That opening had to take courage but thank you so much for it! I love the sound of music and it made for the start of a wonderful video and a wonderful day!
Your videos are amazing! I'm a RPG DM creating several worlds (or fragments of worlds) for my campaigns, it's awesome to have this great collection of worldbuilding knowledge!
"My books have been replaced by a cat" As it should be. :3 I don't think I've ever commented on one of your videos before, but, I've just gotta say that I love your channel. As a worldbuilder, your channel has really helped me get ideas and a better grasp of certain concepts. And it's also entertaining. Si, thank you.
When considering whole societies and governments, one of the most impactful aspects of a magic system is whether magic requires intrinsic ability or not, and whether that ability is inherited. For example, if magical ability come strictly from inheritance, power is very likely held by a magically capable aristocracy. Would the British, French, or Spanish aristocracy have lost power in the Age of Revolution if aristocrats, and ONLY aristocrats, could summon monsters, throw fireballs, and cast healing spells? If that inheritance is tied to species (e.g. elves always have more magical ability than humans) a large power differential between species is likely to exist, especially if there's not a countervailing force (e.g. elves are few in number and reproduce very slowly compared to humans). If no inherent ability is required to do magic, but certain information is necessary (e.g. spell books, rituals, esoteric practices) then that information will probably be tightly controlled by those who have it. Who controls that information and the power associated with it? Individual magicians with apprentices? Magical guilds? Monasteries or churches? Governments? Armies? If magical talent is in-born, but not inherited, what happens when someone first displays magical ability? Although the main characters in many fantasy novels display anomalous magical ability, it's rarely the standard those societies are built on. I think the best explorations of "supernatural ability could pop up anywhere" systems come from the superhero genre!
And indeed, as an adendum, if magic is created by rare resources, like you become a mage if you eat a rare fruit or some crystal, the rich will be mages.
societies using magic for infrastructure is something i want to explore in my dnd campaign. there’s a ritual spell that can double a crops yield within a certain area, that alone can completely revolutionize an economic system. never mind all the magic that makes construction, medicine, cleaning, and other aspects of society much easier.
@@JustInTimeWorldbuilding grungeon master has a great playlist of videos some practical applications for dnd spells, that’s where i got the bit about crops from. i’d love to see some official dnd content really explore this stuff.
Do you consult with authors? I would love it if you could poke holes in my worldbuilding and show me all the things ive missed. Great video btw the way! Thanks.
Given I write for an RPG where magic returns during a slightly more steam punk Victorian world, this is very interesting (Game is 1879, from FASA Games). Obviously the world building for RPGs is different to novel writing as you have a bunch of extra considerations for playability of the setting, but this is great stuff.
Yeah, RPGs require balance and game play that a novel never has to consider, but I try to make the world building accessible to game masters and designers as well :) Even if they have to adapt it in weird ways to cater for people actually, you know, playing :P
Related to the question of how do you tax a dragon. I'd be curious what your country's aviation regulator would do with regards to creatures that have a natural ability to fly? Especially if the dragons existed first and humans develop the technology to fly later on. You can't exactly demand the dragons be the ones to get a license to do what they do naturally, or prosecute them for exercising their freedom of movement in an area where, for instance, the government wants to build an airport. Or, heavens forbid, pass a law saying that all dragons must carry or be implanted with transponders that continuously ping with the nearest air traffic control towers and have them show up on flight tracking websites..
Didn't we kinda already do half of that with cars on the street? If there's enough people wanting change and/or enough economic pressure behind it, basically any intuitively unfair ruling can pass and become normalised.
Tell the dragons very nicely that they should perhaps maybe try to avoid aviation areas so they don’t get hit by the planes and that it is for their own benefit and also to please don’t burn our cities down for delivering this less then fortunate news. That’s if the dragons aren’t the government themselves.
Given that most commercial airplanes fly at about ~5 miles up, you could easily just say that that altitude is reserved for such and forbid Dragons or other winged species from flying up there. Tell them that they are responsible for any and all damages incurred (including to themselves) that result from not fo5lowing regulations and call it a day. Enforce it with heavy fines, prison sentences, wing clipping or other such grounding techniques, and big honking batistas. Maybe a jet fighter or two. I highly doubt a dragon is going to be more deadly or maneuverable than an F22 when it comes down to it. Especially is the F22 is powered by magical bu||sh¡t and can shoot miguffin missiles at will...
