Instructions: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Input: 
  
 Scientists followed a genetic trail stretching millennia to better understand our reproductive patterns. (bigstock) 
  
 Roughly 12,000 years ago, humans started farming commercially. Those with fruitful harvests discovered what it meant to be wealthy. And wealthy men apparently fathered way more babies, according to a new study. 
  
 Survival of the fittest might have actually been survival of the richest. 
  
 Researchers recently uncovered a sharp decline in genetic diversity in male lineages across the world during the Stone Age. The study’s authors hypothesized that material gains made through early agricultural success — a proxy for wealth — gave smaller groups of related men the reproductive upper hand for generations. 
  
 “Men who had more wealth and power might have had more to offer to women,” said co-author Melissa Wilson Sayres, an Arizona State University professor who studies sex-biased biology. “Their sons and grandsons could have been more successful in the same way.” 
  
 The semblance of prosperity, therefore, could have been a bigger genetic factor than natural selection, the researchers found. This difference in reproductive rates probably shrank the pool of genetic traits that are passed down from men, Wilson Sayres said, while boosting the mix of female-inherited characteristics. 
  
 Ancient mating patterns can show us how social priorities have changed over millennia. Rich people, for example, tend to reproduce less these days. America’s birth rate has been declining for years. That could have public health implications: The more genetic diversity population has, the healthier it is. 
  
 “When I think about wealth and culture in modern times, I don't see a lot of wealthy people having large families anymore,” she said. “We're affecting ourselves in ways that have never happened before.” 
  
 The study opens up a number of policy questions about wealth and inequality and how those factors affect which genetic traits are handed down. The advent of birth control and who can and cannot access contraceptives likely plays a role in this process as well. 
  
 Scientists examined DNA samples from blood and saliva samples of 456 men living in seven regions across Africa, Asia and Europe. (“Each of our genomes is a composite of our parents, and our parents’ parents, and so on,” Wilson Sayres said.) They focused on the Y chromosome, which is passed down through the male lineage, and the mitochondria, cell matter from an offspring’s genetic mother. 
  
 Computer and statistical modeling showed throughout history two ancient “bottlenecks," or significant decreases in genetic diversity, according to the study, published last week in Genome Research. Migration from Africa drove the first shift, Wilson Sayres said. The rise of agriculture — and a new way for prospective mates to gauge male desirability — likely drove the second. For every 17 women who passed on their DNA, researchers could find genetic evidence of only one male whose lineage stretched to modern times. 
  
 The takeaway: Today’s baby-making habits shape DNA way down the road ||||| Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images 
  
 Bad news for anyone who touts the idea that our ancient ancestors had it all figured out: Scientists have discovered evidence that, during the Stone Age, only one man passed on his DNA for every 17 women. That's right, guys. Living like our ancient ancestors means having as little as a 1-in-17 shot of reliably getting laid. 
  
 Researchers recently uncovered a sharp decline in genetic diversity in male lineages across the world during the Stone Age. The study’s authors hypothesized that material gains made through early agricultural success — a proxy for wealth — gave smaller groups of related men the reproductive upper hand for generations. 
  
 “Men who had more wealth and power might have had more to offer to women,” said co-author Melissa Wilson Sayres, an Arizona State University professor who studies sex-biased biology. “Their sons and grandsons could have been more successful in the same way.” 
  
 (“More to offer” is one way to think about it, but the cynic in me wonders how much choice women could really exercise in societies that were so strictly patriarchal that a few wealthy men shut all the other men out of the sexual marketplace so effectively.) 
  
 In short, the research suggests that the men who managed to have the most babies—whose babies managed to survive to adulthood and have more babies and pass their genes down to the present day—were the ones who were really good at agriculture. It's worth noting that most evolutionary psychology proponents (or “paleofantasists” as biologist Marlene Zuk calls them) imagine that the “true” nature of humans developed during our pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer phase. It's difficult to imagine that true human nature is found in the heart of the caveman, when it's likely that a few successful early farmers just crushed the competition in the genetic lottery. 
  
 The real takeaway here is to be skeptical of the notion that our sexual and social habits are as strongly genetically programmed as evo-psycho proponents believe. As Francie Diep at Pacific Standard writes, “As more thousands of years passed, the numbers of men reproducing, compared to women, rose again.” Far from being robots who are acting out unchanging genetic scripts, we are creatures who experience periods of dramatic change—and those changes, in turn, change our genes. ||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. |||||
Output:
Scientists are puzzling over a new discovery regarding Stone Age sex: It seems that for every 17 women who reproduced at the time, just one man did the same. The findings are based on an analysis of the DNA of 450 people from geographically diverse locations. Researchers compared Y-chromosome DNA, which is inherited only from our male forebearers, with mitochondrial DNA, which comes from women, Pacific Standard reports. Such analysis can show experts our numbers of male and female ancestors, and the mystery here is why these ancient numbers are so out of whack. "It wasn't like there was a mass death of males," says Melissa Wilson Sayres of Arizona State University. "They were there, so what were they doing?" Her team has suggested that perhaps a few males accumulated a great deal of wealth, pushing out others when it came to reproduction. As Danielle Paquette puts it at the Washington Post, "Survival of the fittest might have actually been survival of the richest." This would have occurred after the dawn of agriculture, suggesting that the top male reproducers were essentially the best farmers. Amanda Marcotte writes at Slate that the findings would seem to run counter to the thinking of evolutionary biologists who believe our nature was defined during the earlier hunter-gatherer period of cavemen. She's also glad that an age in which a few men got all the women is long gone. "That sounds terrible for both men and women." (Other recent evolutionary research examines why men like curvy women.)