What is the gender ratio on Literotica?

[MelissaBaby]

Peoples aren't hunter-gatherers forever, and some environments (esp. the Americas) lacked big game animals to feed a tribe for weeks.

You ever see a moose up close?

 

[ElectricBlue]

You ever see a moose up close?

All bison are really small, like mice. The photographers used zoom lenses to make them look really big. Perhaps ancient moose were the same. The clue is in the name, surely? Moose. Mouse. The "oo" is an ancient hieroglyph for binoculars. Size is an optical illusion.

Carry on .

 

[NotWise]

You ever see a moose up close?

They're huge. And grumpy.

Or bison? Or a full-grown Elk? The archaic Americans also had mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, and the like. All those are in the range from "big game" to megafauna.

 

[SimonDoom]

All bison are really small, like mice. The photographers used zoom lenses to make them look really big. Perhaps ancient moose were the same. The clue is in the name, surely? Moose. Mouse. The "oo" is an ancient hieroglyph for binoculars. Size is an optical illusion.

Carry on .

Still recovering from that tussle with the numbat, eh?

 

[ElectricBlue]

Still recovering from that tussle with the numbat, eh?

EB sniggers. "He's not read every thread yet."

 

[MelissaBaby]

They're huge. And grumpy.

Or bison? Or a full-grown Elk? The archaic Americans also had mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, and the like. All those are in the range from "big game" to megafauna.

My brother shot a moose a few years ago. It dressed out at almost 300 pounds of meat.

 

[BelleCanzuto]

My brother shot a moose a few years ago. It dressed out at almost 300 pounds of meat.

Surely, that only lasted a day or two...

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Originally Posted by MelissaBaby
My brother shot a moose a few years ago. It dressed out at almost 300 pounds of meat.

Surely, that only lasted a day or two...

They’re big animals; it took her brother a day and a half just to get this one out of its dress. Crinolines, you know...

 

[Bramblethorn]

I’ve been watching this with interest.

There’s a fascinating article on the entire topic: Equality for the sexes in human evolution? Early hominid sexual dimorphism and implications for mating systems and social behavior by Clark Spencer Larsen. Larsen notes that virtually all hominid species have or had body mass dimorphism, with males being bigger than females. The bigger the difference, the more likely that physical conflict for mating is/was present. He notes, “Insight into dimorphism... has important implications for social behavior and organization in later and present-day humans.”

(that link is broken, should be: https://www.pnas.org/content/100/16/9103)

This is a nice example of how claims about evolution can be testable: if the hypothesis is "men are bigger because of reproductive competition", an obvious sanity-check is to look at other species (potentially both hominid and non-) and see whether the species with more male competition for mates show more dimorphism. In general, they do; it's not proof that the theory is correct but it's certainly consistent with the theory.

(At which point, worth noting that while modern humans do show some physical dimorphism, it's mild compared to many species - the implication being that while male-male competition is a factor, it shouldn't be overrated.)

I'd be a bit more receptive to the claims about male-female visual differences if I was aware of similar research supporting them.

First off, while every factor in this planetary Darwinian experiment to some degree involves random chance, virtually none of the results do. It’s more or less a given that, in terms of evolution, nothing exists without reason or cause.

This is technically true, but not in the way it's popularly interpreted. In particular, that reason doesn't have to be "it confers reproductive advantage".

There are several well-understood mechanisms that allow non-beneficial traits (neutral or mildly harmful) to become widespread or even fixed in a population. Some examples off the top of my head:

- Genetic drift of neutral mutations: if two different versions of a gene are relatively neutral and there are no complicating factors acting to preserve diversity, in time one or the other will eventually die out simply by bad luck (though "eventually" may take a long time). It doesn't mean the surviving one was better, just chance.
- Genetic hitch-hiking: a non-beneficial allele happens to be located very close to a beneficial one on the genome, so natural selection for the beneficial allele also ends up selecting for the non-beneficial one.
- Side-effects and by-products: e.g. the trade-off between Vitamin D synthesis and cancer risk, or the 15-foot long laryngeal nerve of the giraffe, or the fact that humans still die from trying to squeeze large-skulled babies through a hole in the pelvis rather than giving birth through the abdomen.

Yet, acknowledging the problems with trying to explain things without 100% of the facts, what else is there? Considering human sexual dimorphism, we lack the ability to travel in time to take samples, to observe the changes and conditions and patterns over millennia. It is inevitable therefore that we will take such hard facts as we can find and try to fit them into a coherent pattern, using logic as the glue.

There are things we can't do, but there are also many things we can do. If somebody asserts "size dimorphism is due to reproductive competition" we can look at whether trends in other species are consistent with that explanation. If somebody asserts "X is an adaptation to hunting megafauna", we can look for areas where megafauna was more or less common, and see whether X is more common among people with origins in those areas. And so on and so on. Isotopic analysis can tell us where a long-dead person lived at different stages in their life and what they ate. Cheap genetic sequencing can help us understand when certain mutations appeared and how they spread, as well as identifying genetic mechanisms that might give rise to particular traits.

