This sort of thing is really difficult to pin down, since we don’t really have death records for 99% of the population. But lets break it down with some reasonable, but not confirmable numbers.
At birth: slightly more males, but male babies are more prone to die in infancy, so this evens out.
Warfare: up until the invention of the citizen army, warfare just plain wasn’t that deadly. Actual combat claimed very few lives: the big killer of armies was actually disease, which spread very easily to civilian populations in the area. Invading armies would also kill, rape and plunder at will, and more civilians than fighting men died in any given war. So yes, more men died in war, but not by much. Women died in large numbers because of war, even if they didn’t die in battle.
Childbirth: The best numbers at the moment indicate that only about one in 50 births was fatal, but since women had so many babies, 1 on 8 could expect to die in this way. That’s still better than the 1/2 number that gets tossed around sometimes.
Disease: killed all equally.
Starvation: Kills slightly more men, actually.
But the best answer is simply that most people just died from whatever, and no one had time to outnumber anyone else.
Is this true in every society? I’ve heard of societies where the men eat first, then the women get what is left over. If something like that were the custom, I’d think more women would die of starvation than men.
Can’t believe I missed this, but the zombie isn’t that old.
Yeah, in some societies, that is the case, but it’s hardly the norm (in northern europe/scandinavia, women controlled the food stores, so there’s that).
I was talking about chronic low-level starvation, or short term catastrophic starvation. Apparently, women are slightly better at surviving that sort of thing. Better fat storage is the only explanation I heard, but in general, the men get sick and die faster than women in starvation situations. Not by much, though.
Very often, when we are actually able to find out, women do outnumber men, slightly, in a population. They do now, in our current society. Of course, we don’t have to go back very far in history for it to become impossible to get sufficiently reliable figures, but, absent special circumstances such as systematic female infanticide (which certainly has not been a universal human practice) it is not unlikely that this has been true for most societies. There are things, such as childbirth, that kill only women, but there are also things, like war, hunting accidents, and heart disease, that regularly kill more men. Currently these factors are equilibrating out to a situation in which women slightly outnumber men. I see no particular reason to think it would usually have skewed the other way in most historical societies.
I wonder, though, if what the OP is really asking is why the slight population advantage held by women (as things are now, and have been for a while) does not cumulate over the generations, leading to ratios more and more skewed toward the female as time goes by? (I am sure there is a very good, obvious reason why the notion of cumulation is comletely daft, but my brain is just too tired to put its finger on it at the moment.)
It’s obviously impossible for the ratio of men and women to become too imbalanced, regardless of whether men or women are more likely to live longer. If there are too many more men/women than women/men, those men/women don’t have children. They simply don’t have any effect on future generations.
Actually I understand that in primitive, pre-rule-of-law cultures the rate of death by violence for men can reach as high as 90%.
In fact, women (and most female mammals) have more aggressive, effective immune systems. Women resist both infectious disease and parasites better than men. The culprit seems to be testosterone; female animals with high testosterone like female hyenas have weaker immune systems as males do.
Actually as I recall the difference in survival rates for starvation and cold between the genders is pretty large once you factor out pregnant women*. One example I’ve seen used of this is the Donner Party, where the survivors were disproportionately female. Including the people who tried to escape on snowshoes; almost all the men died, all the women lived.
*I’ve heard of including pregnant women on occasion being used as a tool to manipulate statistics to make women look weaker/sicklier than they are. Include them without mentioning it and it skews the statistics against female robustness for obvious reasons, while at the same time you can claim that you didn’t actually make up or distort the statistics. Technically.
Without birth control, repeated childbirth and breast feeding is going to weaken women and make them more susceptible to disease and infection. In addition, the women were typically anemic from repeated childbirth, and pregnancy can leach calcium stores from the mothers’ bones, causing increased tooth loss. Lack of teeth contribute to malnutrition.
~VOW
That’s irrelevant. Every baby has a near-50% chance of being male or female. It doesn’t matter who its parents are. Even in a culture with one man and a million women, the next generation will be 50/50. In a culture with 50% of each, but only the queen bears children, the next generation is still 50/50.
> That’s irrelevant. Every baby has a near-50% chance of being male or female. It
> doesn’t matter who its parents are. Even in a culture with one man and a
> million women, the next generation will be 50/50. In a culture with 50% of each,
> but only the queen bears children, the next generation is still 50/50.
I think you’re misreading my post. That’s the same point I was making.
This is pretty much the answer, especially considering that each woman may have had several boys (who might die in wars) then die in childbirth herself.
Plus, any really skewed gender distribution tends to even out in a generation or two; look at post-WWII Germany for a good example. Lots more women post-war, but nowadays, it’s about 50-50.
I wonder how the ratio of ancient societies was after some very bloody wars. The Roman republic ost circa 100,000 men in the first 2 years of the Punic War. That must have had an impact. And demographics do get screwed for a generation or two, not long in the scheme of things, but long enough to have noticeable effects. Wars tend to disporportionatly kill young men, many of them before the have had a chance to reproduce.
