Do you have cites for any of the assertions you made in that paragraph? Please note that the term “harem” generally refers to a large grouping of females. It would be odd to refer to man with 2 wives as having a “harem”. In that sense, offering up monogamy vs “a harem” is a false dichotomy.
I’d be shocked to find that was true, but if you have a cite…?
When I Google “Human evolution hunting” the first link is a list of articles in Scientific American, including that Australopithecus was already switching to a diet of goat and cow sized animals; and that (from the summary) they were known to carry their catch back to a central camp for sharing. And so on…
This suggests a group effort - I doubt anyone is going to carry a cow home by themselves, although it’s conceivable they could kill it solo.
The second link is the Wiki article - note for example
The Wikipedia entry on sexual dimorphism:
and we’ve missed this seminar:
http://www.bu.edu/anthrop/dialogues/does_size_matter/
DOES SIZE MATTER? Sexual Dimorphism in Human Evolution
This suggests that to a small extent differences relate to marriage, although the quote seems contradictory:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.1330530314/abstract
One study suggests dimorphism as relates to body fat varies by latitude; the colder it is out, the fatter your women.
Another suggests that stature differences are greatest in mid-latitudes.
(Latitude and Intersocietal Variation of Human Sexual Dimorphism of Stature - Linda D. Wolfe and J. Patrick Gray, Human Ecology Vol. 10, No. 3, Biology and Culture (Sep., 1982), pp. 409-416 - preview in Jstor)
The actual study I recall was something in some popular science magazine, like Scientific American, and quite a while ago.
I will agree though that there is a big difference between a society where a man may end up with two wives versus an arrangement where men can have 4 or more wives. The latter is more along the line of the harem of the middle east. That works best where there is a power structure and the rules are enforced by the might of the state. I don’t see it working in a small tribal structure, where a man with 4 wives will have to defend himself against 3 other men whose only chance at mating is to defeat the first man. The head of a harem in a hunter gatherer tribe will have to go out to hunt, leaving his women unattended. And so on…
(IIRC there were exceptions in some societies - the Emperor of China had multiple wives and a large number of concubines, and this was typical across the Indian subcontinent too. But from what little I know of their social structure, this was limited to the extremely rich and important and monogamy was more typical in the society. )
OK, let’s just start with this one. I can’t access this article online, so it would be best if you could quote from it. I’ve never heard of Australopithecus as hunting. Scavenging, maybe, but that’s generally attributed more to H. habiis than to Australopithecus. Persistence hunting is certainly thought to have been a major component in human evolution, but at the level of H. erectus, not so much before.
And yes, we probably hunted in groups. Whether this leads to monogamy or not is certainly not obvious nor is there evidence in the fossil record to support it. As I noted before, the extant H/Gs are problematic as a model for pre-agricultural humans because they have been forced into a marginal existence in historical times. The particular family structure of H/Gs likely depended on a lot of variables, and there is not reason to believe that only one system was dominant.
H/Gs are generally pretty egalitarian, but cultures are going to vary and depending on the ratio of men to women, family arrangements are going to vary. Men tend to hunt as a group, with the meat being shared, so it’s not like the man with multiple wives has to feed them by himself. Not to mention that most of the calories are going to come from gathering, done mostly by the women anyway. If there are more women than men in a group, then some guys are almost certainly going to end up with multiple wives since an unattached female isn’t going to fare well in that society.
Anyway, we in the West tend to see monogamy as the norm, but that’s our own cultural bias. More likely, the family structure was highly fluid, varying depending on cultural, demographic and availability of resources. I say “more likely” because that seems to fit what we see around the world, but the reality is we just don’t know how our ancestors were hooking up for most of the time our species has been in existence. We can make some educated guesses, but that’s it.
Have you read much of the recent (post-1999) work on butchery marks e.g de Heinzelin or McPherron? Australopithecus afarensis and A. garhi both are associated with carnivory. You’re right that it seems scavenging was their method, though.
Maybe it wasn’t clear, but that’s what I said. The “that” in the sentence you quoted referred to “hunting”. Now, chimps sometimes hunt, so Australopithecus probably did, too. But chimps get only a tiny fraction of the calories from hunting, so lacking evidence that they (Australopithecus) hunted, it would be incorrect to call them “hunters”, since that would imply it was some common activity.
