It isn't testosterone, that's a myth promoted by bald guys.
The hair thing seems to be some sort of social signaling, shared by Blofeldian males like Klaus Schwab, Fink, ex-Goldman head Hank Paulson and Dr. Evil.
But I digress.
From ScienceAlert, April 15:
Researchers Have a Controversial New Hypothesis For How Civilization First Started
The dawn of human civilization is often pinned down to the rise of farming. As food production grew, so did human populations, trade, and tax.
Or so the prevailing story goes.
Economists have now put forward a competing hypothesis, and it suggests a surplus of food on its own was not enough to drive the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to the hierarchical states that eventually led to civilization as we know it.
Instead, multiple data sets covering several thousand years show this reigning theory is empirically flawed.
Even when some parts of the world adopted farming and began producing a surplus of food, it did not necessarily lead to complex hierarchies or tax-levied states.
Only when humans began farming food that could be stored, divvied up, traded, and taxed, did social structures begin to take shape.
That's probably why cereal grains like wheat, barley, and rice – rather than taro, yams, or potatoes – are at the root of virtually all classical civilizations. If the land was capable of cultivating grains, evidence shows it was much more likely to host complex societal structures.
"The relative ease of confiscating stored cereals, their high energy density, and their durability enhances their appropriability, thereby facilitating the emergence of tax-levying elites," the authors of the hypothesis write....
....Farming was obviously a necessary step to improve food production, but researchers suspect only those crops that could be easily confiscated led to the rise of an elite class.....
....MUCH MORE
Actually this research isn't new. The paper in the April 2022 edition of the Journal of Political Economy is an outgrowth of some work done years ago by the same authors which we looked at in 2017's To Create A "1%" In A Social Hierarchy You Don't Need An Economic Surplus, Just A Storable Form Of Wealth:
So there I was, reading the abstract of "Hazelnut economy of early Holocene hunter–gatherers: a case study from Mesolithic Duvensee, northern Germany", thinking about Nutella and Frangelico when this grabbed my eye:
...High-resolution analyses of the excellently preserved and well-dated special task camps documented in detail at Duvensee, Northern Germany, offer an outstanding opportunity for case studies on Mesolithic subsistence and land use strategies. Quantification of the nut utilisation demonstrates the great importance of hazelnuts. These studies revealed very high return rates and allow for absolute assessments of the development of early Holocene economy. Stockpiling of the energy rich resource and an increased logistical capacity are innovations characterising an intensified early Mesolithic land use...Stockpiling, storage, commodities, well that's right in our wheelhouse,* and if I can combine it with the last remnants of interest in Piketty's approach to inequality.....maybe I can synthesize something halfway original...
Yeah, it's already been done.
Here's VoxEU, September 2015....
....MUCH MORE
I'll be back with more on the power-mad baldies when I figure out the connection.
