At one point in the past, the number of men dwindled to only 1:17 of women. What happened?
The world’s biomedical history has recorded strange and bizarre phenomena and this event from 7,000 years ago is a very typical example.
Specifically, this is a period of time that witnessed a terrible collapse in the number of genes of … men, lasting up to 2,000 years. According to a new study published in the journal Nature Communication, the Y chromosome has been missing for generations. At one point, the number of men in the Old World was reduced to a ratio of 1:17 to women.
Old World: The name of the Earth was known to Europeans before Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas in 1492. The Old World includes: Europe, Asia and Africa (also known as the African continent- Eurasia) and surrounding islands.
The question is why, and what caused this phenomenon. In fact, this is not a new phenomenon mentioned, as there have been quite a few studies confirming that the Y chromosome has disappeared in large numbers in the past. However, the conclusions about the cause are not the same.
In 2015, research in the UK published in the journal Nature first mentioned this phenomenon. They suggest that a large number of males disappeared at a time when people switched from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to farming and farming.
It is hypothesized that at this time, some men became dominant in power, and they imposed and controlled the fertility of their inhabitants.
This does not necessarily mean that the total number of men has decreased. The problem is that conceiving and giving birth to a boy is hindered, causing the Y chromosome to gradually shrink. As a result, the genome also collapsed.
The most reasonable hypothesis available
Their conclusions have been agreed by quite a few historical experts. However, the team from Stanford University does not think so. Recently, they turned the issue around with a different approach.
Using mathematical modeling and computer simulations, they traced back the tribes that had waged many wars over resources, and tracked NTS Y across the entire population.
Ancient tribal wars narrowed gene distribution.
For those who don’t know, ancient clans were often patriarchal, meaning that these tribes already had a low Y-chromosome distribution because the entire lineage was dependent on a few male rulers. And through Stanford University research, those wars actually cause the distribution of chromosomes to drop even lower.
In biology, this is known as a “bottleneck” phenomenon – which occurs when the biodiversity of a population decreases.
War causes death – whether men, women or children. But because the proportion of men in the army has always been the majority, the death rate for men is also more skewed. Therefore, after wars, the number of women is often higher than that of men.
Moreover, the wars of the past were extremely barbaric in nature. The winners often make the losers extinct, and that can be the reason for the “bottleneck” phenomenon.
The experts behind the research.
However, this conclusion still has many loopholes and cannot be confirmed. Even experts from Stanford say this is a hypothesis, nothing more.
Only that, historical data only confirms that a strange phenomenon happened to men, but does not show why. And the confirmation of the cause is still downgrading.