Quote from: jibbajibba;790474but does that actually happen?
After a war does society suddenly become polygamous?

In reality the number of male casualties in an actual war as a % of the male population is actually pretty small.
Even in WW1 the most devastating war in human history, France lost about 4% of it's population predominantly young males and yet the remaining men didn't end up marrying 3 or 4 women to make up for it.

This seems to be a case of us applying "game logic" about how we would make use of our resources in some game of super diplomacy but the real world just doesn't work that way.

Marrying has nothing to do with it. Fulfilling your reproductive potential might.

Quote from: zarathustra;790480Marrying has nothing to do with it. Fulfilling your reproductive potential might.

Hmmm... So do we see a spike in illigitimate births say three years after ww1.
Do we think society decides not to use women soldiers becuase it knows that after the war is over the men that survive can service the newly widowed population?

Quote from: S'mon;790478Maybe; we know almost nothing about these cultures other than their graves, and that the Scythians were the source of the Greek myths of the Amazon warriors, women who supposedly removed a breast to better shoot their bows (not necessary IRL!).

I think we can say that if you want to build a plausible-seeming fantasy society with a recognised role for warrior women, then egalitarian horse nomad archers look like a pretty good prospect. They could also presumably form part of a knightly class in a more settled medievalesque society.  Later compound bows of the Mongols started getting too heavy for most women to use to full effectiveness, but a missile weapon not very dependent on strength looks like a good prospect for a female-friendly armament. With a horse for mobility and reach, it should be an effective combat package.

Windlass wound crossbows?
Animal handlers?
Or magical artilery of course

I think that your average fantasy setting means that Dick and Jane can both be competent knights without it being an issue. That's the beauty of gaming, you get to be what you want. There are exceptions, Space Marines and Sisters of Battle standing out as a hill for idiots to die on, but in general, ttrpgs are pretty equal. Even games drawing from, but not entirely based on historical time periods can be equal when it comes to gender roles, and there needs to be no reason behind it.

Quote from: jibbajibba;790483Hmmm... So do we see a spike in illigitimate births say three years after ww1.
Do we think society decides not to use women soldiers becuase it knows that after the war is over the men that survive can service the newly widowed population?

I don't see any statistics for that, however, I did find this:

QuoteThe first-ever dedicated support network for unmarried mothers had been set up as early as 1918, when The National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child (now Gingerbread) was formed in response to a concern about higher death rates among illegitimate children than legitimate ones, particularly during the First World War.

However, this is about an overall trend throughout history - and WWI is not very representative of all of history. First of all, modern medicine meant that far more babies and women survived childbirth than was the norm in the past. When death in childbirth was common, this meant that women were more necessary for the reproduction rate. In addition, widowers were freed up to take another wife, even under strict monogamy - and strict monogamy was more the exception than the rule in most ancient societies.

Males have a tendency to be indigent and useless, look at Wellington's "scum of the earth" remarks about the British army. Except in physical labor, women usually are better workers than men, esp in a craft industry type society; plus in and of themselves, women represent value. How many times are cities sacked, by the Romans particularly, and the women and children taken as booty, fairly common in antiquity. Ancient to medieval and really up until almost ww2, more soldiers died of disease than anything else.

Quote from: S'mon;790473Your latter point is very very important for modern people to get their head around. In most of Africa the disease load was such that natural selection and cultural selection encouraged having lots of children. But for most  agricultural cultures, overpopulation and famine have always been the main threat, and cultures developed lots of ways around this. For instance, historically female infanticide has been very common across most of the planet. It's just not the case that females were 'too precious to risk'.

True, but whether more population was desirable really varied. You can bet the Pharoahs wanted as many farmers and labourers as possible supporting their kingdoms. Female infanticide was widely practiced, but typically carried out only when a famine was looming. So it might be widespread for a couple years, and then not practiced at all for a decade or more. Given healthy instincts, I find it hard to believe voluntary lifelong celibacy was ever all that common. We know that when nunneries were widespread, for example, the vows of nuns were frequently broken. The charges of nunneries serving as something close to brothels may have been overstated by the protestants of the reformation, but there was probably something to the allegations.

Quote from: jibbajibba;790474In reality the number of male casualties in an actual war as a % of the male population is actually pretty small.
Even in WW1 the most devastating war in human history, France lost about 4% of it's population predominantly young males and yet the remaining men didn't end up marrying 3 or 4 women to make up for it.

True. But as an aside, WW1 was the most devastating war for real numbers of soldiers killed, but primitive warfare was much more deadly in terms of the ratio of soldiers killed. A rate of 2-3 deaths or more per year in a tribe with 300 warrior-aged males wasn't all that uncommon. That's 1.5-2 per cent per year, every year. France's losses of 4% we spread out over 4.5 years.

Quote from: S'mon;790476As I've said, for most of human history lots of women (and men) didn't marry, but they were normally mostly the ones from the poorest social classes; upper class women nearly always married.

The lower classes didn't marry because marriage was traditionally about property. And if you have no property, there's little point in a legal contract establishing property and lineage. But just because they didn't marry doesn't mean they didn't bear children. And lots of them.

Quote from: zarathustra;790480Marrying has nothing to do with it. Fulfilling your reproductive potential might.

Absolutely.

