Our prehistoric forebears are often portrayed as spear-wielding savages, but the earliest human societies are likely to have been founded on enlightened egalitarian principles, according to scientists.
A study has shown that in contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes, men and women tend to have equal influence on where their group lives and who they live with. The findings challenge the idea that sexual equality is a recent invention, suggesting that it has been the norm for humans for most of our evolutionary history.
Mark Dyble, an anthropologist who led the study at University College London, said: “There is still this wider perception that hunter-gatherers are more macho or male-dominated. We’d argue it was only with the emergence of agriculture, when people could start to accumulate resources, that inequality emerged.”....Like we've been saying. Inequality emerged with the advent of the surplus society at the time of the transition from the age of hunting-gathering to the agricultural age. This ushered in patriarchal hierarchical organization and a shift from matriarchal mythology and religion to patriarchal. This is not a new discovery.
The Guardian
Early men and women were equal, say scientists
Hannah Devlin, Science correspondentEarly men and women were equal, say scientists
ht Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism
This is junk anthropology.
ReplyDeleteLet's quote /r/anthropology on this piece of media hype:
[–]Protopologist 13 points 22 hours ago
The extrapolation of prehistoric human social organisation from observations of contemporary hunter-gatherers is, as others have pointed out, junk anthropology.
However, the authors of the paper don't actually make this extrapolation. Here is a break down of the abstract of the actual paper:
The social organization of mobile hunter-gatherers has several derived features, including low within-camp relatedness and fluid meta-groups.
This is an observation of cross-cultural trends found in study of contemporary H-Gs.
Although these features have been proposed to have provided the selective context for the evolution of human hypercooperation and cumulative culture, how such a distinctive social system may have emerged remains unclear.
This is the hypothesis: we suggest that early human social organisation may have had similar features, and may have influenced human evolution of certain cognitive capacities during this period. However, the link between the social organisation and the evolved cognitive traits is unclear.
We present an agent-based model suggesting that, even if all individuals in a community seek to live with as many kin as possible, within-camp relatedness is reduced if men and women have equal influence in selecting camp members.
They did a computer model simulating behaviour which approximates human propensities for bonding with other humans, and found that the feature "within-camp relatedness" is reduced to the level one would expect (given the contemporary studies of this feature within H-G societies) when men and women have equal influence over who they select to bond with.
Our model closely approximates observed patterns of co-residence among Agta and Mbendjele BaYaka hunter-gatherers. Our results suggest that pair-bonding and increased sex egalitarianism in human evolutionary history may have had a transformative effect on human social organisation.
Belt and braces - they then compared their model to two contemporary societies, and found similarities. Finally, this is offered as a possible explanation for the problem mentioned above, essentially saying that one of the many reasons that humans began to evolve higher-level social cognition and live in increasingly complex societies may have been due to a a form of social relatedness in which selection of camp members was not a process dominated by one sex.
Needless to say, the reporting of this paper is absolute garbage, removing all of the nuances and caveats from the paper and hamfistedly pursuing a particular agenda.
Well, in their favor the issue they undertake is not anthropology so much as evolutionary theory. Actual anthropology based on still extant Stone Age peoples shows both a much higher level of gender equality and more matriarchal organizational patterns culturally and institutionally. Women were not only considered more equally than in surplus societies in which property was a chief value but also honored as the creators as child-bearers. This is reflected in their mythology.
ReplyDeleteGraeber suggests in Debt that intertribal trade also involved trading genes. While this may not have been done to avoid inbreeding, it had the same effect, and perhaps tries that were more inbred were at an evolutionary disadvantage,
So-called primitive peoples did not have a concept of property that extended beyond necessary use, either. Being hunter-gatherers, they tended to be nomadic and had no use for permanent property entitlement. The modern concept of property rights did not appear until the agricultural age, when control of land became important and there was surplus production over subsistence to allocate. The rules were devised for this purpose and cultures and institutions grew up around these rules.
Significantly, at this time women lost their former status and in many societies became chattel owned by males rather than persons in their own right. Anthropologists speculate that once property rights were developed, along with inheritance, then patrimony became a a paramount value in the society and males developed a system of rules to ensure that their property remained with their progeny inter-generationally.
Quote:"Women were not only considered more equally than in surplus societies in which property was a chief value but also honored as the creators as child-bearers. This is reflected in their mythology."
ReplyDeleteWomen being honored as child-bearer isn't a matriarchial thing. Most of the ancient civilization believed in that idea was well. The devaluation of motherhood is a result of industrial surplus and something entirely new and dare I say a feminist construct.
