William Costello

They're constantly fighting.

It's no picnic.

So not easy.

But yeah, our ancestral history of polygyny is very interesting.

And that got really, really bleak about 8000 years ago, where it's estimated that at that time,

17 women reproduced for every one man.

And what's thought to have happened there is, yeah, really, like if you look at the graphs, and maybe you can put them on screen, but you see an absolute nosedive for male effective population.

So men just, so many men dying before getting to reproduce.

Our men were dying before getting a chance to reproduce.

Yes.

So remember, this is a time of a lot of mortality.

So a lot of men.

Yes.

Yes.

And what happened or what is postulated to have happened is that this coincides with the onset of agriculture, which for the very first time allowed the most high status male in a society to stockpile resources to such a degree that it created such massive inequality that it was better to be the fourth or fifth wife of the high status.

Yes.

And the other theory is that it coincided with either agriculture or chiefdoms where you had this really, really high status guy.

Now, what happened in response to that is the cultural norm of monogamy evolved, and cultures that practiced monogamy as a cultural norm created a more egalitarian distribution of mates.

It meant that even the most high-status man could only have... he couldn't monopolize the mates.

And this gave your kind of disgruntled young men, your incels in a society, a fighting chance.