LogFAQs > #933032408

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Turns out men could hunt better than women

Arguably, that wasn't even the case - there's a fair bit of evidence to suggest the real reason gender roles formed along those lines at that point was because women were better at staying behind to care for the young, so men were forced into the more active hunting role by default.

Still, in that scenario it's not really a transaction as much as it is symbiosis - without women no one was raising the kids or handling the crafting/gathering aspects of tribal life, so it wouldn't matter if you were the best male hunter in the world, you'd still be pretty stone cold fucked without females in a reciprocal relationship. And there wasn't much benefit outside of the already established group support dynamic.

It wasn't until we invented agriculture and settled down in single locations, and thus could suddenly accumulate belongings (and thus form the basis of "wealth") that enough value was added to the system for more complex transactions. Basically, you have to invent trade and barter before sex stops being communal and starts being business.

The other trick is that the possibility of the accumulation of wealth introduced the need to be able to dispense assets upon death (and thus the concept of inheritance), which radically altered the male/female dynamic. Prior to property, who a given child belonged to was more or less meaningless (because children were part of the tribe and the whole tribe had a vested interest in raising them), but once wealth and property are factors, parents had a vested interest in supporting their own children over others... and while woman generally know exactly which children are theirs for obvious reasons, the only way men can really be 100% sure a child is theirs is to guarantee the woman isn't having sex with anyone else. So agriculture created the Patriarchy.
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