Early men and women were equal, say scientists. Modern hunter-gatherer tribes operate on egalitarian basis. Gender differences came with the advent of agriculture.

shit-zen-giggles · 2023-04-16T16:43:35+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_revisionism

63daddy · 2023-04-16T16:42:29+00:00

Very different from what I’ve read. I read that in ancient hunter gatherer societies men probably took on the riskier roles of hunting large game, building, and protecting the tribe, protecting more vulnerable women. Keep in mind pregnancy and child birth, and child rearing were much more risky then. I’ve read this is probably how gynocentrism originated: Stronger men taking on more physically demanding and dangerous, roles to provide and protect weaker women and children.

As another poster indicated, I think there are problems in comparing modern hunter gatherer societies to those of tens of thousands of years ago.

hawkeyepitts · 2023-04-18T03:03:27+00:00

Something feminists don’t want to admit is that poor and lesser privileged women have always worked.

Feminism isn’t about poor people, it’s about middle class white women wanting to be victims.

People get pissed at me when I tell them the rural south was more equal for working people than anything today. Men and women both worked, both looked after the kids, and both had pretty equal responsibilities and hardships.

Acrobatic_Computer · 2023-04-16T16:32:12+00:00

Modern hunter gatherers are non-representative. We know they didn't generate agriculture as quickly, nor expand/develop as much. Extrapolating from these societies is a form of selection bias.

It could be that specialization of labor along gender lines is a result of more strongly seeking efficiency, which leads to greater development. Societies that don't seek these efficiencies as emphatically therefore fail to develop until they interact with another society that does, forcing them to compete or be wiped out.

In this way gender sameness would be a disadvantage, only able to be uniquely present in societies that were isolated from competition. There are probably a billion other interpretations as well. The reality is we just don't actually know the history here, and trying to extrapolate like this tends to ignore that we have knowledge of these differences.

lumpynose · 2023-04-16T18:34:45+00:00

This reminds me of the justification of the Paleo diet (which I think now is more commonly called the Keto diet), which essentially is a low or no starch diet. The claim is that early human were hunter gatherers and didn't farm and therefore didn't eat grains or legumes (beans). But there's no historical evidence for that claim and there are even articles about anthropologists finding evidence of early people eating legumes.

The Paleo diet is not a bad diet, but these wacko justifications are a bit much.

ReflexionSolutions · 2023-04-17T08:16:50+00:00

Note how it goes from "operates on an egalitarian basis", to an extrapolation that there where no gender difference. But it's to completely different things.

There can be gender differences and gender roles, yet both genders are considered equals.

Castruccio_Castracan · 2023-04-16T17:51:08+00:00

Genetic evidence that many more women reproduced than men did. Which means that lots of men died sexeless for most human generations. Very unlikely that this resulted from any kind of egalitarian setup of society.

SouthernSeeker · 2023-04-17T03:00:04+00:00

...Um, are they implying they sent women alongside men to hunt mammoths and freaking saber-toothed tigers? That women's superior color perception and sense of smell (a lifesaver in the pre-refrigeration days when minor food poisoning was a death sentence) somehow only happened in the last six or eight thousand years?

Look, I get it: you want to debunk the old idea that stone age women just sat around as pampered princesses. And you should- it's nonsense. They were helping feed and protect the tribe, too. But that took the form of gathering edible plants, weaving nets to trap small game, beating said small game to death with clubs, several forms of fishing, and so on, depending on where and when they lived. But this Lysenkoist tabula rasa nonsense has been debunked more often than Malthusianism, and people still can't accept that.

It's funny how many of these problems disappear when you just stop treating people differently based on sex.

Angryasfk · 2023-04-17T09:11:54+00:00

The assumptions they make a more than a little suspect. The pastoral and agricultural societies they supposedly are comparing these Hunter gatherers to have also have labour involved in maintaining resources: tending to heards and flocks or working land and tending crops. The farmers in particular are rooted to a particular spot for several years at least, not moving every 20 odd days like the Hunter gatherers. So do those societies keep their communities and possessions “in the family” because they’re “male dominated” or because they want to the heard and the land they’ve devoted so much time and effort to “in the family”?

I think the base assumption is questionable, as is using only two examples to make sweeping claims about societies across the vast majority of the time our species has been on earth. I’d want to see much more evidence with different base assumptions before I took this with more than a pinch of salt. It has the whiff of researchers seeing what they want to see.

PA-wip · 2023-04-17T10:31:11+00:00

At the end, why do we care about how it was in the history. What happen in the past, happened for some reason and we cannot blame people of today for what happen some 50 years or century before.

I am French and live in Austria, I am not the whole day long shouting on people saying to them that they are Nazy... We should live in the present and keep going to get the best of human being in the future (not matter our gender(s)...).

Educational_Bet_6606 · 2023-04-17T15:21:29+00:00

This might be true in very early cultures, like those pre neanderthaloid, where there were less than a few million anywhere, but even in historical times the hunter gatherers had gender role differences.

FreeSpeechFFSOK · 2023-04-17T15:37:56+00:00

As someone who puts a LOT of stock in evolutionary psychology, this sounds VERY suspect.

Look at just about any large mammal society and what do you see? Clear, distinct gender roles....often a male lording over groups of females and keeping other males away or in check.

Even a look at recent and modern primitive tribes thows this into suspicion.

Title	Early men and women were equal, say scientists. Modern hunter-gatherer tribes operate on egalitarian basis. Gender differences came with the advent of agriculture.
Author	NeoNotNeo
Upvotes	0
Comments	39
Date	April 16, 2023 4:01 PM UTC (3 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/12oev20/early_men_and_women_were_equal_say_scientists/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/early-men-and-women-were-equal-say-scientists.1214795 https://theredarchive.com/post/1214795

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