"Science Shows Prehistoric Gender Equality"

[thir]

This article suggests, based in new or newly viewed material, that women may have been hunters along with the men, are responsible for most of the cave art, and left the tribe at times to find new mates.

Cave art: much of it is hand stencils, and many of these apparently point to a woman's size in hands.

Hunting: female artists paining hunting combined with the many fractures and other damages in female skeletons as well as in men's.

Some going out to find new partners to prevent inbreeding, new technique ( I think it was new) points towards this being the women.

Science shows prehistoric gender equality
http://www.care2.com/causes/cave-wom...-equality.html

A Prehistoric Woman's Place Was Not in the Cave
http://www.parentdish.com/2011/06/02.../#.Unfan4bktp0


Were the first artists mostly women?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...thic-cave-art/


The evolution of sex roles Anthropologists are looking at how prehistoric tasks were divided, perhaps indicating the moment when we became truly human.
http://articles.philly.com/2007-04-0...gists-gatherer

Prehistoric dads helped with child care
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/35916446/#.Un5fxCeLJb3

The last one I doubt, and I cannot find out if it is speculations, or based on anything substantial.

Gettler says that the shorter interbirth interval and the long period of child rearing characteristic in modern humans could have only happened with ancient dads lending a hand.

What do you think? Can this be true, and if yes, does it have any influence on how we percieve ourselves today?

[IAN 2411]

To be honest, thir. I have been looking at a lot of Nat/Geo films of late. I find the subject of prehistoric man with the rest of questions along with the known history very interesting. I now have to ask the question, does it all really matter to the multitude? Will finding the missing link further our technology leading us further into the future? Does this finding that the early cave woman might have been more intelligent than the male in knowing that inbreeding was not the way to go help us in our daily lives? Would it be right to say that it might have been instinct for the woman to go and multiply not because of any reason other than boredom or loneliness? If what they say is true about the hand paintings, it would back up my last question. If the woman was back in the cave alone, her doing the hand paintings would pass the time away while her man was hunting. Might it not also be the case that if the woman was doing the hunting and leading the way. Then here in the 21st century where there are a multitude of stay at home husbands, we are evolving by going full circle.

Be well IAN 2411

[thir]

To be honest, thir. I have been looking at a lot of Nat/Geo films of late. I find the subject of prehistoric man with the rest of questions along with the known history very interesting. I now have to ask the question, does it all really matter to the multitude? Will finding the missing link further our technology leading us further into the future? Does this finding that the early cave woman might have been more intelligent than the male in knowing that inbreeding was not the way to go help us in our daily lives? Would it be right to say that it might have been instinct for the woman to go and multiply not because of any reason other than boredom or loneliness? If what they say is true about the hand paintings, it would back up my last question. If the woman was back in the cave alone, her doing the hand paintings would pass the time away while her man was hunting. Might it not also be the case that if the woman was doing the hunting and leading the way. Then here in the 21st century where there are a multitude of stay at home husbands, we are evolving by going full circle.

Be well IAN 2411

There are doubtless many ways to interpret what they have found, but the main thing for me is to put a question mark on the man-the-provider thought, which keeps both genders in rather frozen roles. In some societies, anyway

On another list many men have declared that they do not want relationships because they get fleeced if divorce, or they feel that their only role is to haul money in. Stay at home dads often face ridicule, and the idea of food/money for sex is another idea almost impossible to get rid of.

Maybe just putting question marks on these persistent myths will give everybody more freedom.

[leo9]

Leaving aside for the moment the question of gender roles, I've been coming to the conclusion that studies of the origins of humans still underestimate the importance of speech. What they miss is that speech doesn't just communicate within the group: it communicates across time. It allows culture to accumulate and grow, and that, in my opinion, is what makes the difference between humans and smart apes. It might be all it takes to explain the huge technical difference between humans and Neanderthals, and why some other pre-humans with brains almost as big as ours never got past the cracked-stone-blade stage of tool making.

Because when you look at it critically, one human's cleverness doesn't amount to all that much. Put a naked ignorant human down in a chimp or gorilla tribe and he couldn't do much better than the rest of them, for all his big brain. Even the inventor of Tarzan, writing pure fantasy, had to cheat by giving him European culture in the form of tools and books to make his achievements believable.

If you can share a discovery, a better way of doing things, you can pass it on, so the next generation can build on it instead having to invent it all over again. That's how you go from twisting creepers into a basket, to making nets so you don't need the whole tribe to turn out to corner one beast and weaving cloth good enough to make the cold North habitable. One of the most credible explanations I've heard for our anomalously long lifespan is that old people's knowledge was an asset to the tribe, long after they were useless as breeders and food providers, and getting too weak for childcare.

That's why the making of complex artifacts seems to come out of nowhere, with no visible change in the remains of the people making it. Because culture builds exponentially: slow development of the basics, till you reach a stage where ideas come together and techniques reach perfection, and suddenly it takes off and people watching from a distance say "Where did that come from?"

[leo9]

To be honest, thir. I have been looking at a lot of Nat/Geo films of late. I find the subject of prehistoric man with the rest of questions along with the known history very interesting. I now have to ask the question, does it all really matter to the multitude? Will finding the missing link further our technology leading us further into the future? Does this finding that the early cave woman might have been more intelligent than the male in knowing that inbreeding was not the way to go help us in our daily lives? Would it be right to say that it might have been instinct for the woman to go and multiply not because of any reason other than boredom or loneliness? If what they say is true about the hand paintings, it would back up my last question. If the woman was back in the cave alone, her doing the hand paintings would pass the time away while her man was hunting. Might it not also be the case that if the woman was doing the hunting and leading the way. Then here in the 21st century where there are a multitude of stay at home husbands, we are evolving by going full circle.

