theme for a fantasy campaign

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Brett

In the primitive stage of stranden society the men are only undertaking day trips anyway, and are at hand to exploit resources near the shore. But whether the men are near or far, a girl with no children yet is not confined to the shore at all, and a woman whose youngest child is old enough not to need close supervision only needs to return to shore a few times per day. Even a woman who needs to be within a shout and a short sprint of a child than might at any time toddle into trouble fish with a handline or net a tidal waterway. Then too, such women as whose babes are no longer at the breast can form crèches, freeing up some for hours-long fishing and shellfish-diving. That gives women's shore communities both onshore and offshore food resources that might need to be defended. I briefly mentioned their military circumstances in post #179.

Men fetch nutrients from further afield, in general at least as rich or richer, and perhaps crucially diverse. The biological problem for men is to convert those riches into reproductive success. The two most obvious and ethologically most common strategies are (1) to invest those nutrients in getting more matings (make more related infants) and (2) to feed them to related children and their mothers (increase the survival-to-adulthood rate among related infants).

1(a) The men could invest their catches in the bulk and strength to out-fight other men, and the fat reserves to closely supervise women in a compact harem during a restricted mating season, but only if the women had a limited mating season and were forced to cluster during it. But the women haven't and aren't.

I have the impression that gorillas are polygynous and have pronounced sexual dimorphism. Do they have a limited mating season, and if so, is there a compelling reason that the stranden can't? It's not jumping out at me, but that may just be because I'm not ingenious enough to work it out. Or do they have polygyny without restricted mating seasons?

1(b) They could give food etc. to women who mated with them, without longer-term commitment. In this case the reproductive interest of the man is to detect when a woman is are fertile and to monopolise her affections through her fertile period. The reproductive interest of a woman is to mate during her actual fertile period with a man whose inheritable characteristics suggest that other women will want to mate with his sons (the "sexy son" strategy), while at other times convincing rich men that she is fertile and will conceive children with them if amply bribed (the "gold-digger" strategy). This sort of behaviour is not unknown to ethology — I can think of spiders that do this — but it is probably not adequate to the high degree of dependency of a woman raising a voracious and slow-maturing human child.

Not for this species, anyway. It's what I was considering for the troll analogs, with the females being originally stronger than the males and later equally strong and smarter.

2(a) Men could give food to their mothers while their mothers were still fertile, or to their sisters. In these circumstances it is in their evolutionary interests that their mothers be faithful to their fathers, but whether their sisters are faithful to anyone doesn't matter to them. This leads to the avuncular pattern of society, in which the supervision of women's sexual behaviour is lax.

That general pattern is one I'm familiar with and might like to explore in more detail. And it's going to lead to matrilineages and political alliances based on them, which will be more stable when, later on, the men are far away at sea.

* Does it imply anything about relative male and female body size?

* It seems as if males don't gain meaningful power over their mothers until they're old enough to participate in hunting and bringing home food. But by then most of their brothers (and sisters) will already be born, won't they? So male social control of older women's sexuality is going to have less of a payoff. I suppose if a man knows who his father is, he might be unhappy if his mother took up with another man, perhaps unhappy enough to go a-viking. . . .

2(b) Men could create a lasting arrangement with one or more women, in which the woman undertakes sexually faithful, and the man provides nutrients to her and her children. In such circumstances the woman has an evolutionary interest in making the man concentrate his resources on her children and not dilute them among multiple baby-mothers, unless the provision is so ample that her children are glutted and the other women in question are close relatives. She also has an evolutionary interest is accepting his support while sneaking matings with the likely fathers of sexy sons. And an interest in convincing him that she is not doing this: costly displays of fidelity and attachment may be involved. The man has an evolutionary interest in spreading his resources among as many children as they will support (which might involve multiple mothers) and in perhaps sneaking some matings with women whose children other men will support, also, in preventing his women from bearing children to other men. In this situation his father and brothers are potential rivals: they want to promote him only into reproductive opportunities that they can't have themselves. His allies are his mother and grandmothers, his sisters, and his children. This produces the patrilineal pattern of society in which women are supervised (in the absence of their husbands) by their mothers-in-law.

The most common pattern among men, and therefore less interesting because less exotic. Though I wouldn't flatly rule it out, if 2a has problems.

3. Men have other strategies such as the "sneaky ****er" that do not involve providing resources, and therefore do not answer the question "how does a man convert surplus resources into increased reproductive success". I'll mention them here anyway as a prolepsis. And they do complicate the strategies above.


In short, it looks a lot like any hunter-gather society in which the men undertaking overnight or multiple-day hunting trips. And it may develop into something like the fishing and whaling communities of New England etc.

One thing that occurs to me is that men are probably going to do more diving than women. Deep diving is high-risk, and men can be spared; and it gives access to more resources, and enables men to provide more usefully. Perhaps displays of good lung capacity, via singing, may be a useful form of sexual advertising. "Have my kids and your sons will be good providers!" I'd like to have musical ability be a common trait; it's so often attributed to merfolk and sirens and the like. A bit of sexual selection for vocalization riding on top of natural selection for breath control might fit.

Bill Stoddard