In any world where only women can give birth, they would still not be sent to the frontline even if they were marginally better fighters. A society can bounce back in one generation even if half the men are dead. The economy will suffer, but only temporarily. But if half the women are gone, then so are half the children of the next generation, making the whole group extremely vulnerable. While warrior women have existed in our history, they were always rare. Now if most women have offensive magic and men don't, then all bets are off.
If women are egg layers, it also changes the equation :D I might have been able to do kids if it involved laying an egg. But seriously, I don't think it needs gendered magic. Even in our world, there were societies who didn't practice patrilocality and succeeded. Not many, but the matrilineal Mosuo leap to mind. Patrilocality arose not to conquer, but to defend against raids from still nomadic people (as I understand it and of course, we're talking about events literally over ten thousand years ago, so a lot is speculation and filling the blanks). So if magic let the sedentary people defend their homes effectively (things like runes to protect the walls and long range AoE effects like fireballs), I think you would have more matrilineal or egalitarian societies than exist in our world. Quite possibly, it would result in a very interesting mix of gender views. Actually, there's a great scholarly article on the Mosua which kind of bears out this sort of thinking, a summary of the article: The Mosuo people exhibit different kinship systems depending on their geographical location due to varying economic, social, and political conditions. In the Yongning Basin, near Lugu Lake, they developed a matrilineal system characterized by female-biased inheritance and natalocal residence. This system is adaptive in stable and resource-rich environments where investments in women ensure lineage continuity. Conversely, in the more rugged mountainous terrain near Labai, a patrilineal system evolved, favoring male-biased inheritance and patrilocal residence, which are advantageous in harsher environments where male cooperation and external alliances are crucial for survival. If your magic system makes a material difference to location and survival, I think it will change the gender views of your society. Ahem, sorry for the very long text. This stuff is super interesting to me, so I tend to ramble a bit.
You bring up some great points but I don't think you take them you far enough. If early man had access to a significant amount of magical power then the logical result would be that you couldn't have much in the way of a society at all, at least not one beyond the family unit. Mankind would be completely ungovernable since nobody would b able to be e in charge.
I don't think that is necessarily true. The problem of course is that so much depends on the world and the kind of magic. But lets say something like learning how to toss fireballs was possible and there were creatures like dragons. People would still need to band together to survive. Even if there are no fantasy creatures, people would still band together to well, attack other people and defend against other people. Basically, I don't think anything short of overwhelming power will stop the evolution of social traits and that will result in some kind of society. And if some species has access to overwhelming power (like say DnD dragons or something), then yes, they'd be a solitary species and there would be far less of them around than there are of humans. Social species almost always outbreed solitary species. Raymond Feist actually did something interesting with his world in that regard. In the early prehistory, he had a race of insanely powerful humanoids and they indeed lived completely separately from each other. They are called the valheru and they can command dragons, using magic from birth and so on. When they're born, their mother immediately sends a servant to put the babe outside and the kid survives with using their magic or it doesn't. They only breed with each other when a special kind of lust rises in them, otherwise they breed with other humanoids which doesn't produce true valheru. Long story short (sorry for the wall of text) it depends on the level of fantasy, the level of magic and honestly, the concepts you, as the world builder, want to play with :D
@@JustInTimeWorldbuildingI think even overwhelming power will not necessarily stop the evolution of social traits. It’s not just because “overwhelming power” is a term of art. Maybe they form bonds over having it in common or the humans initially created them to be extra social partners and they just fortunately had it.
