Women in prehistory

Last updated February 02, 2024

A large amount of research on prehistory has been dedicated to the role of women in pre-literary society. Tasks typically undertaken by women are thought to have formed a major sexual division of labor in relation to child-rearing, gathering, and other everyday occupations. More recent research has however suggested women also played an active role in hunting and other physical activities in place of the exclusively domestic roles traditionally occupied by women in literary civilizations.^[1]^[2]^{[lower-alpha 1]}

Anthropology

Matriarchy and matrilineality

A major point of contention throughout anthropology from as early as the 19th century was the difference, if any, in social status between prehistoric and contemporary women. Early socialistic thinkers such as Lewis H. Morgan, Friedrich Engels or August Bebel openly equated matrilineality with primitive communism and patrilineality with individualism, oppression, and private property.^[3]^[4] Such schools typically argued that due to the lack of a definitive line of paternal descent without socially enforced monandry, prehistoric societies instead practiced matrifocal, communal motherhood.^[3]^[5]

Similar ideas arose during the second wave of feminism with the increased study of matrilocality and matriarchal religion, such as Marija Gimbutas's theory of a matristic, egalitarian "Old Europe" later outcompeted and conquered by the patriarchal and expansionist Proto-Indo-Europeans.^[6] Such interpretations remain highly controversial due to perceptions of political bias or lack of material evidence,^[7] but have been defended by notable figures such as anthropologist Chris Knight, who instead criticized what he saw as ad-hoc functionalist attempts to downplay obvious matrilineal traditions in contemporary tribal societies.^[5]

Woman the Gatherer versus Woman the Hunter

From the 1970s onward, the dominant scientific perspective of gendered roles in hunter-gatherer societies was of a model termed "Man the Hunter, Woman the Gatherer". Coined by anthropologists Richard Borshay Lee and Irven DeVore in 1968, it argued based off of evidence now thought to be incomplete that contemporary foragers displayed a clear division of labor between women and men.^[1] More recent evidence compiled by researchers such as Sarah Lacy and Cara Ocobock has found a lack of conclusive preferences for gendered roles among modern hunter-gatherer societies.^[1] Recent archeological research done by the anthropologist and archeologist Steven Kuhn suggests that the sexual division of labor did not exist prior to the Upper Paleolithic (50,000 and 10,000 years ago) and developed relatively recently in human history.^[8]

Lacy and Ocobock in particular highlighted the role of estrogen in the potential contributions of women to everyday survival in prehistoric societies; contrary to popular belief, testosterone only significantly affects the development of type 2 muscle fibers when compared to estrogen, which instead primarily affects the development of type 1 fibers. Type 2 muscles perform better in short-term "power" activities, such as weight-lifting or spear-throwing, while type 1 muscles perform better in long-term, endurance-based "marathon" activities.^[1] Women's muscles are thus more energy-efficient, which implies that persistence hunting, a technique thought to have formed one of the main evolutionary advantages of hominids over their otherwise far more mobile prey, would have been easier for women to perform than men.^[1]

Notable hunter-gatherer groups in recent or contemporary eras known to lack a distinct sexual division of labor include the Ainu,^[1] Agta,^[9] and Ju/'hoansi,^[10] in addition to significant material evidence for female involvement in hunting among prehistoric cultures such as those in what is today Peru.^[2]

Material culture

Prehistoric art

The Upper Paleolithic era is known for displaying a wealth of artistic representations of women, which are generally grouped together under the term of Venus figurines as some of the first works of human culture in history. Venus figurines are noted for their exaggerated sexual characteristics, commonly taken as symbols of fertility and sexuality, and include the earliest known representation of a human being; Known as the Venus of Hohle Fels, it is described by anthropologist Nicholas Conard as "about sex, reproduction... [it is] an extremely powerful depiction of the essence of being female".^[11] Other notable figurines include the Willendorf, Dolní Věstonice, and Moravany Venuses, all of which are distinguished by a focus on the hips, breasts, and stomach.^[12] Examples are generally centered around Europe, inhabited at the time by relatively advanced Cro-Magnon cultures, though the term has been applied as far abroad as Siberia.^[13] Similar motifs from subsequent eras include the Potnia Theron , found in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East.^[14]^[15]

Some feminist archeologists, such as Kaylea Vandewettering or Leroy McDermott, have criticized the male gaze involved in terming and categorizing the Venuses, the name of which originates from the first figurine to be recovered, the Vénus Impudique . Coined the "Immodest Venus" by its discoverer, it was named for both contemporary European views of sex and for a perceived association with the sexuality and fertility ascribed to the Roman Venus, despite the Paleolithic cultures responsible predating Greco-Roman religions by millennia and no materially substantiated consensus as to the figurines' significance ever being reached among researchers.^[16]

