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Alex H's avatar

"Incan men were not in the process of becoming conscious when Pizarro encountered them (whatever Jaynes says contrary)."

So interestingly, the Inca's had this belief that when the emperor died his mummy would still be wheeled out as an immortal (but not unable to speak) Lord. And it would be a female partner that would act as interpreter.

Similarly: "As the empire expanded, the role of the most powerful Inca mummies—known as illapa—grew beyond simple ancestor worship. When an Inca emperor died, his successor inherited his power, but not his worldly belongings; these were understood to follow the dead emperor into the afterlife. His family members would then tend to his mummified body, ensuring he was kept in luxurious style even in death.

When the illapa were taken out and assembled together, the new Inca emperor would sometimes show his own power by taking his place and sitting stone-like among his dead predecessors. But these powerful Inca mummies weren’t just male, Heaney emphasizes; instead, *they were often preserved in male-female pairs. In order to claim power, a would-be emperor had to marry a prominent Inca woman, sometimes even a relative*

“There was a duality in both Inca and Andean understanding of the universe—that it is male and female together, with their respective powers and abilities, that creates the empire,” he says."

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Nathaniel Eliot's avatar

I'm on board with the idea of women leading the ritual shift into consciousness, but I have doubts it required Y chromosome changes to enact. I think what we're seeing here is effect, not causal.

The null hypothesis I see is that the Holocene involved warfare much like historical warfare, which tended to kill men disproportionately and reward their survivors with outsized opportunities to breed, but moreso because we were very new at it. The 6kya massive swing could still be triggered by a quasi-memetic shift to consciousness, as your snake theory posits. The tribes achieving consciousness would then typically win in violent warfare with non-conscious tribes, slaying their men and capturing their women.

That 6kya peak is certainly still dramatic evidence of a incredibly sharp change in a short period of time, which fits the young consciousness hypothesis from your snake theory well. Also fits the creationist narrative that the world started 6kya disturbingly tightly, in a way that implies maybe there's some poetic truth to that, too.

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