What a wonderful answer! I am made aware of your earlier observation we seem to talk past each other, because of our fundamentally different biologies, our sex directs our understandings in different directions based on our separate life histories and evolutionary purposes. Yet reason is blind to these differences, so even from our discrete viewpoints our common application of reason creates common understanding we at least can find we are dancing around.

I have reread our entire discussion here as I awoke at 130 am and cannot go back to sleep, and nothing interests me more than understanding what you mean and I have not grasped, because I do often seize on my first impulse and fail to explore more carefully, and have missed much nuance in what you said here. There is a prescience available only in the middle of the night, when distractions in the light of day are absent, that I am striving to take advantage of at the moment. As a result I have noted how many times I have seemed to dodge your intended point and seized on my own interests in things you tangentially address.

One of these is our fundamental difference in how we consider risk and adventure. Men, or at least me, tend to feel like gamblers, that a pot is going to be won and only players have a chance of being the winner. Regarding a scouting expedition, or space exploration, or building skyscrapers, there is a pot to be won by those gambles. The scout will gain knowledge of bushcraft, how to pitch a tent, build a fire, tie knots, treasures that will inform them all their lives and grant them boons of understanding and perspective, joy, and memories of good times to sustain them all their days. Builders of skyscrapers aren't the same men that own the real property, that pay the architects and steel workers. They have different prizes they gain from venturing. Steelworkers their wages and skills, and property owners the immense wealth to come from rents of the vastly increased number and quality of rental units their property will bring. They don't seek the risk. They seek the prize, and undertake the risk of failing to gain the prize through many potential calamities that could strike.

You are still right to point to the risk as a reason to venture. No doubt men and women both take risks for the thrill they bring, and despite my own rationalization of my personal motivations, I cannot honestly claim the prize of doing the things I have done on motorcycles was the skill I gained. It certainly was that thrill of danger and how that pared away for those moments in mid-air the problems of taxation, of bills due and payable from income not yet received, or the myriad mundane and banal evils that beset us. Nothing existed at such moments but the need to perfectly wield the bike to land it without crashing, and the horrific pain of crashing - which I experienced many times - was powerful motivation, fear of suffering agony was clearly what I sought by riding as I did, and that meditative release from bullies at school, mean parents, and algebra quizzes. I find this actually very silly, and strange, when I consider things rationally (which is why I gave away my motorcycle when I started to have dreams about jumping a particular ravine on property I owned, to lose the ability to gain that particular thrill without delay), but it is the fact, as unreasonable as it shows me to be.

There is a certain prize from most every gain of power over men that men seek. This is what men consider in their strivings, 'eyes on the prize', yet it is undeniable there are also those whose participation isn't for some wealth or treasure to be gained, but the thrill of battle.

"...the smallness of its construction..."

This is particularly what I mean to convey isn't the prize of seizing resources in space. It isn't such thrills and challenges that I think will drive exploration and diaspora across space, but vast, palatial personal properties. Not cramped quarters and recycled air, but whole planets terraformed and paved with gold and jewels, brimming with verdant growth of bespoke ecosystems, and availing unimaginably sybaritic luxury to the family that created it. While the challenge of living through decades and centuries of hard and mean circumstances are a prize that will draw some, the prize of personal possession of entire solar systems after they have been developed are what I expect to be the more powerful draw. Today wealthy people expect as children to have their own bedroom, but in happy days to come they will have their own planets, their own solar systems, crafted to their personal preferences and specifications. Wealth and felicity orders of magnitude beyond what can be conceivably attained on Earth beckons. Also, no competition, no subjugation of others is necessary to it. Neither could some army profit by conquering such a possession, nor overlords impose taxes, or rule such a family profitably. Freedom from oppression is perhaps even a greater prize, once such development is completed. The temporal constraints on interstellar travel mean that every such conquest is essentially the only one an overlord with an army could undertake, and it would be vastly more profitable to simply make such estate rather than take it, and this true for every soldier in an army, as well as their overlord.

Generally, I, at least, intentionally consider only the eventual prize and disregard the thrill of questing for it. I think it is an evolved trait in me to consider things in this way, and that as a woman you may have evolved to do the opposite, to note the rewards of risk itself, and that biologically caused because of the very different roles our sexes have to cope with very different definitions of success, fulfillment of our purposes, of the purposes of our genes.

Men tend to prefer dogs, and women cats, which I think reveals this difference in our evolutionarily created differences in how we think (lest you consider this generality chauvinist, I will admit I have a cat and no dog). Dogs have a variety of jobs, security of their owners, of a flock, ability to herd the flock, to track game, and etc., prizes to be gained, while cats eliminate vermin but mostly rule humanity like no satrap has ever enjoyed. I have belabored the point in an effort to dispel my shame over that chauvinism I see revealed in my discussion with you, but, of course, not that alone, but also reveling in the prize, the understanding I have gained, however obvious it may be to you, and you may marvel I find it a rare thing to have some clue about how I, or women, and you specifically, think. Men have such fragile egos they must crow about their achievements of even such puerile nature. At least, so I seem to be here.

