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Despots and tyrants may have changed the course of human evolution by using their power to force hundreds of women to bear their children, says new research. It shows that the switch from hunter-gathering to farming about 8,000 - 9,000 years ago was closely followed by the emergence of emperors and elites who took control of all wealth, including access to young women. Such men set up systems to impregnate hundreds, or even thousands, of women while making sure other men were too poor or oppressed to have families. It means such men may now have hundreds of millions of descendants, a high proportion of whom may carry the genetic traits that drove their ancestors to seek power and oppress their fellow humans. "In evolutionary terms this period of human existence created an enormous selective pressure, with the guys at the top who had the least desirable traits passing on their genes to huge numbers of offspring," said Laura Betzig, an evolutionary anthropologist. She has studied the emergence of the world’s first six great civilisations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, Mexico and Peru. In each she found that emperors created systems to "harvest" hundreds of the prettiest young women and then systematically impregnate them. Betzig has studied the records left by the six civilisations to work out how many children were born to emperors. "In China they had it down to a science. Yangdi, the 6th-century Sui dynasty emperor, was credited by an official historian with 100,000 women in his palace at Yangzhou alone," she said. "They even had sex handbooks describing how to work out when a woman was fertile. Then they would be taken to the emperor to be impregnated. It was all organised by the state so the emperor could impregnate as many women as possible. And they had rules, like all the women had to be under 30 and all had to be attractive and symmetrical. This was the system in China for more than 2,000 years." Others relied on violence. One genetic study showed that Genghis Khan, the 13th-century Mongol warlord, who was renowned for sleeping with the most beautiful women in every territory he conquered, now has about 16m male descendants. This compares with the 800 people descended from the average man of that era. Betzig also studied primitive societies. She found that the small bands of hunter-gatherers were the most egalitarian, with men and women able to have the number of children they wanted. "This freedom is probably because they were so mobile. If their group got taken over by a big guy who tried to control resources, the others could simply leave and find somewhere else," she said. This system broke down when the world’s first civilisations emerged about 8,000 years ago based on farming. All began on fertile river plains surrounded by mountains or deserts that made it difficult to leave. Such situations were perfect for the emergence of elites and emperors. In a paper published recently, Betzig has catalogued the same trend in each of the great early civilisations. Such systems arose in Britain as well, especially in the feudal era. "Lords then had sexual access to hundreds of dependent serfs ... with up to a fifth of the population ’in service’," Betzig said. She is to publish a book, The Badge of Lost Innocence, exploring why that era has ended. "The European discovery of the Americas changed everything," she said. "Along with the emergence of democracy it offered millions of people the chance to emigrate or get rid of despotic regimes. The literature of that time shows people wanted to have families of their own and for the first time in thousands of years they had that chance. " Betzig has studied the records left by the following civilisations EXCEPT ______ to work out how many children were born to emperors.
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J.K. Rowling’s first novel for adults, which treads on very different ground to her bestselling Harry Potter series, is set to become a publishing sensation when it hits bookshelves next week. Waterstones, the country’s biggest book-chain store, revealed that the comic novel, The Casual Vacancy, has received the largest number of pre-order sales this year. This number is believed to be five figured, although online pre-orders have reportedly reached well over a million already. The RRP for the paperback is ￡20 but many outlets are reducing this considerably with Waterstones pricing it at ￡10. The secrecy, as well as the excitement, around Rowling’s latest offering, has guaranteed its status as the biggest publishing event of the year. Waterstones is opening its doors an hour earlier than usual, at 8 a.m., on its official publication date next Thursday. Until then, Rowling’s publisher Little, Brown has stipulated that the books should not even appear on display. Staff will come in early to put out display copies and prepare for the crowds. Jon Howells, a spokesman for Waterstones, described it as one of the first "Super Thursdays" leading up to Christmas, not least because Jamie Oliver was also publishing his book, 15-Minute Meals, on the same day. Mr. Howells said that while he anticipated a big rush at the outset, the book would, in all likelihood, not inspire the equivalent of Pottermania. "Certainly, the anticipation for J.K. Rowling’s book has been great because it’s the first non-Harry Potter book and it is for a purely adult audience. I think it will see a fantastic level of first day and first weekend sales and after that people will come to it