite political party. They have very different personalities, and even when they aren’t talking politics, they get along horribly.
The “Liberal,” as far as the average conservative is concerned, is a boogeyman on TV doing horrible things in far-off places like CA or NYC. The inverse is also true: the “Conservative” is a disembodied talking head on Fox News or rural boogeyman in a place they’ve never been, like Indiana.
When conservatives talk about the sanctity of marriage, what they really mean is, “I screwed up. I did dumb things, and that’s how I got pregnant/divorced/etc. Whatever you do in life, don’t be like me.” But most people don’t like to admit that they’re talking about their own mistakes, so they blame everything they can on some mysterious, unknown “other”: the liberal. The other is, after all, but a foil for the self.
Liberals do the same thing. They blame all sorts of things (black-white test score gaps, incarceration rates, etc.) on the actions of conservatives (conservative and “racist” are pretty much synonymous to liberals,) even when no conservatives are even around. The invisible, insidious, omni-present conservative gets blamed for everything liberal policies can’t fix. (Saboteurs to the gulag!)
But why do liberals support policies they don’t themselves follow?
Two obvious reasons come to mind:
1. Liberals tend to believe that they shouldn’t tell others what to do, so if you want to do something dumb, hey, that’s your business, and…
2. It’s hard to muster a good argument for banning something if you’ve never been personally affected by it. Among the liberals I know, divorce is vanishingly rare, but I know conservatives with 4 or 5 divorces each. Divorce is a real issue for conservatives because it’s a thing they frequently do, just as low blood sugar is an issue for a diabetic. In an environment where lots of people get divorced, it is probably a good social strategy to advertise one’s qualities as a mate by roundly denouncing the practice–you look more serious about staying married. In an environment where few people get divorced, declaring your opposition isn’t so useful. There, the inverse may be true: people can signal that they are such good mates, they’re not even worried about divorce being legal. Like the peacock, they signal strength by flashily showing just how low they can lower their strength without getting eaten.
The only downside, of course, is that sometimes liberals do get eaten by their permissive attitudes toward sex. Like when they get AIDS.
Implications: Should conservatives ditch conservatism and adopt more liberal attitudes?
In general, it probably wouldn’t help. The liberals have their attitudes due to conditions in liberal areas, and conservatives have their attitudes due to conditions in their lives. Further, divorce and promiscuity probably have more to do intelligence than any particular attitudes, and encouraging divorce isn’t going to make people smarter.
If your goal is monogamous, stable, long-term marriages with happy, healthy people in them, you’d be better off focusing on the social policies that make people with these genetic traits breed less than people who don’t.
Overall: Recommended if you like Neanderthals or human ancestry. Probably not useful if you are already an expert in the field.
Pros: interesting discussion of flint-knapping, gluey pitch production, and Neanderthal burials.
Flint knapping is one of my occasional interests. It is surprisingly difficult to just pick up a rock and produce a useful tool. Without a good teacher, you quickly degenerate to banging the rock on the ground as hard as you can like a retarded monkey. If Kanzi the bonobo saw me trying to make stone tools, he’d probably bring me some fruit out of pity. “Poor hairless idiot ape,” Kanzi would think. “Can’t even make tools. If I don’t feed it, it’ll starve.”
Amusing digression time: Once I was walking through the city, in a semi-developed/semi-overgrown lot, and saw a bit of shiny rocks lying around on the ground. Unusual for the area, because the local geographic history hasn’t led to a lot of rocks on the surface, and most of those are of the duller sedimentary sorts (or, obviously, landscaping materials.) So I picked up this bit of flint, then another bit of flint, and then a larger one with obvious convex areas from being struck with another piece. And a few feet away, here was a piece that fit comfortably into my hand, perfect for knocking chips off the other chunk. Some of the pieces I even managed to fit back together, reassembling the rock that once was.
I came back with a small box and picked up all the bits of flint before development began on the lot. One piece does look like an arrowhead, but given that I found it alongside a bunch of chips that are more or less flint-knapping trash, the arrowhead’s creator probably thought there was something wrong with it.
Sure, the whole little box may be filled with little more than ancient trash, there is something I love about picking up these rocks and being able to see in their shapes the actions of some other humans, the angle they held that rock at, the way they smacked it with another rock to produce these flakes. To feel this connection between myself and some other human who walked here before me, and the traces of their life that no one else walking through that place had noticed.
Anyway, turns out the Neanderthals had a pretty interesting/unique way of making flint tools, that involved first shaping a large block of flint into a specific shape by flaking bits off the sides, and then, with one good hit, knocking off one large slice. This is a more complicated process than merely picking up a rock and whacking bits off of it it until you get an edge.
The gluey pitch seems to have been derived (distilled?) from birch bark. Some scientists demonstrated the process by burning a roll of birch bark in a pit, but they obviously did not use enough bark, and only got a smudge of goo. It’s a bit frustrating watching someone do something obviously wrong–since you’re filming this for TV, why not use a great big bunch of birch bark so you can get enough pitch to actually show us?
Anyway, looks like Neanderthals distilled this gluey stuff and then used it to help secure the flint tips to their spears, before thrusting them into the sides of enormous shaggy elephants, which are quite formidable animals. So the pitch (and bindings) had to be pretty darn good.
Neanderthals also seem to have buried their dead, though the show notes that their potential grave-goods pale in comparison to similar human burials.
