The premise of this study looked intuitively unlikely to me. However, I really like intuitively unlikely premises that turn out to be true, so this was right up my alley.
It turns out it's not unlikely. It's just lunatic. Notice the words "can," "might," and "could" in the description. They have mathematical models that show that if women had started out being the warmakers somewhere, this would have been reinforcing over time, and their sex would be the warmaking one now. It hasn't actually happened anywhere, so perhaps it wasn't quite a coin flip. One would have to go back farther and farther into our evolutionary history - past the first primate, perhaps - to get to coulda-been-this-coulda-been-that situation. It gives an excellent expression to the old saw "If my aunt had balls she would be my uncle."
You will continue to hear a lot about the spotted hyena, where the females are more aggressive, because it provides an exception. It will be held aloft, not as evidence that one-off situations under special circumstances are always possible, but that we are mostly quite malleable and can be changed to other behaviors (if we just pass the right legislation, maybe). It is similar to finding the language in the Caucasus in which "Dada" is used for mother, showing that "mama" cannot be a shared word from the first language; or the few primitive societies that are matriarchal proving that humans were equally likely to develop that way but for the merest chance, and we can change it back whenever we like.
My initial response was "9 months gestation, plus 9+ months dependency" but... then I got to wondering...
ReplyDeleteHow far back does 9 month gestation go? And, if I were a diehard feminist, I'd be asking if those darned males had anything to do with that? And did they somehow make newborns dependent on females alone?
And no, I didn't read the article closely. I'm a REALLY old-fashioned feminist, in that I've always thought males' bottom line in fighting whatever and whenever war was either over females or at female instigation. Where females have lost is that we've let men forget the "prime objective".
Increased brain size made it so that gestation is actually more like 18 months. 9 months inside, at least nine months breast feeding. "Knowledge of good and evil" relating to "I will increase your pain in childbirth" may actually have a connection.
ReplyDeleteI think that war is over protecting "resources," part of which is women and children. (I think women in such societies view men as "resources" as well.) But in polygamous societies, you can't convince all these guys they'll definitely have a chance to mate, only that there's some chance. What was it I read recently about one bottleneck in the switchover to agriculture where only 1 in 17 males had descendants? So it's double warfare, within the tribe and without.
You may be right about that increasing pain in childbirth thing. And not simply physical pain, because perhaps the knowledge separating man from woman symbolically represents the separation of mankind from God.
ReplyDeleteDid you catch the Motte and Bailey?
ReplyDeleteThe article shifts from the well recognized and defensible claim that men's physical characteristics account for their specialization in early warmaking to the claim that it's all which sex was more aggressive in support of the coin flip theory.
The fact that sex roles aren't the same for every species doesn't mean that some sex differences aren't baked into the cake for a particular species. It does mean that there's nothing inherent about being the sex that produces eggs vs. the sex that produces sperm that will allow you to make confident generalization about complicated things like capability, worth, or even likely role in a culture. But ants have queens and clone workers; humans don't, and it's no more an "accident" that we differ in that way than it's an "accident" that they're ants and we're people. What a lot of nonsense.
ReplyDelete"They're ants and we're people" should be a poster. In an indirect way, it sums up an enormous amount of these discussions. Some other topics too.
ReplyDeleteRead somewhere recently that about 20% of Scythian warrior graves are women. This is the area that the Greeks said Amazons ruled.
ReplyDeleteVikings had a few as well. And then there's Boudicca
ReplyDeleteBeen a few here and there. A middle ages grave in France had a woman with off the skeletal hallmarks of wearing heavy armor for extended periods. It leaves specific marks on the skeleton. No idea who she was.
ReplyDeleteThere were a few in the US Revolutionary war who fought in drag alongside the men.
The Scythians are the only ones I know of where the numbers were really significant.