I wonder if you don't miss the scale of violence, security dilemmas in ancient societies, kinship networks, familial systems. Also without any stable authority, legal systems could not develop & shape culture over time.
Were we not dependent on nomadic pastoralism, semi mobile opportunistic small bands.
And, the ability to replace males as beasts of burden, applicators of violence has lower cost to the network vs. females who when they live to puberty can produce 10+ children, 50% which will live to puberty.
this is likely the world for 10,000s-100,000s of years until large scale agriculture, pack animals 5-9k years ago
we are all still quite new to patrilineal systems, just like we are new to large scale industrial development, massive explosion in energy use, high calorie nutrition in the 20th century, communication networks, universal suffrage, legal systems which will all have a profound impact on our culture.
Another explanation is that 'patriarchy' develops alongside other forms of complexity in family systems.
The hunter-gatherers' nuclear family (with a relatively high status for women and loose family ties) is gradually complexified by successive innovations in family systems. Like others (agriculture, state, writing...), these innovations appear in a few key points before spreading. For Eurasia, these points were the Fertile Crescent and China. Distant regions, such as Western Europe, retained primitive characteristics, including the relatively high status for women of the nuclear family. The same is true in southern Africa, far from the Niger and Egypt. And so on in Americas and Oceania.
The author writes "Europe used to be patrilineal." but I suspect the author intended "patrilocal", instead. Europeans generally take their father's family name.
Not sure why you still have me blocked on Twitter, Alice. Anyway, note that Heinrich’s theory of the Church’s role in eroding cousin marriage has been debunked by recent results from ancient DNA that show that European family structure was nuclear well before the Church emerged. In other words, the assumed initial conditions of their model are simply wrong.
Fantastic article, like usual.
I wonder if you don't miss the scale of violence, security dilemmas in ancient societies, kinship networks, familial systems. Also without any stable authority, legal systems could not develop & shape culture over time.
Were we not dependent on nomadic pastoralism, semi mobile opportunistic small bands.
And, the ability to replace males as beasts of burden, applicators of violence has lower cost to the network vs. females who when they live to puberty can produce 10+ children, 50% which will live to puberty.
https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past
Assuming a maternal mortality risk of 2.5% per birth (25% over 10 births) the replacement rate was greater then loss rate.
https://tif.ssrc.org/2020/09/11/carrying-risk-in-antiquity-and-the-present/
While males value was
reproduction
beast of burden
security & violence
this is likely the world for 10,000s-100,000s of years until large scale agriculture, pack animals 5-9k years ago
we are all still quite new to patrilineal systems, just like we are new to large scale industrial development, massive explosion in energy use, high calorie nutrition in the 20th century, communication networks, universal suffrage, legal systems which will all have a profound impact on our culture.
thank you for a wonderful article.
Another explanation is that 'patriarchy' develops alongside other forms of complexity in family systems.
The hunter-gatherers' nuclear family (with a relatively high status for women and loose family ties) is gradually complexified by successive innovations in family systems. Like others (agriculture, state, writing...), these innovations appear in a few key points before spreading. For Eurasia, these points were the Fertile Crescent and China. Distant regions, such as Western Europe, retained primitive characteristics, including the relatively high status for women of the nuclear family. The same is true in southern Africa, far from the Niger and Egypt. And so on in Americas and Oceania.
The data strongly support this theory: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0279864
Besides, the Catholic Church merely formalizes a pre-existing family system: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279864.s001
The author writes "Europe used to be patrilineal." but I suspect the author intended "patrilocal", instead. Europeans generally take their father's family name.
Not sure why you still have me blocked on Twitter, Alice. Anyway, note that Heinrich’s theory of the Church’s role in eroding cousin marriage has been debunked by recent results from ancient DNA that show that European family structure was nuclear well before the Church emerged. In other words, the assumed initial conditions of their model are simply wrong.