The parts about Neanderthal DNA will be of interest to you if you don’t know about the Neanderthal/human DNA admixture business already, or you’ve heard about it but are still a little unclear on the details. The scientists interviewed claimed that it looks like there were a lot of interbreeding incidents rather than just a few, but “a lot” in this case does not necessarily mean “thousands”.
Cons: For a program that goes into depth on how inaccurate depictions of Neanderthals happened (ages ago, someone found a skeleton with arthritis and concluded that all Neanderthals were stooped,) their depiction of the homo Sapiens who first encountered the Neanderthals was also inaccurate.
The first encounters between humans and Neanderthals probably happened in the Middle East, shortly after h Sapiens left Africa, but before they had split into Asian and European branches. In other words, not to put too fine a point on it, whites did not yet exist. We’re not sure exactly when white skin evolved, but it probably wasn’t before h Sapiens got to Europe.
(Of course, it could be the other way around, and it’s the Bushmen who’ve changed since they split off.)
Either way, it’s pretty easy to assume things that are probably wrong, and the h Sapiens who first encountered h Neanderthals were probably more similar in appearance to modern Africans or Middle Easterners than Europeans.
A second issue occurred during a dramatization of the Neanderthal and h Sapiens DNA. Neanderthal DNA was depicted as red, and h Sapiens as blue. (Erm, I think. Unless I’ve got it backwards.) They then showed a “combined” DNA strand with blue and red pieces.
While this is a fine way to visualize what’s going on, I would just like to clarify that DNA isn’t actually blue or red, nor are there folks running around with mosaic red/blue variants.
You may be laughing (I burst out laughing at the sight of it,) but I know people who would very sincerely and devoutly insist that “Humans have different colored DNA from Neanderthals. I saw this program on PBS all about it, and I know PBS is accurate. You should watch the program!”
You can imagine how talking to these people makes me feel.
Finally, my last complaint is that there was no discussion of Neanderthal DNA in Native Americans!
Worldwide distribution of B006, (from Yotova et al. “An X-Linked Haplotype of Neandertal Origin Is Present Among All Non-African Populations,” Mol. Biol. Evol. 28 (7), 2011).SNP PCA from Skoglund & Jakobsson’s “Archaic Human Ancestry in East Asia” (2011)
Right, so what’s up with Native Americans? You may have noticed that during the discussion with the map, no jellybeans were placed on the Americas at all. What a pity, when there’s still so much about the peopling of the Americas that we don’t know.
In the future, I’m hoping for similar documentaries about the Denisovans and their DNA admixture in modern humans.
Log. graph of homicide rates vs. fertility ratesGraph of homicide rates vs fertility rates (data from the Wikipedia)
Take your pick. They’re the same graph, except the top graph has the homicide rate on a log scale and the bottom on a linear scale, because Honduras’s homicide rate is kind of off the charts.
I couldn’t fit all of the labels onto the graphs, but since most of the countries group by region, you can still figure out roughly where most of them go. The lower left hand corner, low fertility and low homicide, is filled with dots from East Asia and Western Europe. The central-middle-bottom section, of moderate birthrates and below-average homicide rates, has the Muslim countries. The far right–high fertility and medium violence–is mostly African. (Note that Angola and Gambia’s labels have been footnoted at the bottom of the graph.) And the upper left–high violence but moderate fertility–is Latin America. (The high homicide rates are one of the reasons I oppose unfettered Latin American immigration.)
While there is a positive relationship between violence and fertility, this is clearly not the whole story. Just eyeballing the log graph, it looks like a curved line would fit the data better than a straight line, but that’d require polynomial or quadratic regressions and we don’t really need to get into that much detail.
Rather, I suspect that just considering cleanliness explains the graphs: cleaner people are more easily disgusted by other people, and so have fewer children than their aggression levels would predict.
I haven’t found great data on overall “cleanliness” or “disgust rates,” but it appears that Latin Americans are some of the world’s cleanest people:
Brazilians shower nearly 12 times a week, and Mexicans wash their hair more than anyone else.
By contrast, the French and Russians are positively disgusting. (I’m giving India and China a pass here due to limited running water in their countries.)
Here’s another graph, showing similar numbers:
My personal experience with East Asians (Japanese, Taiwanese, etc.,) also suggests that they are cleaner overall than Americans. These countries appear to have been hit with a double-whammy–very clean and low aggression–driving down the interest in sex so far that 60% of girls aged 16-19 claim to be uninterested in sex or even despise it, and even 40-50% of married people haven’t had sex in the past month. They’ve even got a phrase for it, “sex disgust syndrome.”
I don’t find Japanese fertility rates concerning, just because Japan really does need fewer people and the sex-inclined Japanese will quickly replace the non-sex inclined ones, so the issue will work itself out naturally. (And at any rate, I am not really in any position to go telling the Japanese what to do with their own society.)
In our own society, though, I am concerned that decreased monogamy (more “hooking up” via apps like Tinder and Grindr, etc.) is leading to more, not less female concern about male sexual aggression, with all sorts of unfortunate side effects.
One of the theories that undergirds a large subset of my thoughts on how brains work is the idea that Disgust is a Real Thing.
I don’t just mean a mild aversion to things that smell bad, like overturned port-a-potties or that fuzzy thing you found growing in the back of the fridge that might have been lasagna, once upon a time. Even I have such aversions.