more steadily." "We are treating it as a very different thing from the Harry Potter books. The way readers will approach this will be different. A lot of the readers will be curious and interested in what this book can do for them. There was a huge sense of urgency with the Harry Potter books, and people wanted to read them quickly so that they would not find out the plot through other mediums, while this is a standalone story," he said. A spokeswoman for Tesco, which will also be stocking the book, said: "If the hits on the Tesco Books blog are anything to go by, we think it could be one of our bestselling books in the run-up to Christmas." The plot of the book, which revolves around the inhabitants of a small English town, has been fiercely guarded, and newspaper reviewers have been asked to sign the kind of long and stiffly worded pre-publication confidentiality contracts that a celebrity footballer might use to protect his darkest secrets. A limited number of copies will be delivered by hand to reviewers’ homes today. Rowling is due to attend her only question-and-answer session in front of a live audience in London on the day of publication. The event, at the 900-seat Queen Elizabeth Hall in the Southbank Centre, sold out within 48 hours and will also be attended by the world’s media. The Southbank Centre condemned the selling of single ￡12 tickets on eBay for ￡85 each. The event, which will last just under two hours including a 30-minute Q & A with the audience, will be transmitted in a live feed on YouTube. Rowling will sign books afterwards, and audience members are limited to one copy per person. Next month she will appear at the Cheltenham Literary Festival and sign copies there. Little, Brown refused to reveal the numbers of copies that have been printed so far—but the book is expected to sell millions. The word "Pottermania" in the sentence "... the book would, in all likelihood, not inspire the equivalent of Pottermania" (para. 3) can best be paraphrased as ______.
When I recently mentioned to a pregnant acquaintance that I was writing a book about egg freezing (and had frozen my own eggs in hopes of preserving my ability to have children well into my 40s), she replied, "You’re so lucky. I wish I had known to freeze my eggs. " She was 40 years old and wanted two children, so she and her husband were planning to start trying to conceive a second child shortly after the birth of their first. "Now everything is a rush," she said. Married at 38, she didn’t think to talk to her obstetrician-gynecologist about fertility before then. If her doctor had brought up the subject, she said, she might have put away some eggs when she was younger. In our fertility-obsessed society, women can’t escape the message that it’s harder to get pregnant after 35. And yet, it’s not a conversation patients are having with the doctors they talk to about their most intimate issues—their OB-GYNs—unless they bring up the topic first. OB-GYNs routinely ask patients during their annual exams about their sexual histories and need for contraception, but often missing from the list is, "Do you plan to have a family" OB-GYNs are divided on whether it’s their responsibility to broach the topic with patients. Those who take an "ask me first" approach understandably don’t want to offend women who don’t want children, or frighten those who do. It doesn’t take much for an informational briefing to spiral into a teary heart-to-heart about dating woes. Do you reassure a distraught 38-year-old that she’s still got time; encourage her to seriously consider having a baby on her own; or freak her out so she settles for a lackluster relationship And considering that fertility figures are averages (while one woman may need fertility treatment at age 36, another can get pregnant naturally at 42), when is the right age to sound the alarm But the biggest impediment to bringing the issue up was that doctors didn’t have many good recommendations for a single woman. she could either use an anonymous donor’s sperm to have a baby today, or she could fertilize her eggs with it and freeze the resulting embryos for future use. Now, a better option is gaining credibility. Egg freezing (a technique that allows women to store their unfertilized eggs to use with a future partner when they are older) has been available in the United States since the early 2000s, but success rates at first were low and doctors have been hesitant to push it. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine said the technique shouldn’t be "offered or marketed as a means to defer reproductive aging", and deemed it "experimental". Last week, the doctors’ society announced that it was removing the experimental label (though it stopped short of endorsing widespread use of egg freezing to put off having children). After reviewing four randomized controlled trials, it found little difference in the effectiveness of using fresh or frozen eggs in in-vitro fertilization, and said that babies conceived from frozen eggs faced no increased risk of birth defects or developmental problems. The procedure isn’t a panacea. It’s terribly expensive—often $15,000—and is not usually covered by insurance. In addition, there’s a worrisome lack of data regarding the success rates of eggs frozen by the women at the end of their baby-making days. The majority of the women in the four studies were under 35, and it warned against giving women who want to delay childbearing "false hope" that their frozen eggs will work when they are ready to get pregnant years later. Although estimates