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.
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
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."
Probably wasn't much different from today: the cavewomen couldn't keep their hands off the bad cavemen, and the nice cavemen simply lived out their lives alone without any dates.
"Palaeontologists disagree just as often and as radically as economists do, and yet they insist on describing what they do as science."
That is a powerful statement that everyone should take to heart. It only takes a little insight and asking yourself a few questions not only of palaeontologists but all science that is build on interpreting events that are no longer directly observable to lead to a healthy skepticism of that which is not supported by empirical proof.
It is amazing how often grand fairy tales are imagined to tell a story not clearly supported by the "box full of bones" presented as evidence. These stories are taught in schools and published in scientific journals and parroted in the press as if they are fact.
UM...barefoot and pregnant?
doubly appropriate...
A Weaver's View of the Catal Huyuk Controversy
Marla Mallett: Textiles | August/September 1990 | Marla Mallett
Posted on 08/25/2006 3:32:24 AM EDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1689685/posts
Years ago I used to post at a forum run by feminist scientists. They had one agenda only and that was to prove females played a more significant role than history or prehistory gave them (feminista perception problem). I could not make them understand that the role of females was hardly insignificant just because they didn't do the same things as the males. I guess as herstory progresses, the feminists still don't get it.
Germain Greer: Very Simple, Very Strange.
This enters in to what I call "the fortune teller's paradoxes".
A fortune teller is asked what they actually see when they look into the future. So they say to the questioner, "What do you see when you look into the present?"
"Do strangers walk up to you and tell you what's going on in the world and their lives? How hard is it to find out what's going on right now, with all the resources you have around you?"
"But," they concluded, "most people don't go to a fortune teller to find out what they're future holds. They already have a pretty good idea what it is, anyway. They go to a fortune teller hoping to get their future *changed*"
In this case, the same rule applies to anthropology. In most cases, the assumption is that people in other times and places acted pretty much like people do today. But the anthropologist wants that to *not* be the case, hoping that people there or then were more interesting than people are today.
And *that* is why people wanted to believe Margaret Mead's "Coming of Age in Samoa". It was far more enjoyable for them to imagine the Samoans as a lewd and promiscuous people than the reality, that Samoans have a great sense of humor and immensely enjoyed pulling Margaret Mead's leg.