I mean reactions like screaming and looking like you are about to vomit upon finding a chicken heart in your soup; gagging at the sight of trans people or female body hair; writhing and waving your hands while removing a slug from your porch; or the claim that talking about rats at the dinner table puts you off your meal. Or more generally, people claiming, “That’s disgusting!” or “What a creep!” about things or people that obviously aren’t even stinky.
There is a parable about a deaf person watching people dance to music he can’t hear and assuming that the people have all gone mad.
For most of my life, I assumed these reactions were just some sort of complicated schtick people put on, for totally obtuse reasons. It was only about a year ago that I realized, in a flash of insight, that this disgust is a real thing that people actually feel.
I recently expressed this idea to a friend, and they stared at me in shock. (That, or they were joking.) We both agreed that chicken hearts are a perfectly normal thing to put in soup, so at least I’m not the only one confused by this.
This breakthrough happened as a result of reading a slew of neuro-political articles that I can’t find now, and it looks like the site itself might be gone, which makes me really sad. I’ve linked to at least one of them before, which means that now my old links are dead, too. Damn. Luckily, it looks like Wired has an article covering the same or similar research: Primal Propensity for Disgust Shapes Political Positions.
“The latest such finding comes from a study of people who looked at gross images, such as a man eating earthworms. Viewers who self-identified as conservative, especially those opposing gay marriage, reacted with particularly deep disgust. … Disgust is especially interesting to researchers because it’s such a fundamental sensation, an emotional building block so primal that feelings of moral repugnance originate in neurobiological processes shared with a repugnance for rotten food.”
So when people say that some moral or political thing is, “disgusting,” I don’t think they’re being metaphorical; I think they actually, literally mean that the idea of it makes them want to vomit.
Which begs the question: Why?
Simply put, I suspect that some of us have more of our brain space devoted to processing disgust than others. I can handle lab rats–or pieces of dead lab rats–without any internal reaction, I don’t care if there are trans people in my bathroom, and I suspect my sense of smell isn’t very good. My opinions on moral issues are routed primarily through what I hope are the rational, logic-making parts of my brain.
By contrast, people with stronger disgust reactions probably have more of their brain space devoted to disgust, and so are routing more of their sensory experiences through that region, and so feel strong, physical disgust in reaction to a variety of things, like people with different cultural norms than themselves. Their moral reasoning comes from a more instinctual place.
It is tempting to claim that processing things logically is superior to routing them through the disgust regions, but sometimes things are disgusting for good, evolutionarily sound reasons. Having an instinctual aversion to rats is not such a bad thing, given that they have historically been disease vectors. Most of our instincts exist to protect and help us, after all.
So, I’m going to let you in on a little not-so-secret: childbirth is horrendously painful. Don’t believe those bastards with their natural birth hoo-ha. There is nothing magical or wonderful about childbirth. You bleed copiously, you can barely walk for the next two weeks, and before modern medicine, you stood a good chance of dying in the process.
The US’s homicide rate is 4.7 deaths per 100,000 people per year. The UK’s is 1. Japan’s is 0.3. (Source.)
The “developed nations” have a maternal mortality rate of 16 women per 100,000 births. (Source.) (Note that one woman may give birth to more than one child in her lifetime.)
The “developing nations” have a maternal mortality rate of 230 per 100,000 births (and a much higher number of children per woman,) and some countries have maternal mortality rates around 1,000 per 100,000 births. If the average woman in these countries has 5-7 children, that works out to 5-7% of women dying in childbirth. (Though not every year.)
In other words, in the state of nature, childbirth is kind of like being stuck in the middle of WWII.
Let’s consider the male side of things. Given enough available females, a male could, hypothetically, sire one child every night for 30 years, resulting in 10,957 children, plus or minus a couple depending on the leap years. We’ll call 11,000 our “hypothetical male maximum.”
The man stands approximately zero chance of dying in the process of siring children, does not endure pregnancy or childbirth, and even if he depends on someone else to do all of the childcare for him, he still has a reasonable chance at his offspring making it to maturity. (After all, Genghis Khan didn’t get to be the most evolutionarily successful man in recent history by raising all of his bastards.)
In other words, for men, there is basically zero cost to impregnating a woman (other than, obviously, finding one.) Even under harsh economic/environmental conditions, every additional woman a man mates with is an additional chance at offspring. The only limiting factor is how many women he can convince to mate with him.
A woman, by contrast, can produce at max only about 20 children (9 months gestation + 6 months nursing / 25 years fertility). (State of nature does not have baby formula.) She needs a maximum of 20 mates, and can make do with <1 if she has to share.
Where the male number of potential offspring is practically limitless, by human standards, the female is decidedly limited. Which means that women must be picky. A male who has sex once with someone kind of meh is not seriously limiting his ability to have tons of awesome children. A woman who has sex with a guy who’s kind of meh is potentially wasting one of her very limited chances of having children on a loser.
Note: I am not claiming that 11,000 is a realistic number. Obviously even Genghis Khan himself probably didn’t have 11,000 children. The point is that male and female reproduction are vastly different, creating very different incentives.
The average male has approximately zero to lose and all the offspring to gain from a random fling, and thus is mentally ready to consider the majority of women as potential mates. If some of those women happen to not be particularly attractive, well, it’s no big loss.
Women, by contrast, endure high-risk pregnancies and births, for a very limited set of children. They therefore cannot risk having children with inferior males.
So it is in the male’s interest to mate with everyone in sight, but in a woman’s interests to eliminate the vast, vast majority of potential mates, winnowing her selection down to the best 1-4.
