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Wag
 
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Lavlin (4/8/2007)
Tempting, but given that script was based on a system of accounting how many lactating animals who owed to whom, that was already centuries old (if not millennia, I`d have to look that up) at the time, that`s a bit meager.
Eh? Are you talking about some specific script or the invention of writing? I hadn't heard anything conclusive about the original purpose of the invention of script (heard lots of suggestions - religious texts, size of agricultural plots, histories for kings).
Bear in mind, I was replying to "I`m not sure how much evidence we have of women looking after babies in prehistorical times.". By definition, there are no written (historical) records from prehistoric times, so writing is largely irrelevant.
Writing appears something like 6000 years ago - but that's not relevant if you just want domestication eras:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication#Approximate_dates_and_locations_of_first_domestication
You can milk goats and they were domesticated ~12000 years ago.
But the point is, before goats (and agriculture) the only way children can have survived is via suckling women (is there anything you can just gather to feed babies?). That strikes me as pretty strong, if indirect, evidence.
Lavlin (4/8/2007)
Marios (4/4/2007)
[quote]Are you talking about Athens circa 600 BC, all the human cultures in the world ever or somewhere between the two?Early urbanisation, like 5,000 years ago (or was that 5,000 BC, I keep confusing the two).
Either way, we probably don't have any written sources. Presumably they used some indirect means - looked at the size of the remains of some foundations and concluded somehow that women were living in certain areas.
Lavlin (4/8/2007)
From an article no longer in my possession about the shift in participation in the communal economy from women (agriculture) to men (craft). May have had some feminist bias, but what hasn`t these days.
Well - anything worth the effort of printing out a paper on/quoting really. If someone is supplying some rock-solid research which involves very little interpretation, then you might still think it worthwhile, in spite of some obvious bias towards a particular interpretation. If, however, it's very tenuous stuff from a data source that it's rather hard to inspect yourself, then I think you have to take any sign of bias as a good reason to set an interpretation aside. It's not that hard to find scientists who aren't feminists. It's one thing to hunt up someone's background and find out they are left-leaning, but if you get a strong sense of a political bias while reading a scientific article, that's a pretty strong indication that they are unable to retain basic objectivity (if they can't stop their political sentiments getting into their scientific article, what's the chance they managed it during their interpretation of the data?).
Lavlin (4/8/2007)
The other bit was based on the weekly science pages of a daily newspaper. Something about marathon walking and not having a menstruation cycle until one quit the habit. The article focussed on bones, though.
There's something about lactational amenhorrea (birth control via breast-feeding). A number of women (my mother for one, although, oddly, not in my case) have found that it doesn't work so well (which is bizarre - everyone knows that Ancient Truth and Natural Methods are more reliable than Chemicals and Science). Looking it up, it seems to be a mixture of breast-feeding and a high muscle:fat ratio/certain amount of regular exercise (i.e. like moving from area to area once you've hunted/gathered it out).
More relevantly, I suppose, arguments that sexual roles like 'women staying in the home' stretching back into prehistory are obviously going to founder when you hit non-sedentary hunter-gatherers who don't have fixed homes to keep their wives in.
Again, re: women 'staying at home because hunting is dangerous' doesn't seem to be born out by observation of the economics of hunter-gathering. Again, from Diamond, 'gathering' (_leaving_ wherever you slept the night before and wandering around looking for anything edible) is where the vast majority of calories (and important vitamins!) comes from. 'Hunting' is very unreliable as a source of basic nutrition (there are times and places where this isn't true - like if you were a New Zealander killing moas - but it seems to generally be the case) - but it is a vital source of luxury goods (i.e. stuff to trade in exchange for political power and sexual privileges).
There's a lot to be gained in hunting for men, bugger all for women. Gathering, on the other hand, really pays back. Better yet, it keeps paying - 90 year old women are some of the best gatherers. Just in case you're still skeptical about the death of the 'Man the Provider' myth, some anthropologists tracked the eventual disposition of hunting spoils - the tradition (in one tribe - don't know how well this has been replicated) was to share the meat, with good portions going to secure status and sexual favours outside of the marriage, with only a very small fraction going to the family. Whereas, almost all of the food gathered by the old women goes straight to their children and grand-children.
Diamond's "Why Sex is Fun" covers a lot of that (and has the name of tribe/name of the anthropologists running the study).
Marios
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