McCoid and McDermott suggested that because of the way these figures are depicted, such as the large breasts and lack of feet and faces, these statues were made by women looking at their own bodies. They state that women during the period would not have had access to mirrors to maintain accurate proportions or depict the faces or heads of the figurines. The theory remains difficult to prove or disprove, and Michael S. Bisson suggested that alternatives, such as puddles, could have been used as mirrors.^[17]

Burial practices

Lacy and Ocobock stated that burial sites from the Upper Paleolithic did not demonstrate any difference between the grave goods or posthumous treatment afforded to men compared to women, further suggesting a lack of "social hierarchies based on sex".^[1]

The more general archeological record has found many notable examples of lavish tombs and burial practices for women, including famous cases such as the Egtved Girl and Princess of Ukok. Excavations have yielded a wealth of well-preserved grave goods including stitching awls, medicinal supplies, cosmetics, hairnets, and miscellaneous decorative items.^[19]^[20]

Genetics

Study of the human mitochondria has allowed geneticists to begin pinpointing the matrilineal most recent common ancestor of all humanity, i.e. the last-living woman from which all modern humans are descended in an unbroken mother-to-daughter line, known as the Mitochondrial Eve in reference to the Genesis creation myth. As of 2015, estimates of the age of the Y-MRCA range around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, roughly consistent with the emergence of anatomically modern humans.^[21]

Researchers also noted that the estrogen receptor seen in humans is anywhere from 1.2 billion to 600 million years older than the equivalent androgen receptor, indicating it likely had a major evolutionary role in the development of humanity's ancestors.^[1]

Genetic admixture between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans has been found to display a clear difference between sexes, with the complete lack of mitochondrial Neanderthal DNA indicating that surviving hybrid lineages originated specifically from neanderthalensis male- sapiens sapiens female couplings.^[22]

Notes

↑ Researchers such as Lacy and Ocobock also stressed the difference between sex and gender when discussing the subject. This article may use social definitions of terms like "female" or "woman" interchangeably with biological ones, due to the lack of direct documentation.

Related Research Articles

The Paleolithic or Palaeolithic, also called the Old Stone Age, is a period in human prehistory that is distinguished by the original development of stone tools, and which represents almost the entire period of human prehistoric technology. It extends from the earliest known use of stone tools by hominins, c. 3.3 million years ago, to the end of the Pleistocene, c. 11,650 cal BP.

A traditional hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living an ancestrally derived lifestyle in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local naturally occurring sources, especially edible wild plants but also insects, fungi, honey, bird eggs, or anything safe to eat, and/or by hunting game. This is a common practice among most omnivores. Hunter-gatherer societies stand in contrast to the more sedentary agricultural societies, which rely mainly on cultivating crops and raising domesticated animals for food production, although the boundaries between the two ways of living are not completely distinct.

The Venus of Willendorf is an 11.1-centimetre-tall (4.4 in) Venus figurine estimated to have been made around 25,000 years ago. It was recovered on August 7, 1908 from an archaeological dig conducted by Josef Szombathy, Hugo Obermaier, and Josef Bayer at a Paleolithic site near Willendorf, a village in Lower Austria. The figurine was found by a workman named either Johann Veran or Josef Veram and is carved from an oolitic limestone that is not local to the area, and tinted with red ochre. It is now in the Natural History Museum in Vienna, Austria.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Venus of Laussel</span> Sculpture of a nude woman

The Venus of Laussel is an 18.11-inch-high (46.0-centimetre) limestone bas-relief of a nude woman. It is painted with red ochre and was carved into the limestone of a rock shelter in the commune of Marquay, in the Dordogne department of south-western France. The carving is associated with the Gravettian Upper Paleolithic culture. It is currently displayed in the Musée d'Aquitaine in Bordeaux, France.

A Venus figurine is any Upper Palaeolithic statue portraying a woman, usually carved in the round. Most have been unearthed in Europe, but others have been found as far away as Siberia and distributed across much of Eurasia.

The Gravettian was an archaeological industry of the European Upper Paleolithic that succeeded the Aurignacian circa 33,000 years BP. It is archaeologically the last European culture many consider unified, and had mostly disappeared by c. 22,000 BP, close to the Last Glacial Maximum, although some elements lasted until c. 17,000 BP. In Spain and France, it was succeeded by the Solutrean, and developed into or continued as the Epigravettian in Italy, the Balkans, Ukraine and Russia.