Which means that all other potential suitors, whether they’re 14 men in a small hunter-gatherer band or 4 million men in Tokyo, are sexually useless.
In fact, they’re less than useless: they’re a threat. Because it takes only one act of violence for one of those men to get another potential offspring, and for a woman to lose one of hers.
The difference between optimal male and optimal female strategies leads to conflict–not just between men and women, but also between men and men. If one man mates with 550 to 11,000 women, (11,000/20 children per woman = 550), that implies that 549 to 10,999 men are not mating with those women. And those men are going to be pretty pissed.
Monogamy is one of the more elegant solutions to this issue. The relative guarantee of one mate per person reduces conflict and increases parental investment in the children. But monogamy requires fidelity–reducing female interest in the sexual desires of the majority of men even further.
Disgust in the face of unnecessary male sexual attention helps keep women loyal to their husbands and protects their long-term evolutionary interests, even if people express it in really annoying ways.
Disclaimer time: I am not a doctor. I am not a psychologist/psychiatrist. If you have a mental illness/disorder/concerns, take them up with a trained professional who knows what they’re talking about. For the love of god, DO NOT make medical/mental health decisions based on my speculative babbling about what might have been useful to our ancestors.
Carrying on…
Americans are an anxious people.
According to the Kim Foundation (I don’t actually know who they are, but they are the first hit that comes up when you Google “Percent Americans with anxiety,”) about 18% of us have some form of anxiety disorder, such as, “panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and phobias.”
An additional 10% of us have mood disorders, eg, “major depressive disorder, dysthymic disorder, and bipolar disorder.”
There’s a lot of interesting data in this graph. For simplicity’s sake, from here on out, when I say, “Women,” I am referring primarily to “white women,” but remember that no group is entirely lacking in crazy.
Also, the graphs for mood disorders:
Now, you’re probably thinking, “Wait a minute, those numbers don’t add up!”
They don’t have to add up. You can get diagnosed with two things at once. Or five. It just depends on how often you go pester the shrinks.
It’s no secret that women are kind of crazy, but I still find the numbers a little shocking. According to the Huffington Post, 25% of women are on psychiatric drugs of some sort. The article also claims that, “One in four women is on antidepressants,” so I guess 100% of women taking psychiatric drugs are on anti-depressants, or the math got fucked up somewhere.
Why do 22-25% of women feel so bad that they need psychiatric medication just to deal with their lives? (Not to mention 15% of men.)
Some quick possibilities:
1. Shrinks are handing out pills like crazy, whether patients are actually mentally ill or not, because who wouldn’t like to be happier and better-adjusted?
2. Something about modern life makes people (especially white women) very anxious.
3. Highly anxious people are a side effect of low infant mortality + the baby boom expanding the class of parents.
4. Anxiety/depression are actually adaptive, and so we are supposed to feel this way.
5. Some combination of all of the above.
Personally, I lean toward #5.
Now, a quick aside: I don’t really like feelings. Oh, sure, I’m okay with the good ones. Happiness, love, joy, enthusiasm, sure, I like those. But the rest of the feelings I could generally do without. I especially dislike other people’s emotions. “I am having a sad,” translates all too quickly into, “I am yelling at you.” So, as I stated at the beginning, if you think you need help handling your emotions, or the people around you think you do, please consider getting help. You don’t have to live in pain.
That said, I think anxiety is supposed to serve some purpose that modern conditions have gotten out of whack.
Stress in a personal relationship such as marriage
Financial stress
Stress from an emotional trauma such as the death of a loved one
Stress from a serious medical illness
Side effect of drugs, legal or otherwise
Medical symptom, eg, low oxygen
The last three I consider perfectly rational biological responses–it’s very understandable that someone who can’t breathe feels anxious. But other than coffee, I doubt these are seriously affecting the overall anxiety rates.
That leaves us with “stress,” (which is basically a synonym for “anxiety”) from pretty much every part of life. Almost 20% of women cannot cope with work/school/relationships/finances without medication. It is tempting, therefore, to think that our entire modern lifestyle, from large, dense cities to two-income households could not exist without medicating women into not freaking out.
But why would they freak out in the first place?
Biochemically, “stress” is the feeling of your body responding to threatening or potentially threatening situations via your “fight or flight” response. In nature, fight or flight is very useful: it prepares you to run for your life or fight to the death. According to Wikipedia, Fight or Flight works like this:
The reaction begins in the amygdala, which triggers a neural response in the hypothalamus. The initial reaction is followed by activation of the pituitary gland and secretion of the hormone ACTH. The adrenal gland is activated almost simultaneously and releases the neurotransmitter epinephrine. The release of chemical messengers results in the production of the hormone cortisol, which increases blood pressure, blood sugar, and suppresses the immune system. The initial response and subsequent reactions are triggered in an effort to create a boost of energy. This boost of energy is activated by epinephrine binding to liver cells and the subsequent production of glucose. Additionally, the circulation of cortisol functions to turn fatty acids into available energy, which prepares muscles throughout the body for response. Catecholamine hormones, such as adrenaline (epinephrine) or noradrenaline (norepinephrine), facilitate immediate physical reactions associated with a preparation for violent muscular action.
