Serious There is no evidence that, during the Stone Age, only 1 man reproduced for every 17 women

[DeepSea]

In a well-known blog post published by Slate, feminist author Amanda Marcotte claimed that 8000 years ago, when humans transitioned to agriculture and fixed settlements, only 1 man reproduced for every 17 women. According to her, "living like our ancient ancestors means having as little as a 1-in-17 shot of reliably getting laid". In other words, men shouldn't complain about not getting laid because men's plight in modern society, no matter how unpleasant, is supposedly a lot better than it was 8000 years ago.

She cites a Washington Post article, written by a female journalist, that is more circumspect in its claims, but comes to a similar conclusion:

For every 17 women who passed on their DNA, researchers could find genetic evidence of only one male whose lineage stretched to modern times.

The article references a study that appeared in Genome Research, a peer-reviewed genome sciences journal. Neither Amanda Marcotte nor the author of the Washington Post article have a background in science. Why are they trying to interpret a study that they are ill-equipped to understand?

Physicist and anthropologist Gregory Cochran, who is actually qualified to comment on the study, criticized both the Slate and the Washington Post article, concluding that:

‘1 in 17’ – It is not so. Nothing like that, anywhere.

True that Amanda Marcotte should have put in that YouTube video of Joy Harmon washing the car in front of the chain gang.

Although Slate hires worms, that’s not the problem: the researcher told a number of reporters the same confused thing.

 

[Deleted member 265]

Although Slate hires worms:

is gregory cochran /ourguy/

 

[Life Wasted]

Well regardless if it's true or not the present day has a similar stat, it's called the 80/20 rule. In another 8000 years researchers will be looking back at 2018 and publish similar articles titled "8000 years ago, only 2 men had children for every 100 women" except this time it will be irrefutably true.

 

[Gyros_Pretcel]

Cope
You want to tell me the people who did the study themself don't understand biology?
https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success

 

[RageAgainstTDL]

I figured out where it comes from. Here is the article:

https://genome.cshlp.org/content/early/2015/03/13/gr.186684.114.full.pdf

"We used Bayesian skyline plots (BSP) to infer temporal changes of regional male and female effective population sizes (Ne)"

However, the Y chromosome plot suggested a reduction at around 8–4 kya (Supplemental Fig. S4B; Supplemental Table S4) when the female Ne is up to 17-fold higher than the male Ne (Supplemental Fig. S5)"

kya = thousand years ago.

So what they're saying is that from their analysis, 4000-8000 years ago, women had an effective population (reproductive population) 17x that of men.

But that was just one data point.

The supplemental data Fig. S5 is included here:
https://genome.cshlp.org/content/suppl/2015/02/18/gr.186684.114.DC1/Supplemental_Figures.pdf

And that has the information we want:

This does show a massive spike in the ratio of sexually women-to-men 4000-8000 years ago. But through most of history, the ratio hovers around 3:1.

3 women reproducing for every man is not great either, but at least it's not 17:1. That appears to have been a historical anomaly for reasons I can't guess or might be error from a flaw in their methodology.

So I would agree with you OP, the "17 women reproduced for 1 man" line is technically accurate, but misleading at best, since it was only true for a brief spike in time assuming this analysis was correct.