Men tend to have survived many battles with their fellows, and to have killed none of their opponents. We do very much like stag have a ritual of battle that does not have as it's end the death of our enemy, but establishes familial and communal hierarchy, natural and evolved in us. Women have different contests they undertake for the same purpose, rather than violence. The enmity of teens is also natural, an evolved mechanism that impels them to start their own households and families. We clearly should marry them off when they get prickly, and they are evolution's goad and encouragement to do so. Even at their barbaric extreme, when men fail all reason and resort to violent words and acts to compel their fellows and families to obey them, it is almost never murderous. We innately are disgusted and revile such men, and none more than those that have so failed their families or communities by murdering them.

This too is compelled to us by evolution, that has cause to promote charm and persuasion, but yet can use force. People have innate submission behaviours, acts and sounds we make universal across cultures, displays to end such violence, and innate behaviours and actions to accept submission and crow about our victories, just like stag, frogs, and birds. This prevents murderous intraspecific violence, because that isn't advantageous to the genes that actually rule us, that we serve with our feeble monkey brains.

But that prize of national power, of taking the land of a neighboring people, isn't available to overlords or their institutions, from accepting that submission. The whole nation has to surrender and submit for that loot to be attained, and this is why I stress that murderous violence isn't natural to men, but is imposed by institutions. This inhumanity isn't innate to humans. It is to inhuman institutions, however, and why I call them antichrist. Only psychopaths desire to murder, and that is evolutionarily encouraged only in the presence of institutions that aren't humane. This is the difference between institutions and society as I understand them, antichrist and christ respectively.

"...the times of nomads and hunter-gatherers..."

It isn't often understood that nomadism requires complex international relationships. We think of the migrations of wildebeests and reindeer as exemplary of human migrations, but those are actually rare examples, caused by specific monsoonal climates, and dramatically presented on TV as spectacles. Most animals aren't migratory as most climates aren't so predictably monsoonal. It is necessary for nomadic peoples to negotiate longstanding agreements with nations and peoples for temporary access to grazing lands. If they had to fight to access a particular place yearly, nomadic pastoralism would become impossible. It's not as simple as hunting and gathering, but actually requires advanced sophistication of diplomacy and intercultural relations, and depends on international stability, which is why it remains so rare. All the world is under very new governance, and national stability just doesn't exist anywhere as it has perhaps in prior ages.

I think even our expectation that prehistoric ages were times of being able to freely roam searching for better hunting grounds naive in the extreme. I am pretty confident that people rapidly expanded to fill the environment with occupied territories, and moving over the ridge to the next valley required joining the neighboring tribe or driving them away. The nations of the Earth have existed conceptually for almost the entirety of the duration of our genus, and by the time AMH evolved had already been ongoing for more than a million years, with every habitable place inhabited by people that depended on it for their lives.

So I agree with you that there never was an idyllic time in which people could just freely roam and live here or there, that the present is perhaps the most idyllic of times humanity has lived. It is interesting that men and women have uniparental DNA packages that pass from fathers to sons, or from mothers to their children, unaltered by sexual reproduction, and reveal much now that we can access aDNA. What we see looking at the uniparental DNA is that in 'modern' times, from the Neolithic forward, Y DNA is replaced entirely by invasion and conquest. Men are put to the sword by their conquerors since the advent of agriculture, while mtDNA is continuous, as women become commodities and continue to contribute to the gene pools of conquered nations. The evolutionary forces on the sexes are very different since centralization arose. Before professional militaries arose, much more persistence of Y DNA seemed to happen, as peoples mixed, rather than were conquered.

The Petr and Posth papers regarding the replacement of these packages in NEA are therefore cause for very great wonder, because how did AMH women replace NEA women across all of NEA range? Did warrior women put NEA women to the sword when their tribes conquered NEA family groups? It is baffling. This hasn't been proposed by any peer reviewed source I am aware of, but since mtDNA and Y DNA aren't admixed the replacement of mothers and fathers amongst NEA had to happen for those uniparental packages to be replaced - or a very great duration of slow replacement through evolutionary action, during which NEA and AMH were continually mixed, which isn't shown in nuclear DNA that is admixed. These events happened hundreds of millennia ago, long before any evidence of agriculture or metallurgy, or of institutions and warfare. How this happened yet NEA nuclear DNA continued to exist for hundreds of millennia, indeed, ~60% of NEA nuclear DNA continues to this day in AMH, is baffling, because it happened to both uniparental packages, which implies replacement of both men and women of NEA.

This baffling mystery is strongly informed by the discovery of complex structural building half a million years ago, before AMH had even evolved. Did institutions and overlords pre-exist AMH? Is archaeology so impoverished of evidence we have had no clue to such momentous human endeavors until now?

I think we have no way of knowing because of that poverty of physical evidence. I cannot express my gratitude adequately to you for giving me new avenues of consideration of these mysteries I am obsessed with.

Thanks!