One of the comments reads : Actually, we will probably never figure out, was it man or woman. but I thought this comment of the professor was an interesting eye opener. https://mastodonapp.uk/@MarkHoltom/112070436760917344
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I always read this type of statement as man = species.
I know this particular thinking is falling out of fashion but it’s not totally dead yet
Thing is, statements like the one in the post are just as ignorant as the claimed “enemy”.
You know what else takes 28 days? A moon cycle. We have absolutely no context, what this means. A period tracker bone is a perfectly valid hypothesis, but without any proof or context nothing more than this. It could have been used for moon phases, sheep counting, trade, or simply for testing stone knives.
look how much deeper blade three cut with a single stroke! Are you sure you want to go with brand 4?
This specific instance probably.
But the point is soo much of history ignores the female perspective (or the non-european perspective). Sometimes intentionally like all the female scientists that contribute to foundational studies and don’t get their name on the published paper.
And this is really damaging; I have a family member that legitimately believes that european-descent men are the smartest throughout history (when I brought up the Islamic Golden Age as a counter example he accused it of being propaganda).
American schools are so bad at teaching diverse history. So many still struggle with the basic truths about Columbus and the Natives.
So I what you are saying that we should ban all DEI activity, ban a bunch of books, and regulate Women’s bodily autonomy? /s
Everyone loves traditions!
Look at the ancient structures found throughout the world. The only one I know of in non-Mediterranian Europe is Stonehenge which, while impressive, is some stones hauled over a great distance and placed is an astronomically significant manner. Then you have pyramids and ziggurats in just about every other region except Northern Europe, North America, Australia, and Antarctica, ancient cities on every continent except Northern Europe, Australia, and Antarctica, Polynesians developing a means of marine navigation that is effective across the southern hemisphere (the Norse had a system that was effective in the North Atlantic), Australia having an oral history that has evidence of recording events that go back at least 10000 years (while surviving in some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet). When you look at it, significant achievements in ancient Northern Europe were pretty sparse. We do seem to have caught up in the modern era, though.
Agreed, when speaking of the distant past, I always assume that by “man” they mean “mankind” aka human… Not males.
In the grand scheme, I don’t think it matters whether the thing was done by a male or female, the fact that it happened is the interesting thing about it.
I’m 100% positive that both men (males) and women contributed to these things, and it is impossible to know how much influence each sex had on any given thing, so I’m not sure why the sex of the ancient person who did it, matters.
I’m not sure why the sex of the
ancientperson who did it, matters.Make that a common sentiment and a good chunk of the division surrounding modern discourse goes away. People care way too much about genitals both in the past and present.
Not only what your genitalia is, but what you do with it, seems to be a top priority for far too many people. They’re not your genitals, so maybe don’t worry about it?
But “God” or something. I don’t know.
Not sure why you phrased that as correcting them when you were agreeing and adding to it.
I didn’t take it as a correction. More of a clarification. I omitted some extraneous detail that they added. I felt it was implied well enough by context that it didn’t need to be said, obviously they wanted to add more clarity to the statement.
In my mind the two statements are identical, except that mine relies on context and theirs is a bit more explicit in what is said.
Fair enough.
I don’t think that’s phrased as a correction. It clearly wasn’t as you noted
“clearly wasn’t”
I see now, you just phrase things abruptly in a way that SEEMS rude but clearly isn’t. My mistake. Have a nice day.
You figured out what it meant. That’s clear enough for communication purposes imo. You’re welcome to your own interpretation though
That’s the correct interpretation of that use of the word, and the quote in the post is meaning to use it in that way before pretending it’s a gotcha.
The term man (from Proto-Germanic *mann- “person”) and words derived from it can designate any or even all of the human race regardless of their sex or age. In traditional usage, man (without an article) itself refers to the species or to humanity (mankind) as a whole.
Same here. My native langauge is not gendered and I rarely associate “man” in academic spaces with “gender” category. I usually need more info to tilt to gender in discussions.
Which is your native language? I keep looking for ways to ungender my english if possible. Removing gender from language feels more honest.
Swahili. If you want to translate “she/he went to the river”, you say “Alienda mtoni” which collapses she/he into the subject A- (Alienda) to mean “the person”. You always need context to use a gendered word (like mwanamke for woman) otherwise general conversation does not foreground it. There is literally no word for he/she in Swahili, as far as I know.
I love you how specified “as far as I know” even though it’s literally your native language lmao
Thank you for explaining. I will look into this more.
English is not a grammatically gendered language. Otherwise, all languages have gender.
False, English is a gendered language that lost most of its gender usage. Some words still retain gender, such as blond/blonde.