Dnd type hand wave nuke magic would make large scale government not feasible. If its magic manifest as a coincidence or makes one more " lucky" and nothing more? Then regular government would be possible
What magic can do is surely the primary question you need to decide first. The ability to pull rabbits out of hats might affect the diet of early cultures but the ability to turn ping-pong balls into pigeons is less advantageous. I have the impression you have a clear idea of what magic can do but you don't provide a description. I would recommend the arguments on the design cnosiderations of magic in Greg Stolze's game REIGN. If magic trumps muscle then you don't get egalitarianism necessarily: you get dominance by magi instead of warriors. (And I shall go and watch your videos on magiocracy now.) Your point about when magic comes along and becomes the dominant cultural force is a very good one. I've tended to prefer later historical periods because they are so much better known. I think the bit of government that would be most affected by magic would be the impact of Truthsayer spells on investigation and prosecution of crime.
I don't describe what magic can do because that will vary from world builder to world builder. I'm just providing inspiration for your (theoretical you) world and things you should think about. The world builder knows what their magic can do and hence should think what effect it will have on the political development of their world. If I'm building a world, of course I consider what my magic system can do in broad terms and how that will affect my world. I make the same point about soothsayers on my video about the law and magic systems :D
Again, there are historical examples of what happens when land is inherited by women and therefore society is matrilocal. Egypt's consanguineous marriage pattern was not limited to Pharaoh's family. Women owned the land before Pharaoh did... But the male consort defended the land owned, and by having command of the forces he became the de facto power AS LONG AS he was consort to the heiress.
Not really. A tribe can lose a larger share of its young men than its young women and still not undergo a demographic catastrophe. That will show. In fact I cannot see how the male muggles would breed if you introduce magic that early.
I'm not entirely sold on your agricultural theory of social dynamics. Records indicate that even before agriculture that women would go to live with the mans family, and if you think about it one of them would still have to live with the others family in most cases even when they were nomads.
There aren't really records from that time, since writing only came with agriculture. There is a great article here that shows the various different opinions on matrilocality vs patrilocality in hunter-gatherers: press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/n4128/pdf/ch04.pdf In addition, the !Kung people (part of the San tribes, one of the very few hunter gather societies that remain in this day and age) practice matrilocality. So we have one observable example. All this is obviously speculation, we're talking about events that happened over twelve thousand years ago, and I'm not an anthropologist, just an interested bystander, but certainly all the hunter-gatherer tribes that are still viable in today's day and age have a very egalitarian approach. Men do most of the hunting, but women participate especially in big hunts. Women do most the gathering, but men help when they find large crops and so on. They also don't appear to have permanent leaders, instead making decisions as a group. They'll have a leader for activities, like a leader for a hunt etc, but no single tribe leader as such. All of that, to me, points at an egalitarian society that changed with the advent of agriculture. There were probably multiple causes for that change, increased patrilocality, the investment into a single patch of land that needs defense, not being able to just move away if you had beef with someone, etc. etc. But I do think the rise in patrilocality during this time played a large role.
@@JustInTimeWorldbuilding We have the genetic evidence. Regarding the modern hunter/gatherers we need to use caution, as they are confined to marginal habitats. That is, for example, a lake consistenly yielding a good catch of fish is worth defending. You cannot just walk away.
Men have/had a stronger will to action. It isn't/wasn't just strength that made/makes us better fighters. The US Marines did a study on it that's well worth a read.
There is an American study that says that men have a wider spread of IQ than women, a bigger bell curve essentially. But when the same study was replicated in Sweden, it was found that this was false for Sweden. It remained true for America however. Why? Because culture has a vast impact on how men and women act, how they study, how they regard themselves. Changing cultural views takes generations and only 2 generations ago, women could barely open a bank account without a man's authority. Your study might well be true, for the American culture.
@@JustInTimeWorldbuilding the Marines did their study in multiple countries. They need to get everyone who can get the job done. Also IQ has been a hard thing to test at the edges, so that might have hurt either/both of the studies.
@@timothyfoster6215 I'm afraid I couldn't find the study you're referring to in searching scholar google, but I'll take it on faith that it was conduct as you said. I'm however unsure of how current this study is, so I'm caveating my response with that. Modern research shows that both men and women can possess strong wills to action. Women in military and other demanding roles today demonstrate remarkable resilience and determination. Male dominance used to be a reality of all of western life. I say this not to be insulting or to blame men, it was simply true. Women were restricted from many roles quite explicitly. This had a dampening effect of women's education, their ambition and their will to action. Women needed men in order to survive day to day and thus modulated themselves to be lesser. That is changing, thought not everywhere and not for everyone. Will the action is largely a product of culture. Physically, men enjoy a greater strength than women and that sexual dimorphism will remain true, but culturally, a fantasy world builder can explore alternative options should they so chose. After all, we're most closely related to chimps and bonobos in the great ape families. Chimps are male dominated, but bonobos are female dominated, despite both of them also being sexually dimorphic to roughly the same extent. Also, please bear in mind that this is a fantasy world building channel.