Aah, I read it as referring to scavenging. No worries.
All things being equal, larger animals will survive longer in times of less food. Larger animals have lower relative surface areas, so lower relative metabolic costs, and can carry relatively more fat.
The only time larger animals will starve sooner is if the excess mass consists of large amounts of muscle or nerve tissue and the amount of fat storage can’t be concomitantly increased. This isn’t true of humans or primates in general. If you locked up a dozen primates of different sizes with no food, then the rate at which they died would fairly closely correlate to their body mass. A tarsier will starve in days, a rhesus in weeks and a gorilla in months.
This assumes that running has to be the primary defence. A hare is better at running than a rabbit of the same size, but rabbits are more successful. A porcupine of the same size has much less muscle than either. Different strategies produce different advantages.
This is likely to be especially true of humans. Amongst birds, for example, the greatest dimorphism is found not amongst species where males fight for females, or even species where males compete passively. It is found amongst monogamous species where the males and females have radically different methods of gathering food. If the male is chiselling grubs from rotting wood and he female is pulling moths from crevices under bark, you are going to get very different optimal forms. If the female is confined for weeks on end while incubating the young and the male has to provide for both, you are going to get large variation in size and body structure.
This is a point that’s often ignored in explaining human dimorphism. For other primates, males and females do not live pretty much the same life aside from reproduction. For humans, the lives of males and females is radically different in every respect: diet, activity, social interaction, tool use etc. Ignoring all those differences and trying to pin a size difference entirely on sexual strategies seems to be ignoring the blindingly obvious. Whatever reproductive strategies humans adopted, the same size discrepancies are likely to have the same advantages because the advantages apply to male-female differences in every activity, not just reproduction.
That relies on an assumption that females do not compete for mates, which is clearly untrue. In fact, within certain tolerances, larger (taller) females in all societies have less mate choice than smaller ones. This may be because small size equates to youth which makes smaller females more attractive, or it may be because height correlates to testosterone levels, which means males evolved to find taller women unattractive or it may be something else altogether. But there is a strong size selection for females just as there is for males.
That is a broad oversimplification.
Women are just as fixated on look as men are. A good looking man has a much better chance of getting laid than rich ugly man. All things being equal women do want rich, good looking, popular men. But all things being equal men also want rich, good-looking women. The relative degree of weight given to social status, wealth and beauty by men and women varies by culture and subculture, but there is no compelling evidence that women value looks less than men in human societies generally. In some societies, such as poor US culture, women are actually more appearance driven than men. In other societies, such as the traditional Mediterranean societies, men value domesticity and social status far more than looks.
I can’t think of one monogamous HG society. More typically the older men paired off with multiple younger women, and younger men had to wait their turn or were shared amongst the post-menopausal women.
The reason this didn’t, and doesn’t, happen is because humans don’t generally kill their relatives, and because the immediate repercussion would be death, not sex. A man could isolate another man and his wives, kill the man and rape the wives, but unless he killed the women they would tell the rest of the tribe and the murderer would be killed in turn. And of course killing the women you have had sex with isn’t an evolutionarily viable course.
Language produces massive differences between human behaviour an animal behaviour.
But that’s circular. If women selected smaller males, then those males would be the “winners” by definition. It’s possible that this is some random chance that has produced a runaway selections selection effect akin to the peacock’s tail, but more likely if women are selecting for larger males it’s because larger males have some intrinsic advantage.
Yes and no.
A larger animal by definition needs more food to live. It might last longer during a temporary food shortage… but in a prolonged situation, will have more difficulty finding enough food - will need more area per animal, if food is too sparse, will waste too much energy roaming for food.
There’s a reason why goats roam the semi-desert or mountains, while large cattle or bison roam lusher grasslands.
As for the “typical pattern” of nomadic tribes and smaller agricultural villages having a relatively(!!) monogamous marriage pattern. The “elders” can only have multiple wives if something skews the sex ratios - warfare, infanticide, etc. Otherwise, for every old guy with 3 wives there are two contemporaries who never get any or have to settle for a timeshare. That works in move organized civilizations where the rich class can afford to buy protection (from soldiers who then buy access for camp followers, etc.) I’m not suggesting one guy or one group would try a murder and rape - I’m suggesting that there would be a mutiny of the entire village if too many men found themselves deprived of female companionship. A small group of men hogging the women to themselves is not a viable model for a social structure unless there is a large external “police” force to enforce it. Forcing the young men to wait probably does work, and is followed in some societies - but young is relative; when the women are married off at 13, all ages are relative. The guys get theirs at age 30 or so from what I recall reading. This allows the man to establish himself as able to provide.
