No way—kin selection. He can still net genetic fitness by helping out his social unit, which will almost invariably contain his relatives, who share some of his genetic payload. Conversely, raping someone is likely going to be terminal in some fashion, which eliminates any chance of getting lucky later. Even if they only cast him out instead of killing him, his chances of successfully mating later drop precipitously.
I don’t think we can know much about how social norms and rape played out in the early environment.
We can make some inferences from mobile foragers who’ve maintained some cultural distance from the outside world, though—they’re not a perfect substitute, but they tell us something about patterns of human behavior and existence in the absence of other economic or ecological resource bases.
It’s certainly a whole lot more likely to be, at minimum not entirely off-target, than you’ll be semi-consciously conflating “hunter-gatherer” as a synonym for “primitive”, assuming that all societies without industrialization or intensive agriculture of the type one recognizes are in that category, failing to account for the spread of of particular value-systems and norms that have widely impacted societies around the world, and hyper-focusing on chimps to the exclusion of other primates as analogues for our own evolutionary history (which is what I’m seeing and responding to here).
Observe that if he’s unlikely to be able to have sex otherwise, it’s worth the risk.
No way—kin selection. He can still net genetic fitness by helping out his social unit, which will almost invariably contain his relatives, who share some of his genetic payload. Conversely, raping someone is likely going to be terminal in some fashion, which eliminates any chance of getting lucky later. Even if they only cast him out instead of killing him, his chances of successfully mating later drop precipitously.
I don’t think we can know much about how social norms and rape played out in the early environment.
There are competing pressures. Unless someone is very low status, throwing them out is likely to be disruptive to the group.
We can make some inferences from mobile foragers who’ve maintained some cultural distance from the outside world, though—they’re not a perfect substitute, but they tell us something about patterns of human behavior and existence in the absence of other economic or ecological resource bases.
It’s certainly a whole lot more likely to be, at minimum not entirely off-target, than you’ll be semi-consciously conflating “hunter-gatherer” as a synonym for “primitive”, assuming that all societies without industrialization or intensive agriculture of the type one recognizes are in that category, failing to account for the spread of of particular value-systems and norms that have widely impacted societies around the world, and hyper-focusing on chimps to the exclusion of other primates as analogues for our own evolutionary history (which is what I’m seeing and responding to here).