The basolateral amygdala has been linked to conditioned fear and disgust learning, while the central amygdala has been linked to conditioned fear learning. … liberals had elevated amydalar responses to the viewing of a political commercial about nuclear war. …
Hart et al. (2000) selected an equal number of blacks and whites, repeatedly showing them pictures of white and black faces while performing fMRI. They noted: “across all subjects, we observed significantly greater…BOLD signal in the amygdala to outgroup vs ingroup faces, but only during later stimulus presentations. …
Further, Phelps found that activation in the left amygdala and right amygdala (all the way to the insular cortex) were correlated with a negative bias towards black faces on the Implicit Association Test.”
Last time I took an implicit association test, it told me that I prefer fat people over skinny and blacks over whites. I don’t know why everyone else fails these things.
… the only region that was activated in both the Implicit Association and Startle Eyeblink tests was the left-superior amygdala. … Phelps noted: “the region in the amygdala most strongly correlated with negative evaluation [of black faces] was the left-superior amygdala”.
… Richeson et al. (2003) performed an fMRI investigation of the impact of interracial contact on executive function, and uncovered a critical findings with regards to racial prejudice: it is inhibited by right hemispheric neural networks such as the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate. Richeson’s findings of a right-hemispheric network that inhibits racial prejudice shows the push-pull mechanism of the amygdala and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, especially on the right side.
… Cunningham used two different exposure periods: an subconscious exposure of 30 milliseconds; and, a conscious exposure of 525 milliseconds. During the subconscious exposure, which was not long enough for most of the subjects to even be aware of the black and white face photos, Cunningham found the right amygdala to be activated in the black minus white condition, … Longer presentations of racial stimuli favor activation in the left amygdala, at least according to Phelps.
But with the 525 millisecond presentation, the amygdala’s racial responsiveness was inhibited, meaning it didn’t take very long for another area in the brain to assume control. And that region was located predominately in the right hemisphere, confirming the work of Richeson. Cunningham noted: “the regions Richeson et al. identified as underlying the control of prejudice were nearly identical to the regions identified in this study as being associated with modulation of automatic evaluations”.
Here is where I get speculative:
When we meet another human, we automatically assess whether they are a threat or not. If we know them well or they look like someone we know (and like), they go into the “not a threat” category. If they don’t look familiar, they go into the “might be a threat” box, and your body begins preparing to run/fight for your life.
Your brain makes this assessment subconsciously and begins preparing your fight or flight response before your conscious networks have even kicked in. Your conscious networks appear to be trying to override your unconscious ones–perhaps by just rationally evaluating potential threat, or perhaps by yelling at your amygdala to stop being so racist.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this mental push-pull between the amygdala and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex created more stress.
Men seem to cope better than women with stress and aggression. They have a naturally higher aggression “set point” due to being descended from the men who killed all the other men. Aggression has historically been a winning strategy for men, but not women. Aggressive women, historically, were more likely to kill their own children or, if pregnant, get their children killed by someone else. Being the smallest, weakest person around makes aggression a losing strategy.
Personal anecdote time: In my younger, dumber days, I was a lot more aggressive than I am now. Not so much in real life, because men are bigger than me and I’m not dumb. But in the relative safety of the internet, certainly. Then I got pregnant. Suddenly, I couldn’t stand aggression. I remember watching a YouTube video of police aggression. My heart started racing. My palms were sweating. I was reacting as though the aggression were in the same room with me, not a recording on a little screen of something that happened hundreds of miles away. After that, I stopped watching TV News and stopped fighting with random strangers on the internet. I couldn’t take them anymore.
Aggression is useful for finding mates, because it gets people out of the house and helps them talk to each other. Sometimes it also results in punching.
Pregnant women have no need for aggression. They have already found a mate, and now they need to keep him. (Mates are very useful for bringing you food during that healing period after birth.) Further, pregnant women need to protect their fetuses (and later, babies.) The mother needs aggression only to save her own life or her child’s life.
School, work, corporations, and daily city life all involve being constantly around hundreds if not thousands of unrelated people. And as you probably already know, trust and diversity are negatively correlated. (Or just read the book.)
Corporations are stressful because they’re full of aggressive men, who interrupt more, take credit for other people’s accomplishments, are noisy, and use their physical size to intimidate each other. Women respond to this in a variety of ways you’re already familiar with, including the consumption of large quantities of Xanax to keep them from freaking out and having a meltdown every time a strange man gets into an elevator with them.
Anxiety exists because it helped our ancestors avoid dangerous situations, but modern life basically requires spending high amounts of time in anxiety-inducing situations. Some people eventually learn not to freak out and suppress their instincts, but for many people, repeated stimulus exposure only makes things worse.
But aside from preparing people to flee or fight, I suspect that anxiety serves another purpose: it forces women to do whatever it takes to remain part of the group, the tribe, because the tribe is survival, and outside the tribe is nothing but the howling wind and empty, barren waste. Female survival and evolutionary success has not historically depended on dominating the tribe, but on not getting kicked out.
Anxiety does not manifest itself as a rational response. Someone else does something wrong, you tell them not to, and afterward, you feel anxious. Objectively, you are in the right. The other person did something wrong. But your emotions tell a different story. Your emotions say that you are wrong. This is because you are not at peace with your tribe, with your friend or family member.
Or let us suppose that you say something innocently, even helpfully to another person, and they take it the wrong way and become angry and yell at you. Afterwards, do you feel mad at them? Or do you just feel unhappy that they are feeling so unhappy?
Okay, maybe not you, my faithful reader. You probably aren’t female.