Yes, women, like men, go for looks. But men place more emphasis on looks, and women on wallet size (actually, social stature). Maybe that’s because there’s a real shortage of old ugly independently wealthy women, and yes, Donald Trump does try to pretend he has a luxurious mane - but I doubt his hair is what attracted either wife.
Funny anecdote - I went to an all boys’ school, and I was only aware of what 2 of my classmates’ fathers did for a living - a foot doctor (we razzed the guy about his dad) and a high-up manager for a major annual exhibition; while it was obvious some families had money, nobody knew or discussed how much. These simply were not topics of interest. I later mentioned this to a girl who had gone to an all-girls school, and she said just the opposite - all the girls knew exactly how much money each family had - i.e. their social standing - and what the fathers did, and even the nuns were generally hard on the charity case students.
Grasslands also support a wealth of smaller antelopes. And why do the smallest bears live in jungles, while the largest bears live in frozen wastelands?
Counterintuitively, the arctic and Antarctic oceans teemed with life, due to reasons like higher prevalence of CO2 for algae and plankton in cold water. Best whale hunting was eventually in the Antarctic. Polar bears eat seals, so have to be bigger enough to catch and subdue them. Seals are a tasty load of fat, so the polar bears get a lot of calories from their meals…
Not all is about food vs. size; but consider that the larger grazers cannot hope to outrun a predator. If they don’t shake them on the initial run, they have the bulk and horns to turn and fight in groups. (Hence, the “separate out the sick and slow” strategy against a stampede.)
Antelope rely more on outrunning, as do deer, both much smaller and lighter in general than cattle or bison. For running, half the size means one eighth the weight, but only a quarter the muscle cross-section… making the muscle-to-size ratio important.
As for jungle bears (“…the bear necessities…♪” ) size matters when trying to amble through the jungle, and bears being omnivores are less hung up on being larger than appropriate prey. Tigers tend more to pounce on prey with ambush, than to go for the extended chase of an open savannah. Also, deer are smaller and more maneuverable in deeper woods…
Often food availability is not the major determining factor in the size or shape of an animal - but sometimes it is. Everything in evolution is a trade-off.
No one is talking about a small group of men hogging the women. What we’re objecting to is your statement that monogamy is the normal social system in H/G societies. That it is somehow built-in. The evidence does not support that, no matter what type of just-so story you cook up. Unless there is a social taboo against it (as there is in most western cultures), polygamy will almost always be practiced by at least some men in a given society. Obviously it can’t be practiced by all men unless there is severe skewing of the sex ratio.
[QUOTE=John Mace]
Unless there is a social taboo against it (as there is in most western cultures), polygamy will almost always be practiced by at least some men in a given society. Obviously it can’t be practiced by all men unless there is severe skewing of the sex ratio.
[/QUOTE]
France, Italy, Greece are not Western cultures now? Having mistresses is fairly common in these societies, hell the French even had an official mistress for their King? Polygamy (whether with official sanction or by looking the other way) is almost always restricted to a small subset at the top. Economics is one reason that settled societies are generally monogamous. Another is the fact that having a large number of unmarried men, with no hope and prospects will lead to social disorder.
Incidentally, I have always laughed at feminist claims about society needing to control women’s sexuality; its men’s that most of them are worried about.
As soon as I typed that, I knew someone was going to bring up the “unofficial” polygamy we see in many contemporary societies. 
But then, lots of married women have affairs, too so it’s not all one sided.
But the thing about H/G societies is that you just don’t see single, unattached, adult females. A woman isn’t going to survive on her own, especially with children. Not so for single men. Typically, men leave the group to join their wive’s family. The women need to be paired up so they can reproduce. If a suitable single man isn’t available, then the next best thing is a married one.
H/G don’t always have the same ideas about fidelity as settled societies. I have read that this fact probably skewed observations made by early anthropologists.