@@JustInTimeWorldbuilding I'm sorry you can't find the study, though just a little logic is needed to reject the egalitarian belief. If you had your entire tribe go out to fight and any lost would affect your tribes growth. If I sent out half my tribe I could still repopulate at the same rate and over time subdue your tribe. If women had magic in a strategy game I'd keep them in the village as backup sentries. To be honest in RPGs I take out the mages first. Lastly women have never lacked soft power. I think we've fetishized hard power too much.
@@timothyfoster6215 once villages and hence agricultural is established, this could certainly be a contributing factor to patrilocality which was one of the prime reasons behind the rise of male dominance. I was referring to pre-agricultural egalitarian behavior as we observe in the few hunter gatherer societies that remain today. The San people are very egalitarian for example.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
I'm watching your videos of civilizations, laws, goverments and politics in a row and it's pure gold!! thank you!
You are very welcome and thank you very much for your support!
That opening had to take courage but thank you so much for it! I love the sound of music and it made for the start of a wonderful video and a wonderful day!
I love the sound of music :D I can't sing for beans but I must have watched it a hundred times easy :D
Criminally underrated channel!
Thank you.
The quality of your videos is always going up and up! And your info is always rich and multifaceted and I love it 💓
Your videos are amazing! I'm a RPG DM creating several worlds (or fragments of worlds) for my campaigns, it's awesome to have this great collection of worldbuilding knowledge!
Thank you :) Always good to help a fellow DM out
"My books have been replaced by a cat" As it should be. :3
I don't think I've ever commented on one of your videos before, but, I've just gotta say that I love your channel. As a worldbuilder, your channel has really helped me get ideas and a better grasp of certain concepts. And it's also entertaining. Si, thank you.
I enjoy all of Just In Time Worlds videos 🎉
Thank you :)
Nice video. Will be sharing with my gaming group. :)
Thank you for the kind words.
When considering whole societies and governments, one of the most impactful aspects of a magic system is whether magic requires intrinsic ability or not, and whether that ability is inherited.
For example, if magical ability come strictly from inheritance, power is very likely held by a magically capable aristocracy. Would the British, French, or Spanish aristocracy have lost power in the Age of Revolution if aristocrats, and ONLY aristocrats, could summon monsters, throw fireballs, and cast healing spells?
If that inheritance is tied to species (e.g. elves always have more magical ability than humans) a large power differential between species is likely to exist, especially if there's not a countervailing force (e.g. elves are few in number and reproduce very slowly compared to humans).
If no inherent ability is required to do magic, but certain information is necessary (e.g. spell books, rituals, esoteric practices) then that information will probably be tightly controlled by those who have it. Who controls that information and the power associated with it? Individual magicians with apprentices? Magical guilds? Monasteries or churches? Governments? Armies?
If magical talent is in-born, but not inherited, what happens when someone first displays magical ability? Although the main characters in many fantasy novels display anomalous magical ability, it's rarely the standard those societies are built on. I think the best explorations of "supernatural ability could pop up anywhere" systems come from the superhero genre!
All good points.
And indeed, as an adendum, if magic is created by rare resources, like you become a mage if you eat a rare fruit or some crystal, the rich will be mages.
Your videos are so helpful and interesting! Thank you!
You're welcome :)
societies using magic for infrastructure is something i want to explore in my dnd campaign. there’s a ritual spell that can double a crops yield within a certain area, that alone can completely revolutionize an economic system. never mind all the magic that makes construction, medicine, cleaning, and other aspects of society much easier.
DnD's system is so rich with possibilities for that kind of exploration :D Eberron made a start at it, but they could have gone way deeper IMO.
