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10,000 word long-take I wrote on the history of female warriors, North European human Sacrifice rituals, Girardian mimetic selection, and the incompatibility of the west's current conceptions of Freedom and women's liberation.
What occured in the forests of Germany and on the Eurasian steppe for 1000s of years was one of the most extreme experiments in selective breeding and selective killing practised anywhere on earth. The Aztec and Maya were the only ones with a ritual breeding/killing program so extreme
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Notes -
I really have to say: a man wrote this.
Won't sleep with any man who asks: frigid prude Protestant schoolmarm Will sleep with any man who asks: BDSM slave girl (Gor, I hear you calling!)
This is a male idea of female psychology. Why would women prefer death to slavery, he wonders. Well gee, could it be that being a slave in the house of your conqueror, with his legitimate wife and family over you, was a pretty shitty experience? At the best, grinding hard labour for life. At the worst, she goes all Clytemnestra on you.
Why would women go along with the idea of sacrificing themselves? Well, why do men? Why did men think a glorious death in battle was better than being a coward? Why better a dead lion than a live dog? Why the idea that dying in bed in old age was the worst fate of all?
If you're soaking in the attitudes of your culture and society all your life, you'll adopt them. The pretty slave girls who didn't leap up and volunteer survived, but the status went to the girl who did. Same with the warrior.
As to the rest of it, that there was only one pretty girl per generation and all the other women were ugly, in the ritual sacrifice societies, I have to laugh at that. Oh yeah, Miss Universe is the one pretty girl who wins the contest and all the other girls are uggos. Ritual sacrifice societies also permitted or winked at giving substitutes - maybe you provided a slave, or bought a child off a poor family, instead of your own child. Maybe in time you substituted animals, or symbolic sacrifices. The Aztecs were bloody maniacs because they sincerely believed that the world would end without the shedding of blood to maintain the weakened gods and enable them to keep creation going. They weren't sacrificing people for eugenic purposes. Sure, part of the flower wars was to keep subject and tributary chieftains weakened and subordinate, but they also needed vast amounts of bodies for sacrifice. And the end result was that they made themselves so hated, when the Spanish turned up, the other tribes supported them to bring down the Aztecs.
I don't agree with the Feral Aryan Blonde hypothesis, but I think you're missing a few key points.
Because the side that broke first would be ridden down and slaughtered, the survivors sold into slavery. In ancient warfare the vast majority of casualties were suffered in the rout, not in the battle. If your tribe is more courageous, then you'll win the battle, massacre the opposing men, and capture their women, thus propagating your courageous genes. Over time this results in more courage among men.
But not women. When the men are all wiped out and the women are hauled back to be second wives to the victors, they still reproduce. If anything, women are selected for being more cowardly. The most effective action for a woman in war is to calculate the best moment to flee or surrender to maximize her own chance of survival. The only time physical courage will increase a woman's reproductive fitness is if she has to protect her baby from a mountain lion, and that didn't happen very often after we wiped out the megafauna.
Courage among mammals is an essentially male phenomenon to increase reproductive fitness at the cost of safety. From an evolutionary standpoint that's an easy trade. Of course, in modern times that trend will naturally reverse. In a post-Malthusian world, courage is now anti-correlated with reproductive success. Modern wars are won by artillery from hundreds of miles away.
While I can buy this as a means of propagating the memes of a society, your individual genes would have an exceptionally small effect on the outcome of a battle with hundreds/thousands of soldiers. Moreover, how likely was a man to actually participate in a battle so large that routing was possible? I have a hard time believing the selection effects here would be anything but incredibly weak.
Why?
I'm having a hard time imagining why you think so. I'll try two angles but lmk if neither is what you meant.
You mention "your individual genes" not making much of a difference, but humans fight as ethnic groups. The other men in your army are probably much more closely related to you than the enemies are, and share a lot of the traits which distinguish you from the enemy. So no, one soldier being a bit more courageous isn't likely to affect much, but in aggregate it's likely that one side is going to be substantially more courageous than the other, for several reasons including culture, nutrition, and, yes, genetic distinctiveness. Over enough iterations this should propagate.
Maybe you think that the relatively tiny (in absolute numerical terms) genetic differences between ancestral groups can't amount to much? In fact there are plenty of single-allele mutations which have outsized effects on all sorts of things from body shape to behavior. A lot of the ones we think about most often are deleterious because those stand out more: when someone gets a nasty FOXP2 mutation and can't really engage in human-level speech, that's obvious and we go looking for the cause, which happens to be easy to spot. But suppose there were a mutation which made someone (and by extent his descendants) 20% more courageous? How would that even play out? We'd probably only know about it if it had unfortunate side-effects like also making carriers prone to violent crime or something, which seems plausible. Here's an interesting candidate, though due to the prohibitions on research into such topics set in place by today's dominant religion, we seem to know less about it today than we did fifteen years ago.
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