The First to Fall

The Great Culling: How Civilization Engineered the Modern Male

Somewhere between 5,000 and 3,000 BCE, something strange happened to the human genome. Specifically, the Y chromosome.

Over a 2,000-year stretch, human genetic diversity experienced a massive contraction. At one point, only about 1 in 20 men were reproducing. That means 95% of male lineages vanished…poof…gone. Most men alive today descend from a shockingly narrow slice of the male population that lived during that window.

So…what the hell happened?

Civilization happened.

Not in the TED Talk sense…with aqueducts, murals, and democracy, but in the REAL sense…with hierarchy, slavery, and reproductive monopoly.

The dawn of social stratification. More specifically, the sorting and discarding of people under systems of control. Yet more specifically, men controlling and flattening each other, themselves, women, and their environments with castes and dynasties, priesthoods and palaces, slavery and statehood, patrilineal inheritance, and elite polygyny (harems). And a certain kind of man systematically slaughtering every other kind of man.

This wasn’t a simple population dip (women were still passing on their genes)…it was a selection event. And it coincides with when the process we call “civilization” was going into hyperdrive. Let that sink in for a moment. The selection event, where the genetic lines of 95 out of 100 men ended….wasn’t random. It was engineered by emerging systems that rewarded a very specific type of man…and erased the rest.

Let’s be clear about what this means.

When only a tiny elite of men get to reproduce (thanks to war, rape, slavery, or sheer status monopoly), you get a collapse in Y-chromosome diversity. Genetic drift goes wild. Founder effects explode. Suddenly, the behavioral and physiological traits of those few “winners” echo through the generations.

What kinds of traits? What did the 5% of men still reproducing have in common?

Well, to survive a slave system (on either side of the equation), you need emotional suppression. To survive a caste system? You need to be obedient to the hierarchy. A priesthood? Symbolic fluency (be good with complex bullshit). To reproduce in a monarchy? Performative loyalty.

You simply don’t need egalitarianism, independence, or sensitivity to injustice. In fact, those traits will get you killed (or at least reproductively erased). It’s naive to think that a process like this just weeded out bodies…it weeded out minds.

Over generations, civilization reshapes the species to favor male behaviors that reinforce civilized systems (status-seeking, dominance within rules, emotional control, strategic conformity). We call this “civilized” behavior. It sounds great, because it implies that the only alternative is (and was) resource-seeking, dominance without rules, little to no emotional control, and constant rebellion. But before we even explore whether that’s true, let’s acknowledge the fact that “civilized” behavior is nothing but system-optimized behavior, filtered through thousands of years of brutal selection.

Meanwhile, female mitochondrial DNA (passed maternally) shows no such bottleneck. This means women kept reproducing across a much broader spectrum of lineages. The narrowing came from the top down, not the bottom up. Elite males reshaped the species by erasing vast swaths of it. A bit different from the civilizing / human self-domestication story you hear, isn’t it? The nicer people in the cave cooperating to get rid of the bullies? That happened, but the majority of the domestication story isn’t there. It’s in shackles, pits of bodies, chastity belts, slave raids, human sacrifices, and all manner of horrors.

And it changed everything.

It disrupted ancestral balances…between empathy and assertiveness, “wildness” and restraint, autonomy and obedience. It’s not something interesting side note. It altered hormonal profiles, sexual dimorphism, and the developmental timing of traits like aggression and cooperation. Civilization didn’t just change how we live…it reprogrammed what we are.

And it looks a fuck of a lot like animal domestication. Bottlenecks, Enclosures. Selection for traits that serve the system, not the organism.

The domestication of plants, animals, and people has implications that, when not accounted for in just about every important conversation we have in just about every field, results in the biggest example of decontextualization I can think of. Not acknowledging the maladaptively high level of attenuation of the modern human when discussing psychology, anthropology, history, sustainability, etc….means solutions simply aren’t found. The entire thing becomes self-referential.

We’re not aware of what we are. We’re a domesticated phenotype…biologically tamed, groomed to perform in systems of symbolic order, no matter how insane that order becomes. And we try to find solutions within those insane systems. Solutions to the systems themselves, within the rules of the systems. It’s dizzying.

We’re still living in the domesticating system. We operate inside its psychological architecture. And we carry the genetic consequences of a civilizational edit that decided which kinds of men would carry forward, and which kinds wouldn’t.

The modern man isn’t just a descendant of random survivors. He isn’t a product of “survival of the fittest.” He’s the product of selective obedience. He’s a creature designed (quite literally) to fit the cage.

