Ah your academic bullshit is why we computer programmers (not the scientist variety, but the actual doers) are changing the world, while you stroke your feminist agenda propaganda dick. As Einstein is quoted, "If the facts don't fit the [feminist, emasculating] theory, change [reinterpret] the facts."

Consider my reply to @jimmco. The logic presented isn't exclusive of other complex anthropological interplay. It seems someone got offended that their field of expertise wasn't being claimed by a "non-expert".

The time scales required to falsify evolution are too great to argue for any non-archaeological evidence. We must reason about our experiences and what seems to make sense.

Regarding the book you cited which apparently discusses cultures which reared children as chattel and even though I haven't read the book, this seems to be orthogonal to the logic I presented in this blog post. These cultures have developed around the economics of oversupply of labor in agrarian societies. Remember before the Black Death, Europe also had an oversupply of labor and people were treated as slaves.

I realize you were responding more on the claim of falsifiable evolutionary relevance, and you may be correct that there is none but you can't prove it. It may just be a short-term strategy which fizzles out without any evolutionary impact. Yet I will still argue it is an attempt at a strategy for maximizing hereditary impact. You will observe in those societies which treat children as chattel, the women are often also treated as possessions of their husband. Again this appears to be an evolutionary strategy of beta-males.

Yet we could also reason that is might just as well be a practical strategy of how cope with an agrarian lifestyle, where one needs a reliable female to maintain the household chores and watch over the children. So in that respect we could argue it might have nothing or much less to do with evolutionary impact, and more to do with practically how to produce the most. Yet even that is an evolutionary strategy to survive, thrive, and produce offspring.

whatever (admittedly meager) evidence we have points in the opposite direction

Aliasing error is not pointing any where. There are plethora of strategies being applied in nature, and mapping these out with some repeatable scientific test is I think basically impossible. All we have is conjecture. The relevant strategies may be changing (due to the environmental conditions changing, e.g. the end of the agrarian and industrial ages) faster than any evidence could support them.