I agree with you on this. However I think you need to realize something else. Hunter gatherers are relatively egalitarian, farmer communities and especially city dwellers are not.
A fair number of humans have been exposed to selective pressures since the dawn of agriculture and civilization. There is no doubt that we see changes of typical skeletal features in the last 40k years (especially the anomalous shrinking of brain size accompanied by growth in the “advanced” regions, which defies the previous trend of the past few 100k and perhaps even million years as shown by the fossil record to be the case among all hominids (not just Homo Sapiens)), modern geneticists also see many sweeps still taking place in modern populations. Harpending and Cochran postulate on this and other things that we’ve seen major genetic change, especially on genes that affect things like like behaviour, infectious disease resistance and digestion in historical times.
Perhaps we are ill suited to monogamy and patriarchal sexual polygamy (one husband many wives) because we just recently started responding to pressures in its favour (that have also recently nearly desisted with the advent of equality of the sexes and contraception). Evidence that at least some preference for monogamy may exist is the dropping rates of polyandrous marriage in the Himalayan region as soon as the economic circumstances allowed different arrangements, while people are today only slowly responding to the de facto legal, reproductive and financial disincentives for monogamous marriage.
However a counter point may be tropical Southern Chinese (a few smaller ethnic groups still practice this) and West African farmer communities where we don’t see such a patriarchal pattern. But perhaps this is due to the different economic trade offs of their particular type of agriculture.
Also at the end of the day maybe I’m mistaking pastoral patterns for agricultural patterns of selection since Eurasian and East Africans people’s have a fair share of those among their ancestors.
I agree with you on this. However I think you need to realize something else. Hunter gatherers are relatively egalitarian, farmer communities and especially city dwellers are not.
A fair number of humans have been exposed to selective pressures since the dawn of agriculture and civilization. There is no doubt that we see changes of typical skeletal features in the last 40k years (especially the anomalous shrinking of brain size accompanied by growth in the “advanced” regions, which defies the previous trend of the past few 100k and perhaps even million years as shown by the fossil record to be the case among all hominids (not just Homo Sapiens)), modern geneticists also see many sweeps still taking place in modern populations. Harpending and Cochran postulate on this and other things that we’ve seen major genetic change, especially on genes that affect things like like behaviour, infectious disease resistance and digestion in historical times.
Perhaps we are ill suited to monogamy and patriarchal sexual polygamy (one husband many wives) because we just recently started responding to pressures in its favour (that have also recently nearly desisted with the advent of equality of the sexes and contraception). Evidence that at least some preference for monogamy may exist is the dropping rates of polyandrous marriage in the Himalayan region as soon as the economic circumstances allowed different arrangements, while people are today only slowly responding to the de facto legal, reproductive and financial disincentives for monogamous marriage.
However a counter point may be tropical Southern Chinese (a few smaller ethnic groups still practice this) and West African farmer communities where we don’t see such a patriarchal pattern. But perhaps this is due to the different economic trade offs of their particular type of agriculture.
Also at the end of the day maybe I’m mistaking pastoral patterns for agricultural patterns of selection since Eurasian and East Africans people’s have a fair share of those among their ancestors.