Written by

Ken

in

Somewhere between 5,000 and 3,000 BCE, something strange happened to the human genome. Specifically, the Y chromosome.

Over a 2,000-year stretch, human genetic diversity experienced a massive contraction. At one point, only about 1 in 20 men were reproducing. That means 95% of male lineages vanished…poof…gone. Most men alive today descend from a shockingly narrow slice of the male population that lived during that window.

So…what the hell happened?

Civilization happened.

Not in the TED Talk sense…with aqueducts, murals, and democracy, but in the REAL sense…with hierarchy, slavery, and reproductive monopoly.

The dawn of social stratification. More specifically, the sorting and discarding of people under systems of control. Yet more specifically, men controlling and flattening each other, themselves, women, and their environments with castes and dynasties, priesthoods and palaces, slavery and statehood, patrilineal inheritance, and elite polygyny (harems). And a certain kind of man systematically slaughtering every other kind of man.

This wasn’t a simple population dip (women were still passing on their genes)…it was a selection event. And it coincides with when the process we call “civilization” was going into hyperdrive. Let that sink in for a moment. The selection event, where the genetic lines of 95 out of 100 men ended….wasn’t random. It was engineered by emerging systems that rewarded a very specific type of man…and erased the rest.

Let’s be clear about what this means.

When only a tiny elite of men get to reproduce (thanks to war, rape, slavery, or sheer status monopoly), you get a collapse in Y-chromosome diversity. Genetic drift goes wild. Founder effects explode. Suddenly, the behavioral and physiological traits of those few “winners” echo through the generations.

What kinds of traits? What did the 5% of men still reproducing have in common?

Well, to survive a slave system (on either side of the equation), you need emotional suppression. To survive a caste system? You need to be obedient to the hierarchy. A priesthood? Symbolic fluency (be good with complex bullshit). To reproduce in a monarchy? Performative loyalty.

You simply don’t need egalitarianism, independence, or sensitivity to injustice. In fact, those traits will get you killed (or at least reproductively erased). It’s naive to think that a process like this just weeded out bodies…it weeded out minds.

Over generations, civilization reshapes the species to favor male behaviors that reinforce civilized systems (status-seeking, dominance within rules, emotional control, strategic conformity). We call this “civilized” behavior. It sounds great, because it implies that the only alternative is (and was) resource-seeking, dominance without rules, little to no emotional control, and constant rebellion. But before we even explore whether that’s true, let’s acknowledge the fact that “civilized” behavior is nothing but system-optimized behavior, filtered through thousands of years of brutal selection.

Meanwhile, female mitochondrial DNA (passed maternally) shows no such bottleneck. This means women kept reproducing across a much broader spectrum of lineages. The narrowing came from the top down, not the bottom up. Elite males reshaped the species by erasing vast swaths of it. A bit different from the civilizing / human self-domestication story you hear, isn’t it? The nicer people in the cave cooperating to get rid of the bullies? That happened, but the majority of the domestication story isn’t there. It’s in shackles, pits of bodies, chastity belts, slave raids, human sacrifices, and all manner of horrors.

And it changed everything.

It disrupted ancestral balances…between empathy and assertiveness, “wildness” and restraint, autonomy and obedience. It’s not something interesting side note. It altered hormonal profiles, sexual dimorphism, and the developmental timing of traits like aggression and cooperation. Civilization didn’t just change how we live…it reprogrammed what we are.

And it looks a fuck of a lot like animal domestication. Bottlenecks, Enclosures. Selection for traits that serve the system, not the organism.

The domestication of plants, animals, and people has implications that, when not accounted for in just about every important conversation we have in just about every field, results in the biggest example of decontextualization I can think of. Not acknowledging the maladaptively high level of attenuation of the modern human when discussing psychology, anthropology, history, sustainability, etc….means solutions simply aren’t found. The entire thing becomes self-referential.

We’re not aware of what we are. We’re a domesticated phenotype…biologically tamed, groomed to perform in systems of symbolic order, no matter how insane that order becomes. And we try to find solutions within those insane systems. Solutions to the systems themselves, within the rules of the systems. It’s dizzying.

We’re still living in the domesticating system. We operate inside its psychological architecture. And we carry the genetic consequences of a civilizational edit that decided which kinds of men would carry forward, and which kinds wouldn’t.

The modern man isn’t just a descendant of random survivors. He isn’t a product of “survival of the fittest.” He’s the product of selective obedience. He’s a creature designed (quite literally) to fit the cage.

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