Quote from: Haffrung;790537But as an aside, WW1 was the most devastating war for real numbers of soldiers killed, but primitive warfare was much more deadly in terms of the ratio of soldiers killed. A rate of 2-3 deaths or more per year in a tribe with 300 warrior-aged males wasn't all that uncommon. That's 1.5-2 per cent per year, every year. France's losses of 4% we spread out over 4.5 years.

Frances death ratio from WWI was approximately 4% of the total population, not 4% of soldiers. The military death ratio was about 16%, spread out over 4.5 years as you said. Also, WWI is not the sole standard of modern war. For example, the Korean war killed off about 10% of the total population of Korea (not including the Chinese and U.S. military deaths). Civil wars in general tend to be more devastating.

That said, I agree that there are primitive conflicts with even this higher level of lethality, but it isn't a universal even if it isn't uncommon.  There are many primitive groups where the violent death rate is comparable to peacetime murder rate in modern first-world countries. It is difficult to generalize from these differing rates to what primitive people overall are like.

Quote from: jhkim;790557That said, I agree that there are primitive conflicts with even this higher level of lethality, but it isn't a universal even if it isn't uncommon.  There are many primitive groups where the violent death rate is comparable to peacetime murder rate in modern first-world countries. It is difficult to generalize from these differing rates to what primitive people overall are like.

There are also "primitive" conflicts with significantly lower levels of lethality. For those battles which note casualties, the Peloponnesian War was remarkably forgiving to the combatants. There are battles involving thousands of men, where tens are killed on the victorious side.

Quote from: Haffrung;790537True, but whether more population was desirable really varied. You can bet the Pharoahs wanted as many farmers and labourers as possible supporting their kingdoms.

No, land was the limiting factor for the pharaohs, not population. The only time they'd want more people was right after a plague, perhaps. Even going to war, the limiting factor is usually the land and its produce. Once all the fertile land is tilled more peasants just means more hungry mouths and less surplus to support armies, palaces etc.

Quote from: Haffrung;790537The lower classes didn't marry because marriage was traditionally about property. And if you have no property, there's little point in a legal contract establishing property and lineage. But just because they didn't marry doesn't mean they didn't bear children. And lots of them.

If they didn't have any means to support their children, their children would not survive.
But in fact there is no evidence for your claim, the numbers I've seen (eg in A Farewell To Alms) indicate very low illegitimacy rates, around 4%. In pagan societies illegitimate children would suffer infanticide, though male foundlings might sometimes be adopted. Christian societies had orphanages, but according to the 19th century sources I've seen, few 'orphans' ever actually survived to adulthood until the Dickensian reforms.

Quote from: jhkim;790557There are many primitive groups where the violent death rate is comparable to peacetime murder rate in modern first-world countries.

From what I can recall of the stats in Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature that would be extremely unusual for hunter-gatherer societies. Though I do recall that the Detroit male death rate from violence (4%?) was higher than the death rate in some hunter-gatherer societies. But that was an extreme outlier in terms of Developed-world societies.

Quote from: S'mon;790581From what I can recall of the stats in Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature that would be extremely unusual for hunter-gatherer societies. Though I do recall that the Detroit male death rate from violence (4%?) was higher than the death rate in some hunter-gatherer societies. But that was an extreme outlier in terms of Developed-world societies.

There is enormous unknowns in trying to extrapolate from modern-day hunter-gatherer societies like the !Kung into generalizations about all of "primitive society" throughout history. There is no reason to think that the few modern-day hunter-gatherers are typical and representative of all primitive people throughout history, since they are rare and isolated cases.

That said, I agree that from what I read, the !Kung (for example) do have an overall murder rate the same as American inner cities like Detroit in peacetime. That's a few percent lifetime chance of death, or less than 0.1% per year. I call that comparable. There are plenty of places in the modern world with higher violent death rates, and plenty with lower death rates.

I don't think this fits either the "peaceful nature-lover" nor the "barbaric savage" stereotypes. I haven't read Pinker's book, but I watched his TED talk and read various critiques by some anthropologists and others. I don't consider his word as a psycholinguist to be definitive about primitive peoples.

Quote from: jhkim;790602That said, I agree that from what I read, the !Kung (for example) do have an overall murder rate the same as American inner cities like Detroit in peacetime. That's a few percent lifetime chance of death, or less than 0.1% per year. I call that comparable.

Sure - and the implication is that the San hunter-gatherers, still more or less in the state of nature, are much less inherently violent than the denizens of Detroit, with all the peace-enforcement panoply of the modern State. But other hunter-gatherers such as the Yanomani have much higher death rates to violence, up around lifetime-60% at the high end, compared to ca lifetime-4% for the San (low-violence hunters) and Detroit (high-violence Civilised).

The evidence that violence has declined over time seems indisputable. The reasons are disputable (eg Pinker blames Christianity for violence, whereas comparing to pre-Christian societies it seems to me more to have had the opposite effect on average) as is his confidence that the trend will continue more or less uninterrupted. My own view is that human self-domestication is a real thing on the largest scale, but I'm a lot less sanguine about the shorter term. I'm not at all confident that 3000 AD will be less violent than 2000 AD. But I do think it's highly likely that 3000 AD will be less violent than 3000 BC.

Quote from: jhkim;790602I haven't read Pinker's book...

He's definitely worth reading. He's a very smart guy, and he's very good at anticipating and addressing criticisms of his thesis. I saw a lot of lazy/not-so-smart reviewers criticise his thesis in ways he'd already anticipated and rebutted.