I though yhe blonde spelling was just used for beer
Male or female beer?
You know I never thought to ask
🤦♂️Yes, in that sense, English could be gendered. But what it actually means is that English used to be gendered and retains some gendered words from that time.
Another example, Russian has noun cases, but not the vocative case. However, it does have two words that have a vocative case from when the language as a whole did use to have the vocative case - Бог (Боже) and Господь (Господи) - but that doesn’t mean that Russian has it now.
Also, blond/blonde are pronounced the same so the distinction is lost in speech and probably soon in writing as well, and words like fiancé/fiancée (which are also pronounced the same), widow/widower, actor/actress do not signify grammatical gender by itself.
Why do I have to know the gender of a person in order to talk about them in third person singular? On more days than not, there is conversation about someone I never met where there is an irrelevant sidebar to clarify gender before communication can continue. I find this relic of the language to be inefficient, pointless and annoying. Daily life would be a lot easier with a non-gendered word for referring to a single person in third person. Languages like Spanish, with gendered nouns, is confusing for even native speakers. I am fascinated by how different languages have different ways of being complicated as well as by their phonology and syntax. I asked my question because I was looking into how other languages use gender and came to the conclusion that none were free from that complication. So I agree with you so far. All languages have gender.
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That shows you have no idea what grammatical gender is. It has no relation to your social behavior or what you have between your legs.
I’m not sure if you were responding to my question or if you are presumptuous and angry. I hope you have a nice day.
I’m pretty sure that was the intent behind the original wording. The interpretation of this being the remnant of a female human makes sense to me, but as this is an anecdotal account of Sandi Toksvig’s time in university, we really have no idea if this is a good example of the lack of a female perspective in anthropology or just a convenient strawman to make a point.
In any case, cool meme.
This and “hey guys”
But its taken to mean both, so at least lightly attributes it to a man rather than a woman.
In the context of prehistory it’s to my knowledge taken to be short for mankind and feck all else. I agree its ambiguous in the modern age which is likely why it’s dieing out. Science doesn’t like ambiguous wordage
In history where we have names and context I absolutely agree and it is good to see the important women in history finally getting brought to the forefront
I mean the lunar cycle is roughly 29 days with the argument that it’s 28 if you don’t count the new moon.
I realize this is a neat thought idea but it I think best demonstrates how easy it is to jump to conclusions.
In English common law, a “lunar month” traditionally meant exactly 28 days or four weeks, thus a contract for 12 months ran for exactly 48 weeks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_month
So, depending on the legal framework, a 28 day marker could be very useful. If they were actually tracking the moon, you’d think it would be 29 units even though a lunar month can vary between about 29.1 and 29.9 days. Then again, 28 notches on a stick means 29 sections, so…?
It’s interesting that a woman’s menstrual cycles is approx 28.1 days on average, with a standard deviation of 3.95 days. That means 28 days is a lot closer to the average menstrual cycle than the average lunar month. But, the standard deviation is a lot greater.
Other than tides, why do you need to know when the next full moon is? And can’t you just look at the moon and see how close it is waning to the full moon?
Not saying the calendar is definitely a woman’s, but wanting to know when you’re going to start leaking blood onto everything near you seems like a good reason to track a period.
I mean you can look at the moon to get a general sense, but if you want to be more precise then I’d use the new moon as the start and count the days until the next new moon.
As far as why, I mean the seasons generally follow the lunar cycle so it would be a way to count the seasons and time and plan and do literally anything you’d need to do that you’d track time for.
I bet you’d even want to track your menstrual cycle, I just wouldn’t limit it to that.
I think the real “issue” with the OP statement and what my response is meant to say is that it doesn’t have to be either or.
So, since Islam uses the lunar calendar, you’re telling me that the reason why they use it is to track menstruations?
Good to know they are attentive to their women’s needs
I’m saying you don’t need to make marks on a bone to track the lunar cycle… you just look up.
The same way Arab countries don’t need a calendar, they just look up
A woman’s cycle varies between 15 and 45 days, averaging 28.1 days, but with a standard deviation of 3.95 days. That’s a hell of a lot of variability from one woman to the next. And the same variability can be experienced by a large minority of women from one period to the next, and among nearly all women across the course of their fertile years.
On the other hand, the moon’s cycle (as seen from Earth) takes 27 days, 7 hours, and 43 minutes to pass through all of its phases. And it does so like clockwork, century after century.
Of the two, I am finding the second to have a much stronger likelihood of being the reasoning behind the notches.