It's not straightforward, but there are lots of things a creative biologist/geneticist can do to help test evolutionary theories. My beef with (most of) evo-psych is that, by and large, it's not even trying to test the truth of its claims.

Take it further. Would there be any advantage, evolutionarily-speaking, for women to be as tall and strong as men? It’s hard to see one, frankly.

A few possibilities: Gathering fruit from high trees. Digging up root vegetables. Self-defence against predators or other hominids. (And once we get into agrarian societies, there is good evidence that physical strength for women was very important.)

Would those factors have been important enough to outweigh the costs of that extra height/muscle? Quite possibly not; the more muscle you have, the more protein you need, and smaller creatures with modest dietary requirements are often better at surviving hard times.

Still further – this sort of pressure has been there for thousands upon thousands of generations, which is certainly long enough for genetic change to have taken place. Without going into details of what such changes are or might be, is it in any way unlikely that men and women carry genetic traits making them both physically and psychologically different?

It's pretty clear that there are genetic traits causing physical differences, and given that the brain is a physical entity influenced by sex hormones etc. it's not hard to believe that this extends to psychological differences (at an "on-average" level, that is).

I don't have an issue with people asserting that such things are possible, just with the leap to assert that any given difference must be a genetically-based evolutionary adaptation without providing adequate supporting evidence or attempting to eliminate possible alternatives.

 

[Hypoxia]

Back to mooses. Ain't that many of them. And even fewer mastadons are around. Megafauna abounded in the Americas before the last Ice Age meltback and the invasion of rascally humans, who rendered most big beasts extinct within a millennium. The biggest survivors were bison (till horses were re-introduced) and they're not amenable to herding, milking, etc. Next are moose and various deer types, also not domestic; then llamas, and... that's about it. You get down to javelinas, armadillos, muskrats, and alligators. And dogs. Fido the frankfurter. Mighty he-man hunters aren't needed when poached puppy is on the menu.

EDIT: I forgot the bears. But they were more competition than prey.

 

[Voboy]

Back to mooses. Ain't that many of them. And even fewer mastadons are around. Megafauna abounded in the Americas before the last Ice Age meltback and the invasion of rascally humans, who rendered most big beasts extinct within a millennium. The biggest survivors were bison (till horses were re-introduced) and they're not amenable to herding, milking, etc. Next are moose and various deer types, also not domestic; then llamas, and... that's about it. You get down to javelinas, armadillos, muskrats, and alligators. And dogs. Fido the frankfurter. Mighty he-man hunters aren't needed when poached puppy is on the menu.

EDIT: I forgot the bears. But they were more competition than prey.

Wasn't this one of the big theses of "Guns, Germs, and Steel?" The idea that although Australia was one of the first places colonized by modern humans, they essentially got nowhere technologically because lack of megafauna never led them to acquire nutritional stability or develop skills and weapons powerful enough to kill big, fast animals?

Or am I thinking of another book?

Either way, Australia has no native megafauna, and has an indigenous population that remained technologically backward vis a vis contemporary societies. It's an interesting correlation.

 

[NotWise]

Back to mooses. Ain't that many of them. And even fewer mastadons are around. Megafauna abounded in the Americas before the last Ice Age meltback and the invasion of rascally humans, who rendered most big beasts extinct within a millennium. The biggest survivors were bison (till horses were re-introduced) and they're not amenable to herding, milking, etc. Next are moose and various deer types, also not domestic; then llamas, and... that's about it. You get down to javelinas, armadillos, muskrats, and alligators. And dogs. Fido the frankfurter. Mighty he-man hunters aren't needed when poached puppy is on the menu.

EDIT: I forgot the bears. But they were more competition than prey.

You underestimate the size of a moose. Their height at the shoulder is taller than most men. And bison are larger than most horses -- especially by weight. The same is true for a full-grown stag elk. By weight, elk can be almost as big as a moose and bigger than most cattle. They aren't as tall as a moose, because Elk don't have long legs to wade in swamps.

And bears were prey. There's an area on one of the Pueblo's I'm familiar with that's known as "The Bear Stew area." I don't think "bear stew" would be a thing if they weren't prey.

 

[Hypoxia]

Wasn't this one of the big theses of "Guns, Germs, and Steel?"

I'm not familiar with that one. I'm driven by some Marvin Harris: Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture, and Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures.

Pre-Contact Central America had no big meat animals. Well, just one: human. But the Aztecs had a hard time building an empire when any captives would be eaten instead of recruited. Pre-Contact Americans not near fisheries developed agriculture early. Eat yams, not your neighbors. Anyway, Harris assigns many consequences to the first Americans' devouring all the megafauna.

ObTopic sorta: What are gender ratios in pre-industrial societies?

 

[Hypoxia]

You underestimate the size of a moose.

I've been close to moose. Too close. How many moose must you bag daily to feed a community of 1000? Can a civilization be built on moose or bison hunts?

And bears were prey.

I didn't say they weren't. I said they were more competition than prey. Were they easy prey, none would remain, like mammoths.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Australia has no native megafauna, and has an indigenous population that remained technologically backward vis a vis contemporary societies. It's an interesting correlation.

