Warlord Harem Hypothesis

On the impact of sexual selection via male territorial aggression

Summary

Sexual rather than environmental selection was the cardinal driver of human evolutionary differentiation from the rest of the great apes, from Australopithecus afarensis up through the advent of sedentary civilization. This sexual selection took the form of endemic tribal conflict, with hypertrophied cognition as the instrument of male territorial aggression.

Male Territorial Aggression

Sexual selection via male territorial aggression is common in mammal populations. When environmental selection pressures are relaxed, natural selection’s focus shifts towards sexual selection. When deer populations crest, male territorial aggression between the bucks increases in proportion to their population density relative to their respective biomes.

With deer, antlers are the instrument of male territorial aggression. Rhinoceroses have their horns. Elephants have their tusks. Gorillas have their brawn. These instruments are sexually selected in race conditions against rival males, with the most exaggerated specimens to be found in habitats that are the most densely populated, with the least threat of predation, starvation, or exposure.

Typically, this process is limited by countervailing environmentally selective pressures within the habitat, the caloric and nutritional resources required to develop these instruments, and the environmental challenges resulting from excessive development of these instruments. The archetypal example, the buck’s antlers, become impediments to mobility after a certain point. One way or another, nature’s race conditions arrive at limiting factors.

The australopithecine’s osteodontokeratic culture began with early hominids departing from the rainforest to compete with baboons and hyenas for the omnivorous opportunist niche within Africa’s grassland habitat. They prevailed against their chief rivals, the baboons, by leveraging their superior cognitive faculties to develop superior strategies and tools that eventually afforded them a decisive advantage in their new habitat

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However, this development necessarily pivoted towards territorial and mating advantage within their own species. Therein lies the moment when modern humanity became inevitable, as for the first time in natural history, cognition became the instrument of male territorial aggression. The same race condition kicked off that kicks off with all sexual selection via male territorial aggression; but with cognition rather than antlers, tusks, fangs, or brawn being acutely selected for.

Weaponized Cognition

Unlike analogous instruments of male territorial aggression, cognition has the serendipitous side effect of rendering a creature more capable of warding off predation, extracting more calories and resources from the environment, and fending off exposure. As such, the result is akin to a fisherian race condition, with each iteration resulting in greater population density, more acute male territorial aggression, and more intensive selection for the instrument of male territorial aggression.

The human degree of intelligence requires such a race condition. Axiomatically, we can observe that being smart enough to split the atom, put a man on the moon, and solve the daily wordle isn’t selected for in the natural world. If it were, a stroll through the forest would be akin to a Disney feature, with the birds and bunnies having evolved powers of cognition comparable to our own. Human levels of cognition are caloric and nutritional luxuries that couldn’t be afforded and wouldn’t be selected for by the environment.

While advanced cognition does indeed end up unlocking environmental advantages, there is no straight line of incremental adaptation to this point via environmental selection. It is on account of anthropic bias, an assumption that cognition is more adaptive than it truly is, that anthropologists will continue searching in vain for environmental explanations for recent human evolutionary adaptations.

The only reason a creature would develop an IQ of 100 is in an existential competition with a creature with an IQ of 95 in a battle where cognition is the weapon of choice.

Phenotypal Artifacts

Precivilized life in the fertile and temperate regions that could support the greatest population densities was defined by endemic tribal warfare. This has been confirmed by both the archaeological record as well as the genetic record. Concomitant with this phenomenon was necessarily a chronic gender imbalance. The men who survived enjoyed a polygynous mating dynamic, with the males with the highest status and greatest likelihood of surviving, providing for, and protecting their offspring enjoying the most acutely polygynous mating dynamic.

The males were subject to acute selection for greater intelligence while the females were subject to acute (but primarily assortative) selection for neoteny, gracility, and secondary sexual development. While taste surely varied then as it does now, a cross-cultural analysis confirms that there are a handful of objective, universal traits that tend to be selected for by men; youthful appearance, delicate appearance, and exaggerated signs of pubertal development.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, but logically, endemic warfare selected the originally robust apes for the very childlike and feminine appearance that separates us from our nearest primate relatives. Every physical difference between humans and great apes can be explained by either this process or by our bipedal adaptation to wielding tools and weapons, with the human populations most acutely and recently subjected to precivilized endemic warfare exhibiting the greatest degrees of neoteny, gracility, and secondary sexual development.

Migration and Human Diversity

Not only does the data relating to the greater diversity of female sex-linked chromosomes in modern human populations require this hypothesis, but a study of ancient migration patterns requires it as well. This model predicts that natural selection for superior cognition and more feminized features will occur in the biomes that can support the greatest human population density; which is the major fertile river valleys.

Genetic, archaeological, anthropological, and linguistic data all confirm that up through the advent of civilization, humans radiated outward in waves from a handful of fertile river valley regions that are known as the “cradles of civilization.” This model explains why the Eurasian supercontinent features less linguistic diversity than the remote island of New Guinea with its orders of magnitude fewer people.

This model explains why the most intelligent population indigenous to Sub-Saharan Africa (the Igbo peoples) can be found at the delta of the Niger River, and provides the mechanism for their Bantu Expansion. This model explains the settlement and migration patterns playing out in the Americas when we arrived. This model explains how those in and around the Chinese Basin achieved convergent levels of cognitive development and feminization via different mechanisms despite their relative isolation from the rest of Eurasia.

Blue eyes, blonde and red hair, and alabaster skin are not environmentally adaptive. They are feminizing traits, and their rapid spread throughout the precivilized Old World can only be explained by this model.

The prehistorical record of prehuman hominids exhibits forks from the main line which expanded into habitats that could support fewer humans, resulting in populations that remained relatively unintelligent and masculinized. From the ancient Paranthropus robustus up to the more recent indigenous peoples of Australia, populations that escaped the meatgrinder of endemic conflict in highly fertile biomes drifted towards less intelligent and more robust qualities that are more environmentally adaptive.

Conclusion

This hypothesis is neither novel nor radical, representing a modernization of the insights first offered by Darwin himself in his sequel to On the Origin of Species: The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. It borrows heavily from the Killer Ape Theory advanced by Dart, Ardrey, Lorenz, and others. The only novel element is integrating what we’ve learned from genomics to affirm that this selection for aggression was necessarily intra-special and territorial in nature rather than focused on hunting.

The described process terminates with the advent of civilization. All race conditions in nature arrive at a conclusion sooner or later, and the conclusion of this one was the inception of a synthetic habitat that no longer featured eliminative selection for superior cognition. This was the natural, inevitable result, as waging more advanced and sophisticated warfare required creating a synthetic habitat comprised of managerial, mercantile, and manual laboring niches to logistically support the next stages in the tribal and territorial competition between human tribes.