of the number of American women who have frozen their eggs for nonmedical reasons are in the thousands, very few have yet returned to thaw them—there are only a couple of thousand babies born from frozen eggs in the world. Women should be allowed to come to their own conclusions and take their own risks—there’s a fine line between doctors’ "mentioning" and "suggesting" the procedure—but this is an option they should be hearing about from their OB-GYNs. To standardize the message, professional groups like the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists should create pamphlets that doctors can give to patients. OB-GYN residents also can learn suggested scripts that present the information in a nonbiased, non alarmist way. I first learned about egg freezing from a friend who had talked to her OB-GYN about whether she should freeze, given her family’s history of premature menopause. When I asked my doctor about the procedure, she said she had heard that the success rates had recently improved and gave me the name of a respected fertility doctor. As a result, I stashed away several batches of eggs between the ages of 36 and 38—just before the cutoff at which many doctors no longer consider eggs worthwhile to save. I was fortunate, because I knew to ask. We must go one step further and expect OB-GYNs to bring up family planning at every annual visit, so that women have the information they need to choose to take charge of their fertility. Perhaps more women will think about freezing in their early to mid-30s, when their chances of success are greater. Or maybe, after being asked about their plans from their very first visit, more will decide to start families when their eggs are at their prime, and won’t even need to freeze. Which of the following CANNOT be true about fertility according to the passage
When I recently mentioned to a pregnant acquaintance that I was writing a book about egg freezing (and had frozen my own eggs in hopes of preserving my ability to have children well into my 40s), she replied, "You’re so lucky. I wish I had known to freeze my eggs. " She was 40 years old and wanted two children, so she and her husband were planning to start trying to conceive a second child shortly after the birth of their first. "Now everything is a rush," she said. Married at 38, she didn’t think to talk to her obstetrician-gynecologist about fertility before then. If her doctor had brought up the subject, she said, she might have put away some eggs when she was younger. In our fertility-obsessed society, women can’t escape the message that it’s harder to get pregnant after 35. And yet, it’s not a conversation patients are having with the doctors they talk to about their most intimate issues—their OB-GYNs—unless they bring up the topic first. OB-GYNs routinely ask patients during their annual exams about their sexual histories and need for contraception, but often missing from the list is, "Do you plan to have a family" OB-GYNs are divided on whether it’s their responsibility to broach the topic with patients. Those who take an "ask me first" approach understandably don’t want to offend women who don’t want children, or frighten those who do. It doesn’t take much for an informational briefing to spiral into a teary heart-to-heart about dating woes. Do you reassure a distraught 38-year-old that she’s still got time; encourage her to seriously consider having a baby on her own; or freak her out so she settles for a lackluster relationship And considering that fertility figures are averages (while one woman may need fertility treatment at age 36, another can get pregnant naturally at 42), when is the right age to sound the alarm But the biggest impediment to bringing the issue up was that doctors didn’t have many good recommendations for a single woman. she could either use an anonymous donor’s sperm to have a baby today, or she could fertilize her eggs with it and freeze the resulting embryos for future use. Now, a better option is gaining credibility. Egg freezing (a technique that allows women to store their unfertilized eggs to use with a future partner when they are older) has been available in the United States since the early 2000s, but success rates at first were low and doctors have been hesitant to push it. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine said the technique shouldn’t be "offered or marketed as a means to defer reproductive aging", and deemed it "experimental". Last week, the doctors’ society announced that it was removing the experimental label (though it stopped short of endorsing widespread use of egg freezing to put off having children). After reviewing four randomized controlled trials, it found little difference in the effectiveness of using fresh or frozen eggs in in-vitro fertilization, and said that babies conceived from frozen eggs faced no increased risk of birth defects or developmental problems. The procedure isn’t a panacea. It’s terribly expensive—often $15,000—and is not usually covered by insurance. In addition, there’s a worrisome lack of data regarding the success rates of eggs frozen by the women at the end of their baby-making days. The majority of the women in the four studies were under 35, and it warned against giving women who want to delay childbearing "false hope" that their frozen eggs will work when they are ready to get pregnant years later. Although estimates of the number of American women who have frozen their eggs for nonmedical reasons are in the thousands, very few have yet returned to thaw them—there are only a couple