In my opinion, archeology fails to understand what it finds because: 1) most archeologists are male, and… 2) most archeologists are not doctors.
Because they are male, they tend to think in terms of what ancient men did; they hunted and they fought wars. They don’t think in terms of women, who raised children and spent many more hours in caves. Because they are not doctors, they neglect fundamental facts. My favorite is that life expectancy in ancient prehistory must have been 20 or so. The human brain is not fully formed until about that age. So most of what those people did was done during their teenage years.
The latter fact explains why so many actions of “primitive” people appear irrational and barbaric to us. It is not necessarily that the human brain “evolved”, but quite simply that society was mostly made of very young kids. Imagine turning the government of your country over to teenagers.
The male bias is even more pervasive and may account for several mysteries that archeologists never cracked.
For example, archeologists routinely assume that the first tools were stone tools that require strong men to make and strong men to use, and mostly used for hunting and killing in general. If you are a woman, and try to think like a woman of two million years ago, you reach a different conclusion: before those brave athletic men could go hunting, they had to survive their childhood.
A child in those days, just like today in many poor countries, is constantly with the mother. Mothers know what fathers easily forget: that babies (of both genders) are helpless for several years. Before the invention of kindergartens, and especially when grandparents were dying young, mothers had to take care of those helpless babies, and many of them. One tool that is common to all societies is a tool to carry babies around. The first tool was probably invented by women to carry babies with them wherever they had to go. A baby can never be left alone, especially in the conditions of two million years ago.
Another tool that is necessary to survive childhood is: clothes. Babies were protected from cold and sun by the tool to carry them but, once they started walking on their own, needed clothes: children can get sick much more easily than adults. Once they survived childhood, those brave boys could go on and become hunters and, yes, build amazing tools for hunting (and for killing each other). Therefore the story of tools from a woman’s perspective is very different from the story of tools from a male
perspective.
Ditto for art. Archeologists consistently come up with “male” theories to explain the frescoes of prehistoric caves even if they admit that it was women, and not men, who spent more time there. After all, the paintings show men hunting animals. Male archeologists conclude that it was men drawing their mighty adventures in the world.
But try to think like a woman and you get an alternative interpretation: why does a woman make a drawing on a blackboard of, say, the shape of the USA for the children of the class? Who is more likely to make that drawing for children? The men who fought in the wars to create and protect that country, or the women who stayed home and raised the citizens of the future? Who is more likely to draw an elephant for children to explain what an elephant is? The one who hunts elephants or the one who stays home and teaches children what they need to know to become one of those hunters?
IEET Blog
A very interesting writing and ideas by Piero, but biased partly on an unstable statistical foundation premise about population average age dynamics and presumed changes in maturation development of individuals or changes of behavior dynamics within groups of humans, based gender behavioral characteristics through breeding age stages (or gender stereotypes through populations of mixed ages through history).
A species population’s “average life expectancy” is not likely “the same” as individual, personal, developmental or some maximum life expectancy (an increase in a population’s “average age of death” is not the same as change in maximum life span for an individual in a species), nor does increasing population average age of death mean everything was previously done by much younger people in past times (regardless of gender similarities or developmental differences).
Very simply—statistically—in history, more humans died as infants, died early as children, died as adolescents or died as mothers during the birthing process—so statistically greater proportions of populations “die at these younger ages” than dynamics today—human hunter/gatherer groups and village dweller lifestyles were unlikely mostly infants, prepubescent children and young adolescent children. Human species developmental ages and stages may have evolved some but are likely similar over a 100,000 years.
We’re lacking evidence that “some” humans did not live to 50 or 80+ years of age (grandparents or great grandparents…) - evidence exists that “some humans” did live to “full maximum aged maturity”. The same species “individual age maximum” as existed for our species 10,000 years ago, or 1 million years ago, the same “individual maximal life span” as some humans may live out today (not all, but some). Evidence exists that puberty and breeding did not “start at younger ages” in past eons and evidence exists than some individual humans lived to very old ages (in past eons).
So before we draw conclusions about how group and gender population cultures “worked” in times past, let’s not be confused about statistical semantics that an observed increase of average life expectancy (reductions in deaths at young ages) also means that prepubescent adolescents (of either gender) lead tribal cultural norms.
Let’s also not get confused that “decreasing statistical death-rates of younger age individuals” (increase population average life expectancy, statistically)—is also somehow changing “maximum lifespan” of a human species individual.
Projections of mid life “population age statistical average trends” - into “younger age” culture or “older age” maximums - does not necessarily follow. The birth, age, breeding and individual death, life cycle of human species may not be changing as much as writers extrapolate concepts from.
Very sophisticated people sometime get confused in extrapolating observed changing “average life expectancy statistics trends” somehow—into humans living longer than some species individual typical maximum life spans—or inversely projecting social & gender differences into “pre-pubescent” human social groups, of younger populations, socially functioning differently in past times with - somehow “younger” alternate developmental & gender dynamics.
A species population’s “average life span expectancy of an individual” (probability of death at young ages) is a population statistic that doesn’t extrapolate in all dimensions…