Posted on 03/31/2007 11:03:47 AM PDT by blam
Prehistoric women: Not so simple, not so strange
18:00 28 March 2007
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition.
Germaine Greer
Prehistoric women: Not so simple, not so strange
This is a review of The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the true roles of women in prehistory by J. Adovasio, Olga Soffer & Jake Page, Collins, $27/£13.72, ISBN 9780061170911
Jim Adovasio is the leading expert in the perishable artefacts of the Palaeolithic – baskets, cordage, woven fabric – all associated, if somewhat arbitrarily, with women. To correct the astigmatism that has hitherto seen prehistory as the story of early man, Adovasio – director of the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute in Erie, Pennsylvania – has joined with Olga Soffer, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and journalist Jake Page to produce The Invisible Sex.
The roles of women even in our own time are not easy to define; yet our intrepid threesome has encapsulated more than 3 million years of human femaleness in fewer than 300 pages, rather too many of which are taken up with moaning about the sex bias of anthropologists of yore.
Palaeontologists disagree just as often and as radically as economists do, and yet they insist on describing what they do as science. The trail of inference that leads from fossil fragments to conclusions about sex, gender and social structure has more in common with the Da Vinci code than with scientific method. The only way the authors of The Invisible Sex can uncover women’s true roles is by assuming that a certain class of objects is associated with women. At the same time they want to dispute the generally accepted notion that weapons are boys’ toys.
As it turns out, they neither have their cake nor eat it. They report that thousands of years ago women were buried
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
GGG Ping.
"Prehistoric Women: Not So Simple, Not So Strange"
Unlike modern women (taking cover!)...
Greer is a fine one to lecture us on what is and what is not science.
According to wiki she received her Ph.D. in 1968 for a thesis on Shakespeare's early comedies.
Shakespeare, great as he was, does not provide a strong background in either the scientific method or the findings of science.
I wonder how long it will take for the obligatory ms Thomas pic to be posted??????????????
It was noted on page 437 that paleowomen were noted for having cold feet.
Yup. I was reluctant to post it just because she is the author.
*shrug* Men have cold feet before the wedding, women have cold feet afterward...
Got your asbestos undies on?
Are you calling me simple or strange or both?
In my opinion, the domestic tendencies of modern women is an *advancement* over animals, not a primitive sexist caveman atrocity inflicted on females by males. That is the stupid sicko feminist agenda creeping into our minds.
Look, just use a little common sense here. The culture that wins out in the long run and replaces or drives to extinction all other "inferior" cultures is simply the one that reproduces fastest and more efficiently feeds its babies.
The bible: be fruitful and multiply....hello! sound familiar?
Reproducing fastest and efficiently feeding the maximum number of babies means division of labor. Men cant have babies, so women have to. You cant chase a gazelle while dragging a dozen toddlers now can you? Or while carrying a baby in your belly. So in order to maximize the number of gazelle chasers in your tribe, you make the pregnant ones also the toddler tenders. Everyone else gets off their butts and chases gazelles! That includes all non-pregnant females. Obviously, since babies are only born one at a time, it would be wise to keep as many females pregnant as possible. That means not very many female gazelle chasers. PRETTY G-D SIMPLE AINT IT!
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You are right, there's nothing simple about Raquel Welch.
Continued:
--- As it turns out, they neither have their cake nor eat it. They report that thousands of years ago women were buried at Indian Knoll, Kentucky, with bannerstones, which were used as weights on spear launchers, and interpret this as evidence that the women were champion hunters. Any ethnographer could suggest dozens of other possibilities.
One of the more arcane aspects of the argument of The Invisible Sex is a certainty that the "onset of gendering" was "relatively late".
Although the authors use evidence from studies of apes in discussing the very earliest humans, they do not comment upon the highly gendered behaviour of most ape species, in which males are competitive, females cooperative, females forage industriously for themselves and their families, males feed themselves, and so on.
A motherless young male chimpanzee will play the role of a receptive female to curry favour with adult males. You can't get much more gendered than that.
Though the authors mock the idea of early man thriving on a version of the Atkins diet, they also sneer at the "gathering" side of prehistoric nutrition as producing "enough plant life for a bit of wild salad" and try valiantly to show that women were involved in hunting.
In all the hunter-gatherer societies we know about, women's food was less valued than that offered by men but it is what the group lived on. The difference is rather like the difference between the three meals mothers still put on the table every day and the posturings of the celebrity chef.
Anmatyerre women of Australia's Northern Territory will tell you that they regularly go "hunting". On a day's hunt, equipped with crowbars and axes, they will take game like goannas, lizards, snakes, scrub fowl and other small animals, as well as collecting larvae, eggs, honey and, depending on the season, an array of seeds, nuts, fruits and bush medicine.
Carbohydrate being in short supply, energy is not wasted in lugging food about. It is cooked and eaten there and then. Some might be taken back to the men's camp if an adult male relative is known to be ailing.
The authors of The Invisible Sex take the occasional swipe at ethnography, but they could do with reading a lot more of it, if only to enrich their notions of just how elaborate and highly patterned hunter-gatherer life still is, which would in turn suggest to them a far greater range of possible interpretations of their cryptic evidence. A day in the bush with Anmatyerre women is all it takes.
And, yes, they do have weapons. In return for my driving them to a distant hunting ground, they gave me a beautifully crafted ironwood club that I keep by my front door.
The Invisible Sex:
Uncovering the True Roles
of Women in Prehistory
by J. M. Adovasio,
Olga Soffer, Jake Page
Hey, I thought that ( The First Americans ) was a very good book.
Discoveries by Soffer and Adovasio have changed perceptions about Stone Age people, showing anthropologists and the public that these were not ignorant people dressed in furs, but rather intelligent people making complicated textiles. Before Soffer's find, the oldest textiles were associated with an agrarian society about 6,000 to 7,000 years ago. Soffer has found small amounts of cordage dating from 14,500 to 15,000 years ago. Fellow professor Stanley Ambrose believes Soffer has better informed the public with her bold and innovative research of the Paleolithic. Discoveries by Soffer and Adovasio have changed perceptions about Stone Age people, showing anthropologists and the public that these were not ignorant people dressed in furs, but rather intelligent people making complicated textiles. "She's one of the leaders in the field of understanding the social behaviors of people in Ice Age Europe," Ambrose says. Adovasio agrees. "Olga is a highly experienced and knowledgeable scholar," he says. "She is one of the most focused individuals I have ever met, and I have known very few, if any, with a drive and determination like hers."
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