I guess it comes down to how small that small subset is. Obviously to have dozens of wives you need to have severe social stratification. But even in a much more egalitarian HG or horticultural society the high social status males might have two or three wives, medium status males might have one, and lower status (that is, younger) males would have none.
It depends on how we define “common” to decide of polygamy was common. Did most males throughout human history have more than one wife at a time? Almost certainly not. Did most human beings throughout human history live in a village or band where a couple males had more than one wife? Almost certainly so.
And of course, even in looser HG or horticultural societies there can be all sorts of unofficial pairings going on in addition to the formal pairings. Yes, the official rules for how sexual and familial matters are supposed to occur can vary wildly from society to society. But if we ignore what people say the rules are supposed to be, and look at how they actually behave–either open secrets where everyone knows what is happening but pretends not to know or actual secrets–then we see a lot more consistency.
No, that is such a gross simplification that it simply becomes incorrect.
In times of prolonged drought kangaroos, elephants and camels do not have more difficulty finding enough food than do wallabies, antelope or sheep. In fact quite the opposite is true: the stronger jaws, larger digestive tracts, greater speed and lower exposure to predators that size brings means that larger animals find it easier to find food during periods of prolonged shortage.
There is a god reason why giant tortoises all evolved in areas of regular prolonged food shortage, why savanna elephants are larger than forest elephants and so forth. Large size gives a massive advantage in times of prolonged food shortage. In time so prolonged shortage, it is the small species and small individuals that starve first, exactly the opposite to what you claim to be true.
That statement is not in any way true. There are plenty of mountain cattle and desert cattle in addition to camels which are even larger. And there are plenty of antelope and deer that are goat sized and smaller that are endemic to lush grasslands.
Picking two species out of a suite of thousands and saying “look, they match my hypothesis” is just cherry picking. Can you show any evidence to support your actual claim that desert and mountain ruminants species are, on average, larger than species from “lush grasslands”? Because my intuition tells me that exactly the opposite is true: the proportion of large ruminants like camels and eland is higher in deserts compared to “lush grasslands” where there are a dozen of species of small antelopes and deer for every species that is cow sized.
Which is exactly what we do see in almost every HG and primitive agricultural society studied. So any argument base don this objection can be put to rest
And I already explained that this does not happen in the real world, and the reasons why it doesn’t happen.
Insisting that it will not happen is denying the observed reality.
"The continent-size Australian laboratory of simple hunter-gatherers is, once more, an unmatched source of data, already cited in this connection by Darwin ([1871]: 871). Polygyny was legitimate among all the Aborigines tribes and highly desired by the men. However, comparative studies among the tribes show that men with only one wife comprised the largest category among married men, often the majority. Men with two wives comprised the second largest category.The percentage of men with three or more wives fell sharply, to around ten to fifteen percent of all married men, with the figures declining with every extra wife.12To how many wives could the most successful men aspire? There was a significant environmental variation here. In the arid Central Desert, our, five, or six wives were the top. However, in the more rich and productive parts of Arnhem Land and nearby islands in the north, a few men could have as many as ten to twelve wives, and in some places, in the most extreme cases, even double that number. There was a direct correlation between resource density, resource accumulation and monopolization, social ranking, and polygyny.13Naturally, the increase in the number of a man’s wives generally correlated with his reproduction rate (number of children). Statistics for the Aborigines are scarce (Meggitt 1962:80-1). However, among the Xavante horticulturalists of Brazil, for example, 16 of the 37 adult males in one village (74 out of 184 according to a larger survey) had more than one wife. The chief had 5, more than any other man. He fathered23 surviving offspring who constituted 25 percent of the surviving offspring in that generation. Shinbone, a most successful Yanomamo man, had 43 children. His brothers were also highly successful, so Shinbone’s father had 14 children, 143 grandchildren, 335 great grandchildren, and 401 great-great grandchildren, at the time of the research (Daly and Wilson, 88-9, 332-3; Symons 1979: 143; Chagnon 1979b: 380). The same applied to hunter-gatherers. The leaders of the Aka Pygmies were found to be more than twice as polygynous as ordinary people, and to father more