Anxiety is one of those things that I suspect is good in moderation. A bit of concern for safety makes people pay attention as they go about their business. Double-checking that the locks are locked and the stove is off before going to bed could save your life. Being willing to put aside hurt feelings and make amends with others makes life more pleasant, and is probably crucial to living in large communities. Taken in excess, any of these behaviors becomes debilitating–the person develops agoraphobia, OCD, or pathological unwillingness to stick up for themselves.
A small amount of anxiety may also be useful in getting people to pay attention to little details. It’s making sure that all of the is are dotted and ts are crossed that makes sure airplanes stay in the air, after all.
Peter Frost has laid out a series of posts onguilt, and by contrast, shame. Now, here I must make a confession: I lack an intuitive sense of the distinction he is drawing between guilt and shame, or perhaps just lack sufficient exposure to “shame cultures” to really get it. Regardless, I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to suspect that “guilt” and “anxiety” may be deeply linked.
Frost proposes that, “Pervasive feelings of guilt are part of a behavioral package that enabled Northwest Europeans to adapt to complex social environments where kinship is less important and where rules of correct behavior must be obeyed with a minimum of surveillance.”
While most commentator posit the European guilt complex arose in response to specific events, eg, the Holocaust, Frost traces it back to a much earlier time, citing, for example, Aelfric of Eynsham, an English abbot born in 955:
He who cannot because of shame confess his faults to one man, then it must shame him before the heaven-dwellers and the earth-dwellers and the hell-dwellers, and the shame for him will be endless. (Bedingfield, 2002, p. 80)
And The Song of Beowulf:
That was sorrow to the good man’s soul, greatest of griefs to the heart. The wise man thought that, breaking established law, he had bitterly angered God, the Lord everlasting. His breast was troubled within by dark thoughts, as was not his wont.
(Personally, I’ve always thought Grendel was a metaphor for plague, and Beowulf plunging into the lake represents a human sacrifice by drowning/throwing the sacrificed victim into the lake to appease the gods, but I am really not an Anglo Saxon culture expert.)
Frost pushes back the potential beginnings of guilt culture even further, to the semi-sedentary Scandinavian/Baltic hunter-gatherer/fishing communities of 8,500 years ago. He suggests that in this environment, guilt made people cooperate, Prisoner’s Dilemma-style, and community sanctions against defectors ensured that they stayed a low enough percent of the population that they couldn’t take advantage of the folks who felt a lot of guilt. Quoting Frost:
What is to stop some individuals from exploiting the guilt proneness of others while feeling no guilt themselves? This free-rider dilemma may have been resolved in part by identifying such individuals and ostracizing them. It may also be that these semi-sedentary communities were conducive to evolution of altruistic behavior, as described by Maynard Smith’s haystack model (Wikipedia, 2013). According to this model, guilt-prone individuals are at a disadvantage within any one community and will thus become fewer and fewer with each generation. If, however, a community has a high proportion of guilt-prone individuals, it will have an advantage over other communities and thus expand in numbers at their expense. And if these communities disperse and regroup on a regular basis, the overall proportion of guilt-prone individuals will increase over time. …
There is an obvious issue that arises if a guilt-ridden society suddenly obtains a large number of individuals who don’t buy into the whole guilt complex.
… it was the hunter-fisher-gatherers of the North Sea and the Baltic who led the way to behavioral modernity, i.e., individualism, reduced emphasis on kinship, and the market as the main organizing principle of social and economic life. Their mode of subsistence was not wiped out by agriculture, unless one sees fishing as a kind of farming. They not only survived, but also went on to create what we now call the Western World. Not bad for a bunch of losers.
The guilt complex is obviously deep in Christianity. My researches so far have not revealed a similar guilt complex in other religions, though to be fair, Hinduism is vast and well beyond my understanding. IMO, some Christians take this guilt to an unhealthy level:
Some members of strict monastic orders, and some members of the Catholic lay organization Opus Dei, practice mild self-flagellation using an instrument called a “discipline”, a cattail whip usually made of knotted cords, which is flung over the shoulders repeatedly during private prayer. Pope John Paul II took the discipline regularly.
The Wikipedia page on Flagellantism, a Medieval Religious movement, deserves reading in its own right, but I will try to quote a representative bit here:
The 11th-century zealot Dominicus Loricatus repeated the entire Psalter twenty times in one week, accompanying each psalm with a hundred lash-strokes to his back. … The movement did not have a central doctrine or overall leaders, but a popular passion for the movement occurred all over Europe in separate outbreaks. … The prime cause of the Perugia episode is unclear, but it followed an outbreak of an epidemic and chroniclers report how the mania spread throughout almost all the people of the city. Thousands of citizens gathered in great processions, singing and with crosses and banners, they marched throughout the city whipping themselves. … The movement spread across Northern Italy, up to 10,000 strong groups processing in Modena, Bologna, Reggio and Parma …
The German and Low Countries movement … established their camps in fields near towns and held their rituals twice a day. The ritual began with the reading of a letter, claimed to have been delivered by an angel and justifying the Flagellants’ activities. Next the followers would fall to their knees and scourge themselves, gesturing with their free hands to indicate their sin and striking themselves rhythmically to songs, known as Geisslerlieder, until blood flowed. Sometimes the blood was soaked up in rags and treated as a holy relic. … some towns began to notice that sometimes Flagellants brought plague to towns where it had not yet surfaced. Therefore later they were denied entry. They responded with increased physical penance.
