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Comment by bloak | Hacker News Reader

"History shows that 80% of women reproduced compared to only 40% of men!"

That doesn't necessarily imply polygamy, and it doesn't necessarily imply "incels". Imagine a society in which women get married at age 16 and typically die during childbirth before they reach the age of 32, and men get married at age 32, if they live that long, which most of them don't, and then get married again when the first wife dies during childbirth. I'm not saying that's how it was, but some societies were a bit like that and I think you could probably get the 80% and 40% numbers with a set-up something like that.

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Women have lived longer than men throughout most of history and in basically every society, so your theory doesn't hold. Childbirth was dangerous but men's work was even more dangerous.

Citation needed. A quick Google search on life expectancy during the middle ages tells me that men lived longer than women.

Where do you see that? Every result from my quick searching is listing women as longer than men. Example: https://www.purplemotes.net/2015/08/23/medieval-life-expecta...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2847291?seq=1

The ratio of older women to men: historical perspectives and cross-national comparisons

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10902048/

This paper seems to disagree heavily with you.

Just going by the abstract that you linked, that study seems to only relate to the past 100 years.

And extrapolating this to the middle ages and earlier:

In general, countries with a lower overall life expectancy had a lower number of women per 100 men aged 75+, while countries with higher overall life expectancy had a higher female to male ratio in this age group. A hundred years ago there were nearly equal numbers of women and men aged 75+ in many countries.

It doesn't seem to disagree with me at all.

"making it to adulthood" is different than "living longer"

There are A LOT of claims itt, and not nearly enough sources for any of it.

It feels like you're right, but what "feels right" turns out to be wrong pretty often.

War is probably a big factor too. I don't know what the average or minimum age of all those soldiers standing in the lines of medieval battlefields all the way to say, the Civil War era, but I imagine quite a few were virgins and casualties were brutal.

Off topic, but such archaic means of warfare still confound me. Imagine being some 16 year old kid standing in the front line facing charging armored knights in the Middle Ages. Or staring across from another line of musket/riflemen and being expected to eat a volley of musket balls while standing straight and unmoving.

I think that you have a good point, there’s other factors that could contribute to the stats. We have seen that war can throw demographics out of balance even in modern times, such as Russia after WWII.

Sure, but the most powerful men today practise polygamy, so it's pretty likely that has been going on throughout history as well.

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