"Science Shows Prehistoric Gender Equality"

[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.