@@JustInTimeWorldbuilding grungeon master has a great playlist of videos some practical applications for dnd spells, that’s where i got the bit about crops from. i’d love to see some official dnd content really explore this stuff.
@@nascenticity That's what my Spore Druid did with her family's Apple Orchard. She also boosted her mushroom garden. Plant Growth is an amazing spell.
Do you consult with authors? I would love it if you could poke holes in my worldbuilding and show me all the things ive missed.
Great video btw the way! Thanks.
I do actually :) You can book through my ko-fi shop: ko-fi.com/c/2daeba8b7b
Given I write for an RPG where magic returns during a slightly more steam punk Victorian world, this is very interesting (Game is 1879, from FASA Games). Obviously the world building for RPGs is different to novel writing as you have a bunch of extra considerations for playability of the setting, but this is great stuff.
Yeah, RPGs require balance and game play that a novel never has to consider, but I try to make the world building accessible to game masters and designers as well :) Even if they have to adapt it in weird ways to cater for people actually, you know, playing :P
The cat ❤❤❤
She's both adorable and a ridiculous pain when filming :D
Related to the question of how do you tax a dragon.
I'd be curious what your country's aviation regulator would do with regards to creatures that have a natural ability to fly? Especially if the dragons existed first and humans develop the technology to fly later on.
You can't exactly demand the dragons be the ones to get a license to do what they do naturally, or prosecute them for exercising their freedom of movement in an area where, for instance, the government wants to build an airport.
Or, heavens forbid, pass a law saying that all dragons must carry or be implanted with transponders that continuously ping with the nearest air traffic control towers and have them show up on flight tracking websites..
Heh, those are great questions and they could have very interesting answers.
probably a nasty conflict
Didn't we kinda already do half of that with cars on the street?
If there's enough people wanting change and/or enough economic pressure behind it, basically any intuitively unfair ruling can pass and become normalised.
Tell the dragons very nicely that they should perhaps maybe try to avoid aviation areas so they don’t get hit by the planes and that it is for their own benefit and also to please don’t burn our cities down for delivering this less then fortunate news.
That’s if the dragons aren’t the government themselves.
Given that most commercial airplanes fly at about ~5 miles up, you could easily just say that that altitude is reserved for such and forbid Dragons or other winged species from flying up there.
Tell them that they are responsible for any and all damages incurred (including to themselves) that result from not fo5lowing regulations and call it a day.
Enforce it with heavy fines, prison sentences, wing clipping or other such grounding techniques, and big honking batistas. Maybe a jet fighter or two. I highly doubt a dragon is going to be more deadly or maneuverable than an F22 when it comes down to it.
Especially is the F22 is powered by magical bu||sh¡t and can shoot miguffin missiles at will...
In my world "bondsman" means something very different. Magic enforced contracts.
I love a good magic contract system. Made a whole video about it 😁
wow subscribed
Welcome to my tiny corner of RUclips.
In any world where only women can give birth, they would still not be sent to the frontline even if they were marginally better fighters. A society can bounce back in one generation even if half the men are dead. The economy will suffer, but only temporarily. But if half the women are gone, then so are half the children of the next generation, making the whole group extremely vulnerable. While warrior women have existed in our history, they were always rare. Now if most women have offensive magic and men don't, then all bets are off.
If women are egg layers, it also changes the equation :D I might have been able to do kids if it involved laying an egg.
But seriously, I don't think it needs gendered magic. Even in our world, there were societies who didn't practice patrilocality and succeeded. Not many, but the matrilineal Mosuo leap to mind.
Patrilocality arose not to conquer, but to defend against raids from still nomadic people (as I understand it and of course, we're talking about events literally over ten thousand years ago, so a lot is speculation and filling the blanks). So if magic let the sedentary people defend their homes effectively (things like runes to protect the walls and long range AoE effects like fireballs), I think you would have more matrilineal or egalitarian societies than exist in our world. Quite possibly, it would result in a very interesting mix of gender views.