Not any more, but the evidence is there that the big critters (and there were several big buggers) where rendered extinct within a couple of centuries of the arrival of mankind, about 50,000 years or so ago. Same thing happened in the South Pacific and New Zealand - gone in the flash of an eye, as soon as the first canoes arrived (the Moa, the Dodo, a few other big flightless birds who were too slow).

 

[ElectricBlue]

I've been close to moose. Too close. How many moose must you bag daily to feed a community of 1000? Can a civilization be built on moose or bison hunts?

The American Indians seemed to do okay, one could almost say they figured out a sensible balance - which was only stuffed up by the European invasions.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Can a civilization be built on moose or bison hunts?
.

I think it depends on your definition of what constitutes a civilization.

 

[Voboy]

I think it depends on your definition of what constitutes a civilization.

This.

I think that what the Plains peoples had was, by any meaningful definition, a civilization. It simply wasn’t tied to fixed locations.

 

[BelleCanzuto]

I think it depends on your definition of what constitutes a civilization.

This.

I think that what the Plains peoples had was, by any meaningful definition, a civilization. It simply wasn’t tied to fixed locations.

I concur wholeheartedly. I will add, not just the Plains peoples, but the Iroquois and Cherokee nations in the east, too.

I also can't understand an assertion implying that what we now think of as Western Europe had megafauna to a significantly greater extent than the Americas.

 

[Voboy]

I concur wholeheartedly. I will add, not just the Plains peoples, but the Iroquois and Cherokee nations in the east, too.

I also can't understand an assertion implying that what we now think of as Western Europe had megafauna to a significantly greater extent than the Americas.

The book I read (I thought it was Jared Diamond, but perhaps not) stressed the importance of megafauna in all of Eurasia at a time before the Americas had been fully settled.

The idea was that the generational battles against megafauna in those who remained in Eurasia (rather than those who continued migrating), combined with a fixed area in which those early Europeans could find and develop resources, resulted in a great prehistoric technological leap that gave the Euros a massive head start.

But who knows? And if it was Diamond, that’s more than 20-year-old scholarship. It’s as good a hypothesis as any, I guess.

 

[BelleCanzuto]

The book I read (I thought it was Jared Diamond, but perhaps not) stressed the importance of megafauna in all of Eurasia at a time before the Americas had been fully settled.

The idea was that the generational battles against megafauna in those who remained in Eurasia (rather than those who continued migrating), combined with a fixed area in which those early Europeans could find and develop resources, resulted in a great prehistoric technological leap that gave the Euros a massive head start.

But who knows? And if it was Diamond, that’s more than 20-year-old scholarship. It’s as good a hypothesis as any, I guess.

I just googled the book (I had a vague recollection of hearing about it, but hadn't read it). In the short summary I found, it seems that his hypothesis rests more on domesticating animals and agriculture than generations conflicts with megafauna. But there may be more details that aren't included in the summary I found, or maybe you are thinking of a different book.
Here's a link to the summary: https://www.enotes.com/topics/guns-germs-steel

{As an aside, personally I think this thread is a fascinating testament to the general level of erudtition and thoughtful analysis present in this group of volunteer smut writers. A simple post about the gender ration on this site has evolved into a deep discussion of biology, evolution, the principles of evolutionary psychology, and history. What a group to hang out with!}

 

[NotWise]

{As an aside, personally I think this thread is a fascinating testament to the general level of erudtition and thoughtful analysis present in this group of volunteer smut writers. A simple post about the gender ration on this site has evolved into a deep discussion of biology, evolution, the principles of evolutionary psychology, and history. What a group to hang out with!}

Erudition? or Attention Deficit?

 

[BelleCanzuto]

Erudition? or Attention Deficit?

To-may-to, to-mah- ooh squirrel!

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Bramblethorn, it is always a pleasure to hold a polite discussion with you.

WRT physical strength of primitive farming women, such strength would of course be paralleled - and undoubtedly exceeded - by that of their mates. In any case, such strengthening is something which can develop in almost any individual, without waiting for evolutionary change, given sufficent nutrition and a lifetime of effort. I was recently reading an article re the incredible upper-body development found in the skeletons of medieval English archers, men using bows with 150 lb draw weight. (Putting that into perspective, 50 or 60 lb is normal these days for bow hunting.)

We are indeed an adaptable species.

 

[Voboy]

I just googled the book (I had a vague recollection of hearing about it, but hadn't read it). In the short summary I found, it seems that his hypothesis rests more on domesticating animals and agriculture than generations conflicts with megafauna. But there may be more details that aren't included in the summary I found, or maybe you are thinking of a different book.
Here's a link to the summary: https://www.enotes.com/topics/guns-germs-steel

{As an aside, personally I think this thread is a fascinating testament to the general level of erudtition and thoughtful analysis present in this group of volunteer smut writers. A simple post about the gender ration on this site has evolved into a deep discussion of biology, evolution, the principles of evolutionary psychology, and history. What a group to hang out with!}

I’m beginning to think I had the wrong book, alas.

Diamond correlated the West’s rapid and comprehensive rise to technological dominance to many factors, and he spent a lot of time on megafauna. I might be thinking of Sir John Keegan; I dunno.

Interesting topic indeed.