The Middle Paleolithic is the second subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age as it is understood in Europe, Africa and Asia. The term Middle Stone Age is used as an equivalent or a synonym for the Middle Paleolithic in African archeology. The Middle Paleolithic broadly spanned from 300,000 to 30,000 years ago. There are considerable dating differences between regions. The Middle Paleolithic was succeeded by the Upper Paleolithic subdivision which first began between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago. Pettit and White date the Early Middle Paleolithic in Great Britain to about 325,000 to 180,000 years ago, and the Late Middle Paleolithic as about 60,000 to 35,000 years ago. The Middle Paleolithic was in the geological Chibanian and Late Pleistocene ages.

Feminist archaeology employs a feminist perspective in interpreting past societies. It often focuses on gender, but also considers gender in tandem with other factors, such as sexuality, race, or class. Feminist archaeology has critiqued the uncritical application of modern, Western norms and values to past societies. It is additionally concerned with increasing the representation of women in the discipline of archaeology, and reducing androcentric bias within the field.

Dolní Věstonice is an Upper Paleolithic archaeological site near the village of Dolní Věstonice in the South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic, at the base of Mount Děvín, 550 metres (1,800 ft). It dates to approximately 26,000 BP, as supported by radiocarbon dating. The site is unique in that it has been a particularly abundant source of prehistoric artifacts dating from the Gravettian period, which spanned roughly from 27,000 to 20,000 BC. In addition to the abundance of art, this site also includes carved representations of men, women, and animals, along with personal ornaments, human burials and enigmatic engravings.

Paleolithic religions are a set of spiritual beliefs and practices that are theorized to have appeared during the Paleolithic time period. Paleoanthropologists Andre Leroi-Gourhan and Annette Michelson believe unmistakably religious behavior emerged by the Upper Paleolithic, before 30,000 years ago at the latest, but behavioral patterns such as burial rites that one might characterize as religious — or as ancestral to religious behavior — reach back into the Middle Paleolithic, as early as 300,000 years ago, coinciding with the first appearance of Homo neanderthalensis and possibly Homo naledi.

A matriarchal religion is a religion that focuses on a goddess or goddesses. The term is most often used to refer to theories of prehistoric matriarchal religions that were proposed by scholars such as Johann Jakob Bachofen, Jane Ellen Harrison, and Marija Gimbutas, and later popularized by second-wave feminism. In the 20th century, a movement to revive these practices resulted in the Goddess movement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Venus of Hohle Fels</span> Oldest known depiction of a human being

The Venus of Hohle Fels is an Upper Paleolithic Venus figurine made of mammoth ivory that was unearthed in 2008 in Hohle Fels, a cave near Schelklingen, Germany. It is dated to between 42,000 and 40,000 years ago, belonging to the early Aurignacian, at the very beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, which is associated with the earliest presence of Cro-Magnon in Europe.

The Mal'ta–Buret' culture is an archaeological culture of the Upper Paleolithic. It is located roughly northwest of Lake Baikal, about 90km to the northwest of Irkutsk, on the banks of the upper Angara River.

Sexual division of labour (SDL) is the delegation of different tasks between the male and female members of a species. Among human hunter-gatherer societies, males and females are responsible for the acquisition of different types of foods and shared them with each other for a mutual or familial benefit. In some species, males and females eat slightly different foods, while in other species, males and females will routinely share food; but only in humans are these two attributes combined. The few remaining hunter-gatherer populations in the world serve as evolutionary models that can help explain the origin of the sexual division of labour. Many studies on the sexual division of labour have been conducted on hunter-gatherer populations, such as the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer population of Tanzania. In modern day society, sex differences in occupation is seen across cultures, with the tendency that men do technical work and women tend to do work related to care.

The Venus figurines of Mal’ta are several palaeolithic female figurines of the Mal'ta–Buret' culture, found in Siberia, Russia.

The Venus of Petřkovice is a pre-historic Venus figurine, a mineral statuette of a nude female figure, dated to about 23,000 BCE in what is today the Czech Republic.

The Vénus impudique is the first Paleolithic sculptural representation of a woman discovered in modern times. It was found by Paul Hurault, 8th Marquis de Vibraye in about 1864 at the famous archaeological site of Laugerie-Basse in the Vézère valley.

Venus of Buret' may refer to any of the five Venus figurines found from archeological site of Buret' in Siberia near Irkutsk and the Angara river valley.

Male expendability, the relative expendability argument, or the expendable male hypothesis is the idea that the lives of human males are of less concern to a population than those of human females because they are less necessary for population replacement. Anthropologists have used the concept of male expendibility in their research since the 1970s to study such things as polygyny, matrilinearity, and division of labor by gender role.