Actually, there's a great scholarly article on the Mosua which kind of bears out this sort of thinking, a summary of the article:
The Mosuo people exhibit different kinship systems depending on their geographical location due to varying economic, social, and political conditions. In the Yongning Basin, near Lugu Lake, they developed a matrilineal system characterized by female-biased inheritance and natalocal residence. This system is adaptive in stable and resource-rich environments where investments in women ensure lineage continuity. Conversely, in the more rugged mountainous terrain near Labai, a patrilineal system evolved, favoring male-biased inheritance and patrilocal residence, which are advantageous in harsher environments where male cooperation and external alliances are crucial for survival.
If your magic system makes a material difference to location and survival, I think it will change the gender views of your society.
Ahem, sorry for the very long text. This stuff is super interesting to me, so I tend to ramble a bit.
@@JustInTimeWorldbuilding But it really is super interesting! I enjoyed your "rambling", at least.
You bring up some great points but I don't think you take them you far enough. If early man had access to a significant amount of magical power then the logical result would be that you couldn't have much in the way of a society at all, at least not one beyond the family unit. Mankind would be completely ungovernable since nobody would b able to be e in charge.
I don't think that is necessarily true. The problem of course is that so much depends on the world and the kind of magic. But lets say something like learning how to toss fireballs was possible and there were creatures like dragons. People would still need to band together to survive. Even if there are no fantasy creatures, people would still band together to well, attack other people and defend against other people.
Basically, I don't think anything short of overwhelming power will stop the evolution of social traits and that will result in some kind of society.
And if some species has access to overwhelming power (like say DnD dragons or something), then yes, they'd be a solitary species and there would be far less of them around than there are of humans. Social species almost always outbreed solitary species.
Raymond Feist actually did something interesting with his world in that regard. In the early prehistory, he had a race of insanely powerful humanoids and they indeed lived completely separately from each other. They are called the valheru and they can command dragons, using magic from birth and so on. When they're born, their mother immediately sends a servant to put the babe outside and the kid survives with using their magic or it doesn't. They only breed with each other when a special kind of lust rises in them, otherwise they breed with other humanoids which doesn't produce true valheru.
Long story short (sorry for the wall of text) it depends on the level of fantasy, the level of magic and honestly, the concepts you, as the world builder, want to play with :D
@@JustInTimeWorldbuildingI think even overwhelming power will not necessarily stop the evolution of social traits. It’s not just because “overwhelming power” is a term of art. Maybe they form bonds over having it in common or the humans initially created them to be extra social partners and they just fortunately had it.
Dnd type hand wave nuke magic would make large scale government not feasible. If its magic manifest as a coincidence or makes one more " lucky" and nothing more? Then regular government would be possible
Land lords is just a fake version of the lords of old which are ironically can worst because greed.
What magic can do is surely the primary question you need to decide first. The ability to pull rabbits out of hats might affect the diet of early cultures but the ability to turn ping-pong balls into pigeons is less advantageous. I have the impression you have a clear idea of what magic can do but you don't provide a description. I would recommend the arguments on the design cnosiderations of magic in Greg Stolze's game REIGN.
If magic trumps muscle then you don't get egalitarianism necessarily: you get dominance by magi instead of warriors. (And I shall go and watch your videos on magiocracy now.)
Your point about when magic comes along and becomes the dominant cultural force is a very good one. I've tended to prefer later historical periods because they are so much better known.
I think the bit of government that would be most affected by magic would be the impact of Truthsayer spells on investigation and prosecution of crime.
I don't describe what magic can do because that will vary from world builder to world builder. I'm just providing inspiration for your (theoretical you) world and things you should think about.
The world builder knows what their magic can do and hence should think what effect it will have on the political development of their world.
If I'm building a world, of course I consider what my magic system can do in broad terms and how that will affect my world.
I make the same point about soothsayers on my video about the law and magic systems :D
Again, there are historical examples of what happens when land is inherited by women and therefore society is matrilocal. Egypt's consanguineous marriage pattern was not limited to Pharaoh's family. Women owned the land before Pharaoh did... But the male consort defended the land owned, and by having command of the forces he became the de facto power AS LONG AS he was consort to the heiress.
💜🐈💜
Not really. A tribe can lose a larger share of its young men than its young women and still not undergo a demographic catastrophe. That will show. In fact I cannot see how the male muggles would breed if you introduce magic that early.