The anchorites were early hermits/monks who were literally walled into tiny rooms they never left for the rest of their lives:
Medieval illustration of anchorite cell
Maybe if Xanax had existed in Medieval Europe, people would have been less prone to walling themselves up in churches.
Note that self-flagellation and anchoritism are not rational responses to life in Medieval Europe–not only do they not solve problems like the Black Death, they may have exacerbated them. They are extreme emotional responses to overwhelming feelings of guilt and anxiety.
Properly balanced, guilt and anxiety can prompt people to treat each other fairly and be attentive in their work. Unbalanced, the individual (or society,) becomes unhinged. They start demanding that their own societies be destroyed because they they must have done something wrong to have more advanced tech than other societies, or groveling for forgiveness for things they didn’t even do:
White woman begs forgiveness for slavery
Anxiety and guilt have their good sides. Society probably couldn’t exist without them. But they have to be in balance.
A friend recently attended their 20th highschool reunion, the sort of event that makes one feel very old. Worse, three of their classmates have already died.
I thought that sounded way statistically unlikely, especially given the group’s demographics, but I ran the numbers, and it turns out that it’s only a little unlikely. Given the small N, we’re probably talking about random chance making the class unlucky rather than a particular propensity for death, but it’s unfortunate either way.
Highschool reunions are also a great (by which I mean depressing) opportunity to see who has aged the most. Some classmates look hardly older than the last time you saw them, while others look like they got hit by a semi full of old. Hopefully not you, of course.
In “Quantification of biological aging in young adults,” Belsky et al confirm what I’ve long suspected: that different people age at radically different rates, not just emotionally/mentally, but also biologically.
From the abstract: “We studied aging in 954 young humans, the Dunedin Study birth cohort, tracking multiple biomarkers across three time points spanning their third and fourth decades of life. We developed and validated two methods by which aging can be measured in young adults, one cross-sectional and one longitudinal. Our longitudinal measure allows quantification of the pace of coordinated physiological deterioration across multiple organ systems (e.g., pulmonary, periodontal, cardiovascular, renal, hepatic, and immune function). We applied these methods to assess biological aging in young humans who had not yet developed age-related diseases. Young individuals of the same chronological age varied in their “biological aging” (declining integrity of multiple organ systems). Already, before midlife, individuals who were aging more rapidly were less physically able, showed cognitive decline and brain aging, self-reported worse health, and looked older.” (bold mine.)
” We scaled the Pace of Aging so that the central tendency in the cohort indicates 1 y of physiological change for every one chronological year. On this scale, cohort members ranged in their Pace of Aging from near 0 y of physiological change per chronological year to nearly 3 y of physiological change per chronological year.”
“Study members with advanced Biological Age performed less well on objective tests of
physical functioning at age 38 than biologically younger peers (Fig. 5). They had more difficulty with balance and motor tests (for unipedal stance test of balance, r = −0.22, P < 0.001; for grooved pegboard test of fine motor coordination, r = −0.13, P < 0.001), and they were not as strong (grip strength test, r = −0.19, P < 0.001).”
“Study members with older Biological Ages had poorer cognitive functioning at midlife (r = −0.17, P < 0.001). Moreover, this difference in cognitive functioning reflected actual cognitive decline over the
years. When we compared age-38 IQ test scores to baseline test scores from childhood, study members with older Biological Age showed a decline in cognitive performance net of their baseline
level (r = −0.09, P = 0.010).”
“Neurologists have also begun to use high-resolution 2D photographs of the retina to evaluate age-related loss of integrity of blood vessels within the brain. Retinal and cerebral small vessels
share embryological origin and physiological features, making retinal vasculature a noninvasive indicator of the state of the brain’s microvasculature (32). Retinal microvascular abnormalities are associated with age-related brain pathology, including stroke and dementia (33–35) … study members with advanced Biological Age had older retinal vessels (narrower arterioles, r = −0.20, P < 0.001; wider venules, r = 0.17, P < 0.001).”
“… these biologically older study members were perceived to be older by independent observers.”
“Based on Pace of Aging analysis, we estimate that roughly 1/2 of the difference in Biological Age
observed at chronological age 38 had accumulated over the past 12 y.”
“… our analysis was limited to a single cohort, and one that lacked ethnic minority populations. Replication in other cohorts is needed, in particular in samples including sufficient numbers of ethnic minority individuals to test the “weathering hypothesis” that the stresses of ethnic minority status accelerate aging.”
“Three Dunedin Study members had Pace of Aging less than zero, appearing to grow physiologically younger during their thirties.”
While I suspect measurement error is at play, I’d still like to know what those guys did.
3. They appear to have split off from the rest of humanity and have been relatively isolated for longer than almost anyone else on Earth.
4. They’re getting wiped out by their neighbors, so we’d better learn about them now.
First, Who are the Pygmies?
“Pygmy” does not refer (as far as we know) to one specific ethnic group, but to the members of any ethnic group in which adult men are, on average, 4’11” or shorter. In practice, people tend to only use the word Pygmy to refer to certain African groups; there are short-statured groups found outside of Africa, but we’ll discuss them in another post.
The principle African Pygmies are the Aka, Baka, Mbuti, and Twa. (Some countries and groups use different name; I am not an expert on Pygmies, so I’m sure there is much I’ve missed.) The Mbuti are probably the shortest, with an average height under 4’6″. There are about 250,000 to 600,000 Pygmies, scattered about the Congo rainforest:
We’ve known for a while that the Pygmies–especially the Mbuti Pygmies–and their more southerly neighbors, the San, appear to be the most genetically divergent people on Earth:
Average age of SNPs in different populations, from West Hunter
You might have to squint, but the Pygmies and San are on the far right.
