Why? The Last Man!
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Imagine, if you can, a world without men.
Depending on your experiences, this is a premise that would either fill you with wonder, or bitter apprehension. However, that is the exact premise of FX’s TV series: “Y The Last Man”, produced by Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson. The Series is based on the comic book of the same name, written by Brian K. Vaughan, who also created “Runaways” and “Ex Machina”, so if you like your sci-fi with a little gloomy existential horror thrown in, Vaughan is your man! (Pun totally intended).
For those unfamiliar with the show, it tells the story of Yorick, a New York City escape artist who, along with his pet monkey Ampersand, somehow stayed alive while all other male mammals, from rats to giraffes to New York City Hall employees, suddenly died. It’s an incredible thought experiment, especially when one considers that in 2021 there were 3.97 billion males in the world, representing 50.42% of the world population. It’s not just a world that has lost it’s men, it’s a world that has lost exactly half of it’s population.
Imagine my surprise to discover that, far from a purely fictional scenario, this event actually took place some 7,000 years ago. It’s called the “Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck”. It refers to a distant time in our collective past when our genetic diversity was mysteriously and suddenly cut down by half. At least among the men. Virtually all the men!
After approximately 2000 years of steady decline, there was only one fertile male left alive to mate with every 17 women. Is that to be considered the luckiest break ever for this man, or a lonely nightmare, in a life dominated by being seen as a novelty, or worse, a breeding machine?
A Gender War, or something else?
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Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East would have been volatile regions at the time. Our ancestors explored and settled new lands, moving from place to place. It was a dark time, before Air BnB, where moving to a fresh new land meant establishing new homes, building a new community each time, and inevitably conflict where you moved into an area which others had already settled. Imagine arriving at your holiday destination, only to find someone had already set up their deckchair, dropped their litter on the ground, and had already sullied the bedding!
It was also a time when the world population is estimated to have been somewhere between five and 20 million people. For such a stark genetic imprint to have been left behind for us to find, as many as 9.5 million men must have been killed.
Why?
A team from Stanford University blames “competition between patrilineal kin groups". This makes sense, in theory. As fathers pass their Y-chromosome on to their sons, entire families must have been exterminated over wide areas. Could this be down to a clash of clans? Everyone today is familiar with the clan phenomenon, otherwise known as Tribalism. Tribalism can be seen in every school playground, every high school corridor, every football match, and occasionally in Pub Quiz teams on a Friday night.
But back then, clans formed from common ancestors. They established a strong group identity. This, consequently, promotes a sense of difference and competition with separate nearby clans. Like Star Trek fans vs Star Wars, or anyone who hasn’t watched Game of Thrones attending a Comic-Con.
The Stanford University researchers say these pressures came to a head shortly before the first civilisation emerged in Sumeria about 4000 years ago.
“The presence of such groups results in violent intergroup competition preferentially taking place between members of male descent groups, instead of between unrelated individuals,” the researchers write.
“Casualties from intergroup competition then tend to cluster among related males, and group extinction is effectively the extinction of lineages.”
In a nutshell, the clans that emerged victorious from this ancient Thunderdome (That’s right, Thunderdome. Two men enter, one man leaves) would exterminate their opponent’s menfolk to ensure ongoing dominance and the eradication of potential competition. They would then seize the surviving women.
The End of Man
According to the Stanford University researchers data, the carnage would have been nothing short of apocalyptic. The slaughter was so intense and broad, that just one twentieth of the entire male population survived.
The fighting must have gone on for generations. Family after family, fighting the same wars against the same other families, over and over. Children born and raised to hate the neighbouring clans, entire lineages dedicated to the eradication of neighbouring lineages.
And the first signs of civilisation arose from the ashes.
What do we know for sure? Well, we can hypothesise based on the information we have. Human society began to evolve away from nomadic hunters towards farming communities about 12,000 years ago. No more living in caves, hunting woolly mammoths and cooking their meat over an open flame, BBQ style.
Suddenly, they had possessions. Resources were finite. And as clans had begun to settle in one place, intruders were unwelcome. Such groups evolved systems of organisation based on family membership, much like the great apes. Like many family dynamics from human and animal groups, the family clan focused on the male chief of the clan. In terms of chromosomes, it would have appeared as though every male member of a clan had the same father.
As such, wiping out a whole clan would wipe out their unique Y chromosome markers. The victorious clan would then rush in to fill the void left behind, like some giant genetic piñata exploded! We literally may have had a real life ‘Clash of Clans’ happening, where if you left your base undefended for too long, another player would burn it to the ground. Only in this case, they would also kill all of your male heirs and take your wife home as well, for good measure.
Of course, this is only a hypothesis. There is no direct evidence of such a world-spanning conflict. It’s possible a male-specific disease could also have caused such carnage. A disease that only afflicted men. Like cheesy chat-up lines or willy warmers.
However a lot of people a lot smarter than yours truly think this hypothesis is a feasible explanation for this genetic mystery. A brutal clan war in which men nearly wiped themselves out, because men really hate having neighbours.
Ironically “Y: The Last Man” TV series was cancelled after one season, due to plummeting audience numbers. There’s irony for you. A TV show fictionalising an event that, for one reason or another, did actually occur 7,000 years ago, was deemed too unrealistic by a global audience.
History, it would appear, is indeed stranger than fiction.
Stanford University Study: Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck | Nature Communications
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