I'm not entirely sold on your agricultural theory of social dynamics. Records indicate that even before agriculture that women would go to live with the mans family, and if you think about it one of them would still have to live with the others family in most cases even when they were nomads.
There aren't really records from that time, since writing only came with agriculture. There is a great article here that shows the various different opinions on matrilocality vs patrilocality in hunter-gatherers: press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/n4128/pdf/ch04.pdf
In addition, the !Kung people (part of the San tribes, one of the very few hunter gather societies that remain in this day and age) practice matrilocality. So we have one observable example.
All this is obviously speculation, we're talking about events that happened over twelve thousand years ago, and I'm not an anthropologist, just an interested bystander, but certainly all the hunter-gatherer tribes that are still viable in today's day and age have a very egalitarian approach. Men do most of the hunting, but women participate especially in big hunts. Women do most the gathering, but men help when they find large crops and so on.
They also don't appear to have permanent leaders, instead making decisions as a group. They'll have a leader for activities, like a leader for a hunt etc, but no single tribe leader as such.
All of that, to me, points at an egalitarian society that changed with the advent of agriculture. There were probably multiple causes for that change, increased patrilocality, the investment into a single patch of land that needs defense, not being able to just move away if you had beef with someone, etc. etc. But I do think the rise in patrilocality during this time played a large role.
@@JustInTimeWorldbuilding We have the genetic evidence. Regarding the modern hunter/gatherers we need to use caution, as they are confined to marginal habitats. That is, for example, a lake consistenly yielding a good catch of fish is worth defending. You cannot just walk away.
Men have/had a stronger will to action. It isn't/wasn't just strength that made/makes us better fighters. The US Marines did a study on it that's well worth a read.
There is an American study that says that men have a wider spread of IQ than women, a bigger bell curve essentially. But when the same study was replicated in Sweden, it was found that this was false for Sweden. It remained true for America however.
Why? Because culture has a vast impact on how men and women act, how they study, how they regard themselves. Changing cultural views takes generations and only 2 generations ago, women could barely open a bank account without a man's authority. Your study might well be true, for the American culture.
@@JustInTimeWorldbuilding the Marines did their study in multiple countries. They need to get everyone who can get the job done. Also IQ has been a hard thing to test at the edges, so that might have hurt either/both of the studies.
@@timothyfoster6215 I'm afraid I couldn't find the study you're referring to in searching scholar google, but I'll take it on faith that it was conduct as you said. I'm however unsure of how current this study is, so I'm caveating my response with that.
Modern research shows that both men and women can possess strong wills to action. Women in military and other demanding roles today demonstrate remarkable resilience and determination.
Male dominance used to be a reality of all of western life. I say this not to be insulting or to blame men, it was simply true. Women were restricted from many roles quite explicitly. This had a dampening effect of women's education, their ambition and their will to action.
Women needed men in order to survive day to day and thus modulated themselves to be lesser.
That is changing, thought not everywhere and not for everyone. Will the action is largely a product of culture.
Physically, men enjoy a greater strength than women and that sexual dimorphism will remain true, but culturally, a fantasy world builder can explore alternative options should they so chose.
After all, we're most closely related to chimps and bonobos in the great ape families. Chimps are male dominated, but bonobos are female dominated, despite both of them also being sexually dimorphic to roughly the same extent.
Also, please bear in mind that this is a fantasy world building channel.
@@JustInTimeWorldbuilding I'm sorry you can't find the study, though just a little logic is needed to reject the egalitarian belief. If you had your entire tribe go out to fight and any lost would affect your tribes growth. If I sent out half my tribe I could still repopulate at the same rate and over time subdue your tribe.
If women had magic in a strategy game I'd keep them in the village as backup sentries. To be honest in RPGs I take out the mages first.
Lastly women have never lacked soft power. I think we've fetishized hard power too much.
@@timothyfoster6215 once villages and hence agricultural is established, this could certainly be a contributing factor to patrilocality which was one of the prime reasons behind the rise of male dominance. I was referring to pre-agricultural egalitarian behavior as we observe in the few hunter gatherer societies that remain today. The San people are very egalitarian for example.