children (Betzig 1991). As we saw, resource scarcity reduced social differentiation, including in marriage, but did not eliminate it. Among the !Kung of the arid Kalahari Desert, polygyny was much more limited, but 5 percent of married men still had two wives(Daly and Wilson 285). Women related feuds were the main cause of homicide among them. The natives of the American Northwest Coast and arctic, our other great microcosm of hunter-gatherer peoples, demonstrate the same trend. In the extremely harsh conditions of the mid-Canadian arctic, where resources were scarce and diffused, fighting over resources barely existed. Because of the resource scarcity, marriages among the native Eskimo were also predominantly monogamous. One study registered only 3 polygynies out of 61 marriages. Still, wife-stealing was a widespread, probably the main, cause of homicide and ‘blood feuds’ among the Eskimo (Dickemann 1979: 363; Symons 1979: 152; Irwin 1990: 201-2.).14Among the Eskimo of the more densely populated Alaskan Coast, abduction of women was a principal cause of warfare. Polygyny, too, was more common among them, although restricted to the few (Nelson 1983 [1899]: 292, 327-9; Oswalt 1967: 178, 180, 182, 185, 187, 204; Burch and Correll 1972: 33). Strong Ingalik (big men) often had a second wife, and ‘there was a fellow who had five wives at one time and seven at another. This man was a great fighter and had obtained his women by raiding.’’ (Betzig 1991) The resource-rich environment of the Northwest Coast accentuated resource competition and social ranking. Conflict over resources was therefore intense. However, resource competition was not disassociated from reproduction, but constituted, in fact, an integral whole with it. Typically, women are not even mentioned in Ferguson’s elaborate materialist study of Northwest Coast Indian Warfare (1984b). Nonetheless, as we have already seen in Boas’’ account, they were there. Most natives of the Northwest Coast were monogamous. However, the rich, strong, and powerful were mostly polygynous. The number of wives varied from tribe to tribe, but ‘a number’ or ‘several’ is normally quoted, and up to twenty wives are mentioned in one case. The household of such successful men is repeatedly described as having been very substantial and impressive indeed (Rosman and Rubel 1971: 16-17, 32, 110; Drucker 1951: 301; 1965: 54; Krause 1970 (1885): 154). "
IOW, in really harsh environments like deserts the prevalence of polygamy is still ~5%. In more mesic environments it averages ~40%. Arguing that it could never happen simply makes no sense.
The whole world is not your society. Your perception biases are not reality.
Utterly bizarre. When I was a kid, and for my nieces and nephews now, the questions “what does your dad do” comes up within an hour of meeting. The idea that you had friends at school, and you never asked what their parents did and it never came up in conversation is bizarre. I suspect that the truth is that you only remember what two of these parents did.
Really? A horse, kangaroo or camel can’t hope to out run a predator? And a goat or wallaby has a better chance? Can you produce some evidence for this claim, because it seems outrageous.
Once again, you are cherry picking. Why select small animals that are designed to run large and animals that are not? Why not look at a large animals that are designed to run (eg horses, camels or kangaroos) and compare them to small animals that are not (eg goats, wombats, groundhogs and rabbits)? Being large opens up certain options aside from running, as does being small. Ability to run has little to do with size, size simply opens up options other than running.
While the reality is complicated by changes in diet and behaviour that invariably accompany change is body size, the pertinent point is that your claim that larger animals starve faster in famine and have more difficulty finding food in times of scarcity simply isn’t true. It is the opposite of the truth.
To the extent that we can generalise about the effect of body size on starvation, large body size is correlated with enhanced survival during food shortages, the fraction of body weight loss during periods of food scarcity is inversely correlated to body weight, larger animals are more efficient at digesting low quality, less preferred foods, and are able to forage over larger areas.
That is simply the state of the science. There isn’t any guarantee that every smaller animal will starve faster than every large, but all things being equal, they will. As far as the science is concerned, the generalisation is a large animal is better able to handle chronic or acute food shortage than a smaller one, for a multitude of reasons.
That’s exactly the opposite of what you are claiming is true. I have provided my references. Can you show us yours?
Seals occur almost everywhere. There is nothing special about the arctic wrt seals.
As already noted, plenty of large grazers can outrun predators. Where are you getting all this nonsense from?
We can only wish that Polar Bears were omnivores. They’d stop worrying about ice flows to catch seals and start eating berries like their brown cousins, the grizzlies.
Spelling nitpick:
Ice flows in a glacier, but on the sea it forms floes.