I guess I’m asking what the first diapers were, because having little humans randomly piss and shit all around your sleeping area and generally all over seems like something of a pain in the ass when you don’t have wet wipes handy.
I also find it hard to understand how babies’ random incessant crying and screaming wasn’t a massive advantage to predators or enemy hunters or whatever. Am I being obtuse?
Nothing to understand. It WAS a huge disadvantage to be burdened with a baby. Many mothers died in childbirth. Many children did not live to adulthood.
You need to resist putting 21st century prejudices on to prehistoric people. Apes manage pretty well without diapers and early people were unlikely to have a higher standard than a modern chimpanzee.
Babies were easy to come by and most women were probably pregnant from puberty until menopause, if they survived that long. A baby that put the family group in danger might well not have survived infancy.
There’s nothing much different now. Babies can cry incessantly. We put diapers on them but the shit comes out a random times and still has to be disposed off.
Also, heve you had a baby? When they’re breast feeding, which in primitive states would have gone on a lot longer than is typical now, the shit don’t stink so bad. When they start getting real food is when the fun begins. By that time I think the little buggers have learned through social pressure where to do their business.
A couple of years ago, the latest hippy-dippy trend was undiapered babies. The advocates talked about women in third world countries or those in primitive tribes who carry their babies virtually all the time and learn to sense when the baby is about to poop, so the mother is able to hold the baby over the side of the path, or some other place where the baby poop won’t be in the way.
Human are pack animals, they wouldn’t take a baby along on a hunt, it would stay at whatever shelter they had as a base, whether that was a cave or a crude wooden or stone hut. And not many animals would have attacked a pack of humans, since they had stones, clubs and simple spears to defend themselves and would strategically use whatever terrain or shelter they had.
It the baby or small child that wanders off on its own that would have got eaten, but in the first 3 years dying of dysentery or other disease was a far more likely danger.
You don’t have to go back that far. See the last episode of MASH.
I think it was “The Third Chimpanzee” that describes a lot of primitive tribes and their nursing habits. Typically hunter-gatherer and subsistence agriculture tribes, the mother would breastfeed until about age 3 or so, and sometimes as late as 5. (And weaning was a very traumatic time for the child)
Also, another article about menstruation studied the records from a tribe in Africa where the women went into a special hut when they were menstruating. The research suggested that between periods suppressed by low calorie intake (food being hard to come by sometimes), later onset, suppressed menstruation die to breastfeeding, pregnancies and miscarriages, the author calculated that women used to have about half as many periods as modern women; this was suggested as a reason why women in the modern western world are more susceptible to cancer of the uterus and cervix - they experience a lot more periods that in years gone by and perhaps that contributes.
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I also find it hard to understand how babies’ random incessant crying and screaming wasn’t a massive advantage to predators or enemy hunters or whatever. Am I being obtuse?
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Some cultures, including the Creek Indian culture where I live, would intentionally not respond to babies crying, sometimes even leaving them in a papoose like contraction in a tree and letting them cry it out in order to break them of crying. Crying is in part dependant on reinforcement.
I remember reading about toddlers adopted by U.S. parents from Romanian orphanages and how they didn’t cry because in their months in the orphanage, which was short staffed and had very little food to begin with, their crying did no good and thus they eventually stopped.
That episode bothered me – a bus full of medical professionals and no one thought to give the baby a little anesthetic?
In that MASH episode, they were returning from a picnic/field trip so I doubt anyone had any medications whatsoever.
I imagine early cave women would have held their babies by the hair and not with their arm under the baby’s bottom? Then the poop could cleanly fall to the ground.
Which also begs the question: Do kangaroo babies poop in their mom’s pouch?
In a tour of China I did, we discovered that (at least in the countryside) the babies wore split crotch pants, and largely kept outside, in the front yard. They could wander about, pooping and peeing as they wanted, without the parents really needing to deal with it.
Yes, they do. I won’t tell you how the moms deal with it, I’ll just link you to the article.
I recently saw on a NOVA program that the pouch is lined with a substance that resembles earwax.
When you see mama cats and dogs licking their babies’ rear ends, they’re doing the same thing. :eek:
Hygiene is a relatively modern invention. Pee and poop and garbage everywhere was kind of normal until recently. Well, we still have garbage everywhere.
I doubt modern humans have ever been targets of predators, so making a lot of noise wouldn’t be a problem. Plus most infants were probably expected to die anyway, so if you got caught in a sticky situation there was an obvious solution to the noise.
Pee and poop and garbage everywhere is STILL normal for much of the world.
Cervical cancer is caused by an STD (HPV) that we have a vaccine against today. Endometrial cancer and ovarian cancer are caused by incessant ovulation and menstruation, which is why women should get on hormonal birth control that stops both processes as soon as possible after going through puberty. Continuous birth control pills, hormonal IUDs, and implants all stop ovulation and menstruation. Modern women don’t ever need to have periods.
Not all cervical cancer is caused by HPV. Many cancers are, but by no means all.
Also not true. Do you have a cite for this?
Except, of course, continuously dosing yourself with hormones can also have adverse effects (a couple of my cousins had strokes in their 20’s linked to birth control pills. Granted, hormonal birth control has been tweaked since then, but it does illustrate they can have serious side effects).
Also, if people ever want to reproduce (sort of necessary to continue the species) the women will have to go off all those drugs in order to conceive. Given that conception is never certain yes, women will in fact need to go through menstrual cycles in order to have kids.
You might want to think these things through a bit more.