Strange how gender-bigotry style historical revisionism and gender exceptionalism seems to get a wholly uncritical and credulous pass when it’s not done by a man.
I doubt the teacher really believed this, and they were likely striving to just open their students’ minds to the idea that most innovations are probably assumed to be made by men
The point would be a lot more impactful if they didn’t make up a story to support their position.
This is a class on anthropology, the point was to challenge the assumptions made when interpreting artifacts/history with little context. No one made anything up lol
Why not use a real and confirmed example, then? Because they do exist.
Making a story up - such that it can be actively undermined - certainly does the job poorly at best, and actively hurts the objective at worst.
Other than tides, why do you need to know when the next full moon is? And can’t you just look at the moon and see how close it is waning to the full moon?
Not saying the calendar is definitely a woman’s, but wanting to know when you’re going to start leaking blood onto everything near you seems like a good reason to track a period. Plenty of women are regular like clockwork, I was at 26 days almost exactly for years.
If you start to notice one thing happens pretty regularly and another thing happens regularly but on a larger scale… Say the monthly moon phases and the seasons, you can use the more frequent one to roughly track the less frequent one.
There’s both practical and more spiritual/philosophical reasons for this.
Before artificial light sources, especially electrical ones, moon light let people stay productive longer whilst outside. This was especially important for comunal activities like hunting, harvests or celebrations too. Keeping track of moon cycles is thus valuable for preparation in scheduling. And once you do that it can also be used to organize other social events around that. Similar to how our modern calendars and schedules are built around important fixed events.
The moon and sun as celestial bodies also gained prominent religious and mystical significance in ancient cultures. Remember that people didn’t actually know what the moon or sun were in the modern scientific sense. But for some strange reason these mystical glowing disks on which people were so reliant kept rising with unerring synchronicity. The inquiry into the movements on the firmament lead many a civilization down the paths of observation, record keeping and math too.
No meme, only bait.
The comrades we made along the way ✌️😔
It’s under the sauce.
For some reason I thought they meant they carved the calendar on their own bone and thought “damn that’s metal af”.
Anyway, don’t farmers also need to tell the date? Was this bone from before we started doing that?
this proves metal has existed since the dawn of man! enter Miocene epoch heavy metal
First off: Everyone who played the historical documentary Brutal Legend knows that metal was a gift from the gods.
Second: Miocene epoch heavy metal is my favorite genre!
IIRC “Calendar” was one of the proposed solutions, but the bone actually had a lot more than 28 holes. It’s one of the reasons it’s purpose is considered unknown.
I always find this particular strain of antiintellectualism deeply ironic, because it claims to oppose women being forgotten, but the premise assumes the “scientists” are all male.
I don’t see it assuming scientists are all men. Women are just as capable of internalized misogyny and just as capable of being dense as men.
With the willendorf Venus, it wasn’t until a woman who had already had children worked with it, that they suspected it might be a pregnancy self portrait. There had been women already there, but none who knew what a pregnant person looks like from that perspective.
Ok, now that example I like very much!
I’ve never been 7+ months pregnant (not a sad thing in my case, no worries), but I can 100% imagine that it feels like being the willendorf Venus. I love the idea of some woman however long ago half annoyed and half teasing making it and giving it to the father, saying “this is what I am now,” though.
“never more than 2 weeks pregnant” would be much less alarming, but it does have the implication of yeeting blastocysts at the grim reaper, however many or few…
I just meant showing, I’ve never been past seven weeks, thankfully.
It occurs to me that the solution might be to start referring to men as “wermen” again, and revert “men” to it’s gender neutral roots. That also means we can have a bunch of other prefixes for other genders.
Languages are fun.
That’s also where the “were” prefix in werewolf comes from.
Does that mean female werewolves should be called wowolves? (Or even better, woowolves)
Wifwolves, unfortunately.
just lean all the way in and call us vermin
lol what the fuck, yeah right, ancient germanic word “man” derives from latin… whoever drew this didnt bother to open up the dictionary once…
¯\(ツ)/¯
I’m not an entomologist.
“Entomology (from Ancient Greek entomon ‘insect’, and -logia ‘study’)[1] is the scientific study of insects, a branch of zoology. In the past the term insect was less specific, and historically the definition of entomology would also include the study of animals in other arthropod groups, such as arachnids, myriapods, and crustaceans. This wider meaning may still be encountered in informal use.”
pff nah, entomologists are experts at entoming people. you know, like putting them in a tom underground. dead. like that cara loft lady.
i need to branch out with my sources
Scholars seem to agree it stems from Proto-Indo-European, so Latin is not the source.
“man” as in human kind.
