January 6, 2015

• Hypermasculine males and malnourished females

   

  Everyone has heard about the Clovis culture, the paleoindians of New Mexico who killed mammoths using those big, clever spearpoints.  Now there is an article in the National Geographic Magazine about the people who arrived earlier than Clovis.

  
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  The earliest, earliest Americans (left) were risk-taking pioneers, and the toughest men were taking the spoils and winning fights over women.  As a result, their robust traits and features were being selected.  More than half of the men have injuries caused by violence, and four out of ten have skull fractures.  The wounds don’t appear to have been the result of hunting mishaps, and they don’t bear telltale signs of warfare, like blows suffered while fleeing an attacker.  Instead it appears that these men fought among themselves — often and violently.

  

  The women don’t have these kinds of injuries, but they’re much smaller than the men, with signs of malnourishment and domestic abuse.  They lived twenty-five years or less.

  The unsettling hypothesis is due to archaeologist Jim Chatters, co-leader of the team that investigated the Hoyo Negro cave in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico.  It is speculative, of course.  We picture a gang of murderous thugs who stole and enslaved women.  Call it perhaps the huge testicles theory of migration.

   

  • 1:13 pm
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