are men REALLY at that much of a reproductive disadvantage?

One thing I know people wonder about is whether male offspring are REALLY as big of a "genetic gamble" as Trivers-Willard Hypothesis seems to indicate...answer appears to be yes.

The brutality of the Stone Age: Only one man had children for every 17 women 8,000 years ago.

As a woman who has difficulty maintaining even the illusion that i can conceive due to being very very irregular, i can see how this could be so....men do not usually have to go on special diets and take supplements in order to produce and release sperm....whereas the lady quite often now days and maybe in times past have to follow strict eating guidelines and or seek fertility treatments for that once a month chance at producing an egg.
I have been annoyed that men can cope with the so called stress of this modern age while many women are told this modern stressful lifestyle can easily alter our endocrine system in even the slightest way and whammo bye bye fertility.
Just one eye witness account ;)

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Actually a lot of guys do have fertility issues and this number was very likely much higher in the past because of disease that cut or eliminated male fertility.

George Washington for example was unable to have children and adopted Martha's kids.

this idea has been in the news again and so I wanted to update this thread with a couple more articles about it.

Something Crazy Happened To Men 7,000 Years Ago - And Now We May Know Why | IFLScience

https://www.sciencealert.com/neolith...rilineal-clans

Interestingly, I also stumbled across another possible explanation (more than one potential reason may be underlying this phenomenon, of course) which is here: Tree rings reveal mysterious 'solar event' 7,000 years ago | Daily Mail Online and here https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0207092720.htm It's always possible that environmental factors beget cultural factors but just thought this was an interesting coincidence. Scientists are assuming that since males seemed to bottleneck it was because they were all killing each other (and I like that theory, since it seems to support Trivers Willard) but the truth is that's all just speculation and we honestly don't know.

What we do know is, something happened 7000-8000 years ago that killed off lots of men! This is why "betting" on just one gender of baby - particularly the male gender - does not make any sense, because anyone whose genes were tied to "only making boys" would have been at such a great disadvantage that it's unlikely that those genes would have survived those dark days.

Must be why all babies are a miracle!! ;)

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by skillet04

As a woman who has difficulty maintaining even the illusion that i can conceive due to being very very irregular, i can see how this could be so....men do not usually have to go on special diets and take supplements in order to produce and release sperm....whereas the lady quite often now days and maybe in times past have to follow strict eating guidelines and or seek fertility treatments for that once a month chance at producing an egg.
I have been annoyed that men can cope with the so called stress of this modern age while many women are told this modern stressful lifestyle can easily alter our endocrine system in even the slightest way and whammo bye bye fertility.
Just one eye witness account ;)

Sent from my SM-G900T using Tapatalk

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This might come as a surprise to you but it's actually quite the opposite -- the WHO has even said we're at near epidemic proportions of male infertility within the last 30 years. I read into a lot over the last year -- female infertility itself hasn't increased so much as the average age of women having kids has risen (including this past year, for the first time in awhie, average age of first kid for a woman rose). Versus male infertility is actually seeming to be happening even beyond lifestyle factors like for women (age, weight, etc) ; I've seen theories its estrogen in the water, and I've even seen claims that the advent of fertility interventions over the last century has allowed males to survive and/or procreate that otherwise wouldn't have. Either way, they don't know, but average sperm numbers keep going down.

I almost wonder if we're in the midst of another "event" like the one eons ago!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Throwaway_panther

This might come as a surprise to you but it's actually quite the opposite -- the WHO has even said we're at near epidemic proportions of male infertility within the last 30 years. I read into a lot over the last year -- female infertility itself hasn't increased so much as the average age of women having kids has risen (including this past year, for the first time in awhie, average age of first kid for a woman rose). Versus male infertility is actually seeming to be happening even beyond lifestyle factors like for women (age, weight, etc) ; I've seen theories its estrogen in the water, and I've even seen claims that the advent of fertility interventions over the last century has allowed males to survive and/or procreate that otherwise wouldn't have. Either way, they don't know, but average sperm numbers keep going down.

I almost wonder if we're in the midst of another "event" like the one eons ago!

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I got into a spat with someone on this site I visit for fun over this. To me, I read that theory and think "but what if it was male infertility caused by disease or those solar flares that happened at the same time/fewer males being born for some reason/more men dying due to famine since boy babies need more food/etc etc etc" (since that's just the way I roll, LOL, and also because it makes more sense scientifically that the cause was multifactorial) and they were like "nope that study says it was warfare so it totes ma gotes was warfare". It did NOT have to be men dying young, it could easily have been just not that many men did not manage to successfully reproduce!

Science! :p