You claim that in agricultural societies all women become chattel is entirely false as many women did own property and generally managed household affairs with authority over husbands and any reading of Geek, Roman, or Persian history shows this to be the case. The idea that women's role in history is reduced to helpless harem slaves is about the most sexist thing I can think of .
By the way, the most regime that treated women most like chattel in terms of selling daughters where the nomadic Empire of the Khans. Anthropologist need to read the actual records about how property system actually treated women rather gender inequality theorizing and ignoring the reality of the caste systems.
I'm getting really tired of crap that all of women's history is that of helpless damsels until a bunch of decadent White Bourgeousie women saved them with modernist 19th century feminism.
Not that Wikipedia is authoritative but..
ReplyDeleteAnthropological evidence suggests that most prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies were relatively egalitarian, and that patriarchal social structures did not develop until many years after the end of the Pleistocene era, following social and technological innovations such as agriculture and domestication.[12][13][14] According to Robert M. Strozier, historical research has not yet found a specific "initiating event".[15] Some scholars point to about six thousand years ago (4000 BCE), when the concept of fatherhood took root, as the beginning of the spread of patriarchy.[16][17]
However James DeMeo argues that a specific initiating event does exist: the geographical record shows that climate change around 4000 BCE led to famines in the Sahara, Arabian peninsula and what are now the Central Asian deserts which then resulted in the adoption of warlike, patriarchal structures in order to secure food sources:
Famine, starvation and mass-migrations related to land-abandonment severely traumatised the originally peaceful and sex-positive inhabitants of those lands, inducing a distinct turning away from original matrism towards patristic forms of behaviour.[18]
Domination by men of women is found in the Ancient Near East as far back as 3100 BCE, as are restrictions on a woman's reproductive capacity and exclusion from "the process of representing or the construction of history".[15] With the appearance of the Hebrews, there is also "the exclusion of woman from the God-humanity covenant".[15][19]
A prominent Greek general Meno, in the Platonic dialogue of the same name, sums up the prevailing sentiment in Classical Greece about the respective virtues of men and women. He says:
First of all, if you take the virtue of a man, it is easily stated that a man's virtue is this—that he be competent to manage the affairs of his city, and to manage them so as to benefit his friends and harm his enemies, and to take care to avoid suffering harm himself. Or take a woman's virtue: there is no difficulty in describing it as the duty of ordering the house well, looking after the property indoors, and obeying her husband.[20]
The works of Aristotle portrayed women as morally, intellectually, and physically inferior to men; saw women as the property of men; claimed that women's role in society was to reproduce and serve men in the household; and saw male domination of women as natural and virtuous.[21][22][23]...
Patriarchy/History
Athena was a female... the largest/highest structure in all Athens was dedicated to her... still sitting there today ... (hope they dont have to sell it for "money"!)
ReplyDeleteAll religions emerged from prehistoric mythologies. Some are more gender balanced that others, with the more recently founded ones less so — Christianity and Islam. But even in Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christianity Mary emerged as a prominent mother figure, and she is also prominent in the Qur'an (Surat Maryam).
ReplyDeleteIn the history of religion, prehistoric religions were generally earth religions in which female deity was seemingly paramount. These mythologies were transformed over time into the historical religions and aspects of them were maintained. There is no complete break with the past even in the revealed religions. Judaism also went through some transformation during the Captivity (597-539 BCE).
While Judaism may appear to be exclusively patristic, the presence of God in the world is called Shekhinah, which is female, In The Hebrew Goddess, anthropologist Raphael Patai argues that this concept is a carry over of earlier mythology. Shekhiinah was identified with Wisdom in the Wisdom literature, and Wisdom was identified with the Holy Spirit (Ruach HaQodesh is also feminine) in Christianity. Sakinah also appears in Islam and is prominent in Sufism. Christianity adapted itself to many of the customs of pagan people that practiced earth religions after they were converted, adopting some of the conventions.
But overall, historical religions are patristic and societies in which they played a commanding role are patriarchal. Very few names of women are recorded in history in comparison with men, for example, and the "glass ceiling" still exists for women.
What is it like to be human?
ReplyDeleteThe cave (wo)man too looked up at the stars wheeling overhead and asked: 'who am I; what am I doing here; where did I come from; what will happen to me'? In our modern caves, these questions endure. We ignore them because we are busy. These questions are asked with or without a religion (explanation). No level of entertainment, war, wealth, science or socialising has ever been able to make them go away. They are there, with every breath until the last is given. The reality is, we are alive.
For me, the male nature and the female nature, the social nature are just the yin and yang of the one skin; below is the human being. Who understands the value of a human being? To quote a five year old looking at a large audience: ” ….. I don't see any difference, between you, and you, and you and you …....”