Be well IAN 2411

In what is, despite the best efforts of the Right, a largely secular Western world today, questions like this are part of our shared mythology, and have as much influence on our everyday philosophy and politics as the stories of Genesis had on earlier generations. You only have to look at the way sociobiological arguments emerge in topics like equal pay or gun control.

In the same way that people once invoked the Fall to justify oppressing women, or the midrash about the sons of Noah to justify black slavery, they now invoke the Tarzan myth of Man-the-hunter to justify keeping women in the home, or argue that there is no point trying to control violent crime because "we've always been killers." So yes, having a more realistic idea of where we came from does matter to the multitude. And the fact that popular accounts of it are often wildly misleading, and repeat crude Flintstones pictures that were disproved a century ago, is as worrying as inaccurate current affairs reporting.

[denuseri]

IMHO what I saw in those articles was a tendency to take information obtained in a scientific manner and apply a subjective unscientific editorial in support of a social political agenda.

[thir]

IMHO what I saw in those articles was a tendency to take information obtained in a scientific manner and apply a subjective unscientific editorial in support of a social political agenda.

It seems more or less to be what happens. Example, the cave paintings always assumed to be by men - result of the way of thinking in those days - while now it is noticed that the hands are too small to be from men.

[denuseri]

They don't show enough evidence to make subjective determinations. They really don't know if the prints are indeed made by women or simply younger smaller members of the male population.

Personally based of of known human behaviors over time not being so mutable when examined as a whole I would submit that both sexes did do some painting. If the painting's are done in easily accessible areas (such as the kind one see's evidence of long term habitation within) then its quite likely it was the women who did most of it. If however it was found deep into hard to reach places...it may be a spurious correlation to make that it was only one of the sexes involved.

Same with the hunting injuries...which could just as well be from war or simply and more likely (if possessed by both sexes equally across the board) from the rigors of survival in hostile terrain.

I would also postulate that the amount of child care being provided by the fathers was about the same as is seen in other known social structures of human hunter gatherer societies. (Same goes for the division of labor among the sexes) which hasn't really changed all that much until the advent of technologies that allowed for deviation from the biologically imparted norms provided in evolution for us as a species.

So in all...I submit that their abandoning scientific objectivity by providing preconceived subjective opinion to their findings.

[Thorne]

I have to agree with denuseri, here. There can be many ways to interpret this evidence. But the suggestion that women participated in those areas is a not unreasonable one, and may be the most likely conclusion. For example, one of the ways they determined that women helped in the drawing of those cave paintings is the length of the ring fingers on the palm prints. While it's true that, in modern society, women tend to have ring fingers about the same length as their index fingers, while ring fingers of men tend to be longer, this is not an exclusive test. There are women with longer ring fingers and men with shorter.

So in all...I submit that their abandoning scientific objectivity by providing preconceived subjective opinion to their findings.

As near as I can tell from the articles it's the journalists who are leaping to the conclusions. The science is merely stating that there is evidence that women participated in areas which were previously believed to be strictly male pursuits. The extent of that participation, and whether or not their is any deeper meaning to it, are speculation which seems to originate with the writers, not necessarily with the scientists. It seems to me that the scientists are overturning the "preconceived subjective opinion(s)" by advancing alternate hypotheses.

[MMI]

If the latest interpretation of cave paintings is that they are the earliest expressions of feminism, or that they are holy depictions made exclusively by shamans and magicians, the truth is that we will never know what the truth is ... a bit like discussing religion, really.

The modern academic tendency, it seems to me, is to try to overturn standard assumptions - that males led, fed and bred, while females served and suffered - in favour of a more strident feminine role throughout history and a less dominant (interchangeable in this context with "competent") role for men. To go against these new assumptions requires a high standard of proof, and an even greater degree of courage.

Today, misandry is the norm. Clearly, the bad paintings were by man, the better ones by girls, and the best by independent cave-women who banged men on the head with clubs and dragged them by their hair, back to their caves to dominate them!

[Thorne]

If the latest interpretation of cave paintings is that they are the earliest expressions of feminism, or that they are holy depictions made exclusively by shamans and magicians, the truth is that we will never know what the truth is ... a bit like discussing religion, really.

That may be what those reporting these stories are claiming, but it doesn't seem to be what the scientists are actually saying. The consensus seems to be that the standard interpretation of the drawings, being primarily hunting scenes, was that they were made by hunters, which everyone assumed to be men. What the science is saying is that at least some of those paintings were apparently made by women. Not all, not only the good ones, just that some of them were made by women. This seems to imply, and studies of other hunter/gatherer cultures seem to confirm, that women were not strictly gatherers, while men were not strictly hunters. Rather than being a pendulum, swinging back and forth between misogyny and misandry, the science is, as usual, coming closer to what most likely was reality: a more balanced division of labor where everyone did what they were good at.

It's generally a bad idea to get scientific information from story tellers instead of science. The journalists are looking to sell stories, so making mountains out of molehills is their stock in trade. Look at the actual science if you want to know what they are really saying.