I just thought about it. Women have a longer life expectency. Women were at home at most times, while men were at hazardous jobs, fought wars, been to bar fights, hunting trips and much more dangerous crap.
So how is it that women didnt come to outnumber men in antique, medieval and pre modern times? Was it infanticide?
Until some point less than 150 years ago, a significant portion of women died in childbirth.
Human sex ratios at birth are skewed toward males as well.
And think about it: How would a few years extra life expectancy significantly skew the ratio? If you were looking at the ratio of men to women in the 80+ year old demographic, you’d probably find a pretty significant difference.
But as already noted, women didn’t always have longer average lifespans. That is a fairly recent phenomenon, thanks to better medical practices during pregnancy and delivery.
By far it is because childbirth is extremely risky. And up until recently, aside from waging war, men didn’t really work much more dangerous jobs than women. In fact through most of human history very few men were warriors, most were farmers. Most of their wives were farmers. There was some division of labor along gender lines, but by and large up until quite recently in our history the women worked the fields and did hard work just like the men, so their lives weren’t really much easier.
There’s a scene in The Good Earth by Pearl Buck (set in early 20th century China) in which Wang Lung’s wife is out working the fields with him while pregnant. When it is time to deliver the child, she stops working to give birth, but then she’s up right away cleaning herself and the baby and is back working the fields very quickly (with the child with her suckling.) Pearl Buck was obviously writing a work of fiction but by and large there is little reason to doubt that was common in an agrarian society. People farming for their livelihoods who live harvest to harvest simply cannot stop working for months because they are pregnant, and they certainly can’t stop working after birth.
Hunting was rare for most men for a long period of time. In hunter-gatherer societies men would of course hunt while women gathered (although that standard stereotype is said with a ton of known exceptions), but in agrarian societies few people hunted. For example in agrarian Europe from the fall of the Roman empire up until the late Enlightenment hunting was almost exclusively the provenance of the wealthy land owners, peasants didn’t get to hunt often. In many cases it was illegal for a peasant to hunt, punishable by death.
In fact if you look in old cemetaries it’s not all that rare to find family plots where the husband outlived several wives, each of whom died in childbirth.
To add some numbers (from wikipedia’s maternal mortality page):
Historical Maternal mortality ratios are estimated at about 1,000 per 100,000 live births.
Current Maternal Mortality ratio in Sierra Leone is 2,000 per 100,000 live births (2%).
Lifetime risk of maternal death for women in sub-Saharan Africa is 1 in 16.
A lifetime risk of maternal death of around 1 in 20 in pre-modern times would dwarf the effects of violent deaths among men. Something like 5 per cent of women (2.5% of tooal population)dying before age 40 from child birth is comparable to the UK’s losses in World War One (2.19 % of total population) happening all the time.
You also need to realise that in almost every society in human history, there was a very strong parental bias for male children, resulting in much higher female childhood mortality rates. Because men *did *die at higher rates, if the natural ratio was maintained population would have grown out of control. Families specifically and societies in general society couldn’t afford to allow the sex ratios to become unbalanced, so they deliberately took steps to maintain it.
In many cases, as in Ancient Rome or amongst traditional Australian Aborigines, girls were simply killed outright at birth. That’s not to say that boys were not also routinely killed at birth, but far, far more girls were killed. It’s common in societies where this is permitted for first-time parents to kill every girl born until they produce a boy. only after they have a surviving boy over two years old would they even consider allowing a daughter to live.
In other societies, such as large parts of modern India, outright infanticide is technically unacceptable, but the mortality rate for female children is encouraged through neglect. Boys get better food, more medical care, are always given any food, clothing etc that is limited in preference to girls.
The result is that, in most societies, although the birth rates of males and females slightly favours males, the population skews strongly in favour of males until about the age of 10. After that point the increased death rates of males starts to reduce the skew.
Even in modern India, where by no means a majority of people practice selective neglect of female infants, boys outnumber girls by about 10% before the age of 10. In societies where selective neglect was universal this would have resulted in 20% more boys, and in societies with deliberate infanticide the evidence suggests that there may have been twice as many 9-yo boys as girls.
And before birth; males are more likely to die before birth than females. More males are conceived than females because males are more likely to die young, and an even gender balance is generally favored by evolution.
Even among societies familiar to us, leaving babies out to die was common until more recently than you may think. It was only in 1741 that the Foundling Hospital was established in London so that there was a place to put babies found left out to die:
Others have offered good explanations for why more women might have been dying young than the OP assumed, but there have also been plenty of times/places where women did outnumber men. Heck, the current US population is 50.8% female, which isn’t much more than 50% but it does mean that women in the US outnumber men.
The first cite I could find quickly regarding historic gender ratios is from Wikipedia, which says the first census of England in 1801 found that women were in the majority in every county in the country.
One interesting aspect: It is a well established fact (though not yet fully explained) that in the years following a particularly bloody war, the ratio of newborn males increases.
For instance in Germany after WW I, the rate of newborn males vs. newborn females was 108:100. This rate slowly decreased until 1939 only to rise again to 108:100 in 1946. It took more than a decade for the rate to decrease again to 106:100 in 1960.
Historical data for the UK, France and Belgium show the same phenomenon. See also:
Sex ratio of live births, England and Wales, 1838-1998
http://www.radstats.org.uk/no074/article4a.htm
(from the SDMB archive)
I wouldn’t say most, proper humans have been running around for about 200,000 years, the neolithic revolution occurred about 10,000 years ago. In numbers you’re probably right but not in years.
Cite?
Seriously? A cite that people such as ancient romans and Aborigines practiced sex selective infanticide?
For creatures that practice sexual selection, evolution forces sex ratios to converge upon a 50:50 sexually active population in the long term. Say you had a society that was 60 females and 40 males. The females need to produce a collective 100 babies to maintain replacement rate which means each male gene is going to spread to 2.5 babies on average. If there’s a mutation that preferentially selects for male children, it’s going to spread until the sex ratios even out. Similarly, preferential selection for female children will select out until the gender ratios even out.
edit: this is known as Fisher’s Principle
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I wonder if the timing of that census may have reflected (comparatively) recent losses of British men in the Revolutionary War (in which Wikipedia notes that somewhere on the order of 40,000 British servicemen died), as well as in the wars against France in the final years of the 18th century.
The fact that societies practiced sex selective infanticides is not in dispute. What is in dispute is what you said
[QUOTE=Blake]
It’s common in societies where this is permitted for first-time parents to kill every girl born until they produce a boy. only after they have a surviving boy over two years old would they even consider allowing a daughter to live.
[/QUOTE]
You are saying that parents would kill every girl born to them until they had a 2 year old son, that is above and beyond sex selective infanticide simplicitor, which is what your cities show. Or have I missed something?
India has moved into the modern age with their prejudice against female children. It’s quite common for Indian parents-to-be to find out the sex of the fetus via ultrasound and preferentially abort the females. It’s illegal, but widely practiced anyway.