In normal English, what does this mean? Here is my understanding:
There are parts of your (our) genome where random mutations won’t generally kill you. Random mutations tend, therefore, to accumulate there. Since have some pretty decent estimates for how often random mutations occur, comparing the mutations in two different populations lets us estimate how long ago they split. For example, let’s suppose you get one random mutation per hundred years, and we’re comparing two populations that split 300 years ago and haven’t seen each other since. Population A should have gotten 3 mutations during that 300 years, and Population B should have gotten 3 mutations. So if we look at a third population, C, and find that they have 5 mutations that they don’t share with A or B, then we conclude that C split off from some ancestral population 500 years ago. We can reconstruct this as: 600 years ago, there was a group called ABC, but 500 years ago, it split into Group AB and Group C. 300 years ago, Group AB split into Group A and Group B.
Anatomically Modern Humans (that is, Homo Sapiens Sapiens,) according to our best estimates, emerged around 200,000 years ago in central Africa. We’re used to talking about the Out of Africa event, when humans started wandering around the rest of the globe, but it looks like the first major migration event might have been toward the south:
Map of early diversification of modern humans according to mitochondrial population genetics, from Wikipedia
Those guys who went south (Pygmies, Bushmen aka San,) look like they’ve been isolated down there for an awfully long time–much longer than, say, the Australian Aborigines, who got to Australia about 50,000 years ago.
“Our two best-fit models both suggest ancient divergence between the ancestors of the farmers and Pygmies, 90,000 or 150,000 years ago. We also find that bi-directional asymmetric gene-flow is statistically better supported than a single pulse of unidirectional gene flow from farmers to Pygmies, as previously suggested.”
That’s a long time ago!
(“Bi-directional asymmetric gene-flow” means that they have occasionally inter-married, but not equal numbers of men and women.)
BUT, and this is where I get speculative and may be saying things that a real scientist would tell me are just dumb, what if the Pygmies (and San) actually split off more recently, and just picked up some archaic hominin DNA on their way south?
It’s not so far-fetched an idea. Everyone outside of Sub-Sharan Africa seems to have some Neanderthal DNA, picked up around the time their ancestors left Africa (Northern Africa has had a lot of mixing with non-African populations over the years, so I assume North Africans have Neanderthal DNA, too.) Melanesians (eg, guys from Papua New Guinea and a bunch of tiny Pacific Islands,) and Australian Aborigines are about 4%-6% Denisovan, but it looks like no one else is. Wikipedia article on archaic admixture.
Less is known about potential hominin admixture in Sub-Saharan populations. This may just be because we’ve sequenced far more European genomes and all sorts of remains tend to rot really quickly in the rainforest, making it hard to uncover any archaic DNA to compare modern humans to. However, I can’t help but think that few scientists wanted to be the guy who announced archaic hominin admixture in Sub-Saharan Africans before it was announced in Europeans. That seems like the kind of finding that could quickly get your department defunded, not to mention a lot of people mad at you and a ton of nonsense on the internet.
But with archaic admixture showing up all over the place, no one need worry about the political implications anymore, and science can get on with its business.
So, anyway, what if, on their way into the rainforest, the Pygmies’ ancestors encountered–and bred with–some other group of archaic hominins? (No, not chimps or gorillas–they have a different number of chromosomes than we do, so you couldn’t get viable offspring with them, similar to how mules are infertile.) They would have been more like Neandearthals, though obviously probably shorter.
It seems to me that a more recent divergence from other human groups + archaic admixture could result in a similar number of different genetic mutations as a much more ancient divergence + no admixture.
It also seems like you could have a third scenario: Pygmies (and San) have experienced recent selective pressure on parts of their genomes that no one else has. Maybe the parts of the genome that for everyone else have been just been accumulating random mutations have been important for the recent evolution of the San and Pygmy peoples, and so they’ve been accumulating changes faster than everyone else.
At any rate, the Pygmies are still genetically unique among humans.
Unfortunately, the Pygmies are not doing so well. The Batwa got kicked out of their homes in order to make a gorilla reserve. As hunter gatherers with no title deeds to the land they lived on, the government (Uganda) didn’t bother to give them new land or homes. In other words, the Batwa Pygmies were treated worse than the gorillas. (Today, some NGOs have helped the Batwa get new land and set them up as a living ethno-theme park for tourists, which I guess isn’t the worst fate in the world.)
The Bantus (who, despite living in Africa, are probably more closely related to Koreans than Pygmies,) use the Pygmies as slaves.
The Congolese (Democratic Republic of the Congo) have been literally eating the Pygmies, especially the Mbuti Pygmies, whom they regard as sub-human. Astoundingly, one of the reasons cited for genocidal cannibalism is that they want to open up Pygmy lands for mineral exploitation.
70,000 Pygmies have been killed in the civil wars in the DRC and Rwanda.
While I caution against idolizing the Pygmy villages as non-violent Edens (I have no idea what their violence rates are, but past experience suggests that it’s probably actually pretty high,) at least they aren’t cannibals. The Pygmies are smaller than everyone else and have only stone-age technology, so they tend to get defeated easily.
Pretty soon, there might not be any Pygmies left to talk about.
