mostly seem self-evident, like “promiscuous societies without paternity certainty are going to see less male involvement in raising kids etc”.
Pre-patriarchy societies, where women often mated with several men, were more cooperative in general. Patriarchy is hierarchical, treating both women and children as chattel with the father as leader/owner of the family. Men have only had any significant involvement in raising kids in the past 50 years. Sleeping under the same roof as your patriarch is not the same as being actively raised by him. You’ve gone from a situation where men and women were social equals, albeit with certain roles in general, to one where women’s sole purpose on earth is to bear and raise children. That’s not creating greater male involvement in a meaningful or beneficial way.
And as I’ve already pointed out elsewhere, not having their sexuality/mating choices policed by society doesn’t make women want to attach themselves to only high status men. It means women are free to choose the multiple partners that they want. It’s only where women’s sexuality and life are tightly controlled that they need to attach themselves to the highest status man they can because they have one shot at being supported by one man; and they are no longer allowed to support themselves.
The reason that monogamy and patriarchy go hand in hand is that for the first time people had personal possessions to pass along. Because women now had no other real purpose other than to bear and raise children, they could have a child every year (something not common for gatherers who had to carry their babies with them as they foraged)-and the population began to grow more steadily, despite the fact that agriculture brought more disease and poorer nutrition. Farming could also feed more people, albeit at a lower quality of life. This is what allowed the population to expand. Hunter-gatherers have more free time and more rest time than farmers. They also have less hierarchical desire to build temples to their egos — which is why you have expanding architecture and things that seem like civilization, but what you get instead is a pretty uncivil and highly stratified society, where before you had a cooperative and egalitarian one.
“Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. “Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was about twenty-six years,” says Armelagos, “but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive.”
