Full article in the Telegraph, original in Nature, full PDF here.

tl;dr: genetic analysis of worldwide Y-chromosome variation shows repeated bursts of population explosion historically coincident with migrations or the introduction of key new technologies like the wheel and metalworking. Small groups of men overwhelmingly controlled reproduction at these times and their descendants dominated the subsequent populations.

Very interesting finding coming out of the 1000 Genomes Project: researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute found a pattern of population explosions coincident with the introduction of new technologies or migrations into new territories (not surprising, as both of these things lead to increased population); what's more interesting, they discovered that at the time of these population explosions, tiny groups of males (we could call them 'nobles') overwhelmingly dominated reproduction and sired the vast majority of the descendent population. In one case 4000 years ago, a single 'king' was at the center of a huge population expansion, which led him to be the ancestor of half of the European population.

Re-cast in RP terms, at key moments during modern human development, reproduction was especially severely bottlenecked when a small elite of alpha males dominated societies that underwent massive demographic expansion thanks to new technology or new territorial acquisitions. Modern males are the result of these repeated selections of the absolutely most dominant men at their respective times.

Notice that increased availability of resources did NOT lead to females settling for lesser males. One could imagine that, with less pressure to procure resources, women would more often settle for beta males as strong social dominance was not strictly required for survival. Instead, it led to enormously increased selectivity in mating, whereby women reproduced almost exclusively with the best males even as resources were MORE abundant than before.

You can read the comments on /r/theredpill here.

Tip G_Petronius for their post.