Our Distant Ape Ancestors Were Polygynous

For evidence of our true sexual natures when artifice and compromise are stripped away, we look to the world around us and watch it go with our lying eyes… and if distrustful of our powers of observation we look to the historical record for an idea of how our distant ancestors navigated the sexual market.

One such very distant ancestor to humans, it turns out, was polygynous (one man, many women).

“The Y chromosome tree for gorillas is very shallow, which fits with the idea that very few male gorillas (alpha males) father the offspring within groups,” Hallast continued. “By contrast, the trees in chimpanzees and bonobos are very deep, which fits with the idea that males and females mate with each other more indiscriminately.” […]

Study leader Mark Jobling, also a geneticist from the University of Leicester, noted that “humans look much more like gorillas than chimps” when considering Y-chromosome data and mtDNA.

“It’s interesting to compare the shapes of the trees between humans and our great-ape relatives,” he said. “This suggests that over the long period of human evolution our choice of partners has not been a free-for-all, and that it’s likely that humans have practiced a polygynous system — where a few men have access to most of the women, and many men don’t have access — over our evolutionary history as a species. This is more like the gorilla system than the chimpanzee ‘multimale-multifemale’ mating system.”

A figure that gets bounced around the realtalkosphere frequently is the 80/40 ratio: 80% of women, but only 40% of men ever reproduced, over the course of human history and up until the relatively unique modern era. If this number is accurate, its implications are astounding.

One, it confirms a degree of influence on mating systems from female hypergamy. Women’s deeply hypergamous compulsion to prefer the shared company of an alpha male over the monopolized company of a beta male is a tough truth for most to accept. Though it is a universal truth subject to mitigation by recent evolution just like any human trait, and certain races of women may have been selected for a less hypergamous disposition.

Two, it suggests an ultraviolent past, far removed from the noble savage fantasies percolating in liberal minds, when death stalked men constantly. If murder, lethal accidents, and animal maulings were common throughout most of pre-modern human history, then there wouldn’t be many men surviving to reproductive age, skewing the sex ratio.

Three, most ominously, it portends dysgenic evolution in modern societies. We are near a 1:1 ratio of reproductive success for women and men in Western societies. This is a great egalitarian achievement from the perspective of those who would lose in a sexual market governed by the laws of nature, but the equal mating field may come with a stiff (heh) price: too many low fitness misfits passing on their mutational loads to future generations. Nature, in the end, always wins. No Title IX, condom, or Pill will thwart Nature from her appointed mission of culling the losers and rewarding the winners. And as of now, it appears the winners of tomorrow are those with healthy genomes and an aversion to contraceptives and the sex and the city liefstyle.