I agree that there’s probably a ton more that we don’t know than what we do know, and just to clarify, I’m not suggesting that the world was this egalitarian wonderland of gender equality until the agricultural revolution mucked it up. I’m sure that, just as there are now in modern hunter-gatherer or pastoral gatherer societies, you had patriarchal and patrilineal societies.
What seems somewhat clear is that the agricultural revolution had a profound impact on how we live, and with that came major political consequences, which include the standing of men and women relative to each other. Based on Mmy (admittedly limited) reading and knowledge of the subject, it seems that there was a proliferation of societies which had certain things in common, including modern farming, food surpluses (climate allowing), the growth of written language, record keeping, bureaucracy, taxation, written laws, and a warrior and police class needed to control ever-growing populations. It’s pretty clear that this mostly warrior and police class, going back to antiquity until now, was overwhelmingly male. (Yes, I’m aware that these developments occurred even thousands of years after people discovered farming in the Fertile Crescent).
Just taking a shot in the dark here about how, why, and when women became debased as a result of this technological, economic, and social shift. I’d hypothesize that the rise of the male warrior class allowed men to consolidate political power. Not that this is something they set out to achieve as a gender, but it’s something that became valued, right or wrong, by the growing tribes (“civilizations”). This was possibly a trade off for food security, which was seen as something that could ensure the survival of offspring. Women that might have had more active roles and responsibilities in gathering and managing resources while men hunted, maybe had their roles devalued to some degree. They became more domesticated and spent more time nurturing. Again, I’m sure that this is a massive over-simplification and generalization.
Sure, certainly possible and we pretty much know that most early history societies were patriarchal. Hell, even today that is true, to some extent. What we dont know is how egalitarian or matriarchal societies were before that. Perhaps men being Hunters turned even paleolithic societies patriarchal. It seems that the caves paintings were mostly done by men, but even that is kinda extrapolating from little information.
Yes, like DrDeth said - there are no modern HGs that haven’t had centuries of outside contact with non-HG groups. Often quite close contact.
For instance, for a very long time, the San/Bushmen were considered archetypical H-Gs. But they’d had a millenium-long, very close, basically symbiotic relationship with the related herder Khoe-khoen culture over much of their range, and similar relationships with Bantu herders elsewhere. And then they were in contact with Europeans for centuries before they started getting seriously studied by ethnographers. There’s nothing about their society that you can safely say hasn’t been affected, from their mythology (which bears clear marks of Christian influence now) to their social structure (how do we know their much-vaunted egalitarianism isn’t a post-contact response to marginalization and decimation? Earlier colonialist accounts definitely speak of chiefs)
Well, that is paywalled but I did get down to the point where they were saying the results were doubted.
However, thank you anyway, since it appears my info is outdated, and altho the results are doubt, that does mean I cant say cave paintings were mostly done by men anymore with any confidence.
Yes, there was one study based upon only 32 handprints, and his assumption was that cro magnon man had the same finger length ratio.
National Geographic points out that the mystery is far from definitively solved. While some hail the new study as a “landmark contribution,” others are more skeptical. Another researcher recently studied the palm-to-thumb ratio of the hand prints and concluded they mostly belonged to teenage boys, who, he told NatGeo , often drew their two favorite topics: big powerful animals and naked ladies.
However, like I said that one study does cast into doubt the Previously, most researchers assumed that the people behind these mysterious artworks must have been men, which is where i got my info. So I will just say, it is far from settled but certainly I have to withdraw “cave paintings were mostly done by men” .
Sure, but a study of 32 handprints is kinda weak sauce, since the length ratio thing isnt very good to start with. Not to mention how many people left 32 handprints?
Here is a better version: https://news.psu.edu/story/291423/2013/10/15/research/women-leave-their-handprints-cave-wall Snow found he needed a two-step process for the modern hands to successfully differentiate men from women. He first measured the overall size of the hand using five different measurements. This separated the adult male hands from the rest. Snow found that step one was 79 percent successful in determining sex, but adolescent males were classified as female.
Step two compares the ratios of the index finger to the ring finger and the index finger to the pinky to distinguish between adolescent males and females. For the known hands, the success rate, though statistically significant, was only 60 percent. There is too much overlap between males and females in modern populations.
The other question is- did he only count the handprints that matched his thesis?
Anway, his study does cast doubt, I concur.
I have yet to find the actual study, no one links to it.
I’m not sure what you mean - he used a comprehensive sample. His two-step algorithm accounts for adult males and adolescent males, so it doesn’t only count successes.
There has been subsequent work challenging his algorithm, but even then (and their work has still to be tested.), it only reduces it to 50/50, not “mostly male”.
And as an aside, note one takeaway, which reinforces my previous point to GreenWyvern about modern H-Gs:
“What this shows is that a basic assumption that everyone has been making is wrong, which is that we can take a contemporary human population and use it as a model across space and time,” says archaeologist David Whitley.
I think the only thing that seems to be generally true across humanity’s earlier stages of evolution (or prehistoric ‘man’) is that there was probably some division of labor among tribespeople. Gender probably had some substantial influence on that division of labor, but that probably differed from tribe to tribe.
I don’t know what you can deduct from the fact that humans have significant size difference between females and males. It has been suggested that it has evolved that way because males prefer smaller females. How long that had to go on to have such impact.
We do know from fossile finds that “humans” started to use fire about 1,5 million years ago. One of the results of that is that our digestion works better on cooked food. 1,5 million years of cooked food changes your way to take nutrients for sure.