of thousand babies born from frozen eggs in the world. Women should be allowed to come to their own conclusions and take their own risks—there’s a fine line between doctors’ "mentioning" and "suggesting" the procedure—but this is an option they should be hearing about from their OB-GYNs. To standardize the message, professional groups like the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists should create pamphlets that doctors can give to patients. OB-GYN residents also can learn suggested scripts that present the information in a nonbiased, non alarmist way. I first learned about egg freezing from a friend who had talked to her OB-GYN about whether she should freeze, given her family’s history of premature menopause. When I asked my doctor about the procedure, she said she had heard that the success rates had recently improved and gave me the name of a respected fertility doctor. As a result, I stashed away several batches of eggs between the ages of 36 and 38—just before the cutoff at which many doctors no longer consider eggs worthwhile to save. I was fortunate, because I knew to ask. We must go one step further and expect OB-GYNs to bring up family planning at every annual visit, so that women have the information they need to choose to take charge of their fertility. Perhaps more women will think about freezing in their early to mid-30s, when their chances of success are greater. Or maybe, after being asked about their plans from their very first visit, more will decide to start families when their eggs are at their prime, and won’t even need to freeze. The word "broach" in the sentence "OB-GYNs are divided on whether it’s their responsibility to broach the topic with patients" (para. 4) can best be paraphrased by ______.
Despots and tyrants may have changed the course of human evolution by using their power to force hundreds of women to bear their children, says new research. It shows that the switch from hunter-gathering to farming about 8,000 - 9,000 years ago was closely followed by the emergence of emperors and elites who took control of all wealth, including access to young women. Such men set up systems to impregnate hundreds, or even thousands, of women while making sure other men were too poor or oppressed to have families. It means such men may now have hundreds of millions of descendants, a high proportion of whom may carry the genetic traits that drove their ancestors to seek power and oppress their fellow humans. "In evolutionary terms this period of human existence created an enormous selective pressure, with the guys at the top who had the least desirable traits passing on their genes to huge numbers of offspring," said Laura Betzig, an evolutionary anthropologist. She has studied the emergence of the world’s first six great civilisations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, Mexico and Peru. In each she found that emperors created systems to "harvest" hundreds of the prettiest young women and then systematically impregnate them. Betzig has studied the records left by the six civilisations to work out how many children were born to emperors. "In China they had it down to a science. Yangdi, the 6th-century Sui dynasty emperor, was credited by an official historian with 100,000 women in his palace at Yangzhou alone," she said. "They even had sex handbooks describing how to work out when a woman was fertile. Then they would be taken to the emperor to be impregnated. It was all organised by the state so the emperor could impregnate as many women as possible. And they had rules, like all the women had to be under 30 and all had to be attractive and symmetrical. This was the system in China for more than 2,000 years." Others relied on violence. One genetic study showed that Genghis Khan, the 13th-century Mongol warlord, who was renowned for sleeping with the most beautiful women in every territory he conquered, now has about 16m male descendants. This compares with the 800 people descended from the average man of that era. Betzig also studied primitive societies. She found that the small bands of hunter-gatherers were the most egalitarian, with men and women able to have the number of children they wanted. "This freedom is probably because they were so mobile. If their group got taken over by a big guy who tried to control resources, the others could simply leave and find somewhere else," she said. This system broke down when the world’s first civilisations emerged about 8,000 years ago based on farming. All began on fertile river plains surrounded by mountains or deserts that made it difficult to leave. Such situations were perfect for the emergence of elites and emperors. In a paper published recently, Betzig has catalogued the same trend in each of the great early civilisations. Such systems arose in Britain as well, especially in the feudal era. "Lords then had sexual access to hundreds of dependent serfs ... with up to a fifth of the population ’in service’," Betzig said. She is to publish a book, The Badge of Lost Innocence, exploring why that era has ended. "The European discovery of the Americas changed everything," she said. "Along with the emergence of democracy it offered millions of people the chance to emigrate or get rid of despotic regimes. The literature of that time shows people wanted to have families of their own and for the first time in thousands of years they had that chance. " Which of the following CANNOT be true about the systems created by emperors according to the passage
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