Prehistoric religion is the religious practice of prehistoric cultures. Prehistory, the period before written records, makes up the bulk of human experience; over 99% of human experience occurred during the Paleolithic period alone. Prehistoric cultures spanned the globe and existed for over two and a half million years; their religious practices were many and varied, and the study of them is difficult due to the lack of written records describing the details of their faiths.

References

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Lacy, Sarah; Ocobock, Cara (1 November 2023). "The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong". Scientific American . Retrieved 19 December 2023.
1 2 Gershon, Livia (5 November 2020). "This Prehistoric Peruvian Woman Was a Big-Game Hunter". Smithsonian Magazine .
1 2 Engels, Friedrich (1884). The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State . (Wikisource)
↑ Bebel, August (1974) [1879]. Die Frau und der Sozialismus. Als Beitrag zur Emanzipation unserer Gesellschaft, bearbeitet und kommentiert von Monika Seifert[Woman and socialism. As a contribution to the emancipation of our society, edited and commented by Monika Seifert] (in German). Stuttgart: Dietz. p. 63.
1 2 Knight, Chris (23 September 2012). "Engels was Right: Early Human Kinship was Matrilineal". libcom.org . Retrieved 20 December 2023.
↑ Hayden, Brian (1987). "Old Europe: Sacred Matriarchy or Complementary Opposition?". In Bonanno, Anthony (ed.). Archaeology and Fertility Cult in the Ancient Mediterranean: Papers Presented at the First International Conference on Archaeology of the Ancient Mediterranean, the University of Malta, 2-5 September 1985. Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner. pp. 17–30. ISBN 9789060322888.
↑ Rountree, Kathryn (2001). "The past is a foreigners' country: goddess feminists, archaeologists, and the appropriation of prehistory". Journal of Contemporary Religion . 16 (1): 5–27. doi:10.1080/13537900123321. S2CID 144309885.
↑ Kuhn, Steven L.; Stiner, Mary C. (2006-12-01). "What's a Mother to Do? The Division of Labor among Neandertals and Modern Humans in Eurasia". Current Anthropology. 47 (6): 953–981. doi:10.1086/507197. ISSN 0011-3204. S2CID 42981328.
↑ Dahlberg, F. (1983). Woman the Gatherer. Yale University Press. p. 120. ISBN 9780300029895 . Retrieved 2015-07-12.
↑ Biesele, Megan; Barclay, Steve (March 2001). "Ju/'Hoan Women's Tracking Knowledge And Its Contribution To Their Husbands' Hunting Success". African Study Monographs Suppl. 26: 67–84.
↑ "The Cave Art Debate". The Smithsonian. Archived from the original on 29 October 2013. Retrieved 23 October 2013.
↑ Spice, Byron (21 June 1999). "Clothing of figurines may be record of Ice Age tribes' skills". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette . Archived from the original on 2021-01-21.
↑ Tedesco, Laura Anne. "Mal'ta (ca. 20,000 B.C.)". The Met's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
↑ Roller, Lynn E. (1999). In search of god the mother: the cult of Anatolian Cybele. University of California Press. p. 139. ISBN 978-0-520-21024-0. indefinite figures such as the Potnia Theron
↑ Fischer-Hansen, Tobias; Birte Poulsen (2009). From Artemis to Diana: the goddess of man and beast. Museum Tusculanum Press. p. 23. ISBN 978-8763507882.
↑ Vandewettering, Kaylea R. (2015). "Upper Paleolithic Venus Figurines and Interpretations of Prehistoric Gender Representations". PURE Insights. 4– via Western Oregon University.
↑ McDermott, Leroy (1996). "Self-Representation in Upper Paleolithic Female Figurines". Current Anthropology. 37 (2): 227–275. doi:10.1086/204491. JSTOR 2744349. S2CID 144914396.
↑ "Siberian Princess reveals her 2,500 year old tattoos". The Siberian Times. 2012.
↑ Ghose, Tia (21 May 2015). "Remains of Bronze-Age Cultic Priestess Hold Surprise". LiveScience . Retrieved 21 December 2023.
↑ Liesowska, Anna (14 October 2014). "Iconic 2,500 year old Siberian princess 'died from breast cancer', reveals MRI scan". Siberian Times . Retrieved 21 December 2023.
↑ Karmin; et al. (2015). "A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture". Genome Research . 25 (4): 459–66. doi:10.1101/gr.186684.114. PMC 4381518 . PMID 25770088.
↑ Serre, D.; Langaney, A.; Chech, M.; Teschler-Nicola, M.; Paunovic, M.; Mennecier, P.; et al. (2004). "No Evidence of Neandertal mtDNA Contribution to Early Modern Humans". PLOS Biology. 2 (3): 313–317. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0020057 . PMC 368159 . PMID 15024415.