I agree the linguistics here are unfortunate, but here we are, and that word, in that context, is normally gender neutral.
Also, 28 day calendar probably means it’s the moon.It’s important to note how we got here. In old English man just meant human. Wereman meant male and wifman meant female. Over time that “were” prefix got dropped and man now means male but the ambiguous meaning of humankind stuck around. In fact “human” comes from old french “of man”, again the non-gendered use of the word man.
The point is to fix all these problems we just have to bring back the “were”. The progressive werewolves are way ahead of us on this issue.
Hunter, huntress, huntsman. Actor, actress, actsman. Waitor, waitress, waitsman.
If we bring back the were then how are we gonna refer to male hunters, actors, and waitors?
Hunter, werehunter, wifhunter. fun!
the real question is how are we going to refer to male wolves?
It would be interesting to see what in an alternate timeline, English would have looked like today if the Norman invasion never happened.
I’m not seeing a comment pointing out why 28 days isn’t a moon thing, so I’ll take a shot. If you watch new moon to new moon or full moon to full moon, it’s a 29.5 day cycle. It’s true, the moon’s orbit is only 28 days. However, that’s 360° of travel. We don’t track the moon against the stars for its cycle though, it’s tracked against the sun. A full moon sits opposite the sun, a new moon in line with the sun, etc. So, in that 28 day orbital period, the earth has also orbited about 1/13 of an orbit around the sun, changing the position of the sun against the stars . That means the moon has to travel an extra 28° of orbit to reach the new moon position again - about an extra day an a half.
I’m not seeing a comment pointing out why 28 days isn’t a moon thing,
Hm, that’s odd! it’s right there
Odd indeed since the link works fine in my mobile app (connect) but doesn’t show on the native comment thread. I kinds figured it was something like that with a different source instance. At least I can feel good knowing I explained where 28 does occur
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You mean apart from them occuring at set intervals? The length of time between the average women’s periods is 28 days, but the moon’s 28 day cycle is 100% reliable, and always happens regardless of individual stressors. Having a regular solar event that confirms you’re accurately keeping track of days is pretty practical.
Why wouldn’t a male have figured out a lunar cycle and tried to track the moon? Not that the female explanation is lesser in any regard, but why exclude all possibilities?
As a man living with three menstruating women I learned very quickly how to count to 28 on three different cycles.
As a woman I’m offended but also feel seen
Menstruation sucks and anything I can do to make their lives easier makes my life easier.
But that’s because I’m the man: The man with a good attitude towards menstruation
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
The man with a good attitude towards menstruation
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Offended? Start the clock…
It could be both.
A few weeks ago I blew my wife’s mind after she commented that both her and her best friend had started their period and I responded with ‘well, it is a full moon.’
She thought I was being ’boomer humor’ sexist until I brought up the studies about it. (Which are not 100% conclusive, mind you, but there are trends.)
A man makes blankets and he “works in textiles” a woman makes blankets and she “has a hobby making quilts”.
This isn’t a meme…
Are you Richard Dawkins?
I’m a woman and I have never needed to chart 28 days.
that screenshot up there reads like some academic person with too much time on their hands trying too hard to congratulate themselves for solving some anthropological mystery.
But since before you were born people knew how long a woman’s menstrual cycle lasts. Most likely the Internet existed when you became an adult and thought about measuring things. The society you lived in had existing calendars that you were aware of if/when you had a menstrual cycle. You’ve never needed to “chart 28 days” but someone who lived long long ago may have wondered and they would have had no frame of reference so they decided to count.
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Yeah, I don’t get it either. Weren’t most, if not all, ancient calendars lunar based? Far easier to work out a 28 day cycle than a 365.25 day cycle.
I’m a woman and I have never needed to chart 28 days.
Is this because you don’t care when your next period is? Or because you don’t need to record it to remember it?
I can imagine a modern woman might not care if she always has menstrual products on hand or nearby. But, it might have been more meaningful in ancient times when there might have been more taboos associated with menstruation, plus it might have been more important to know as part of family planning. And, it might have been much less convenient to carry around whatever was needed to handle menstruation.
Also, in a modern world where calendars are everywhere, I can imagine someone might say “ok, so my next period will be in early July”. But, there was a time when days and months were not tracked, or were only tracked by priests, etc. In that kind of situation, I could imagine it might be useful to count the days until the next period was expected. On the other hand, a primitive society probably spends a lot more time outdoors and sees the moon a lot more often, so it might be just as easy to go “ok, so my next period will be when the moon’s 3/4 full”.
28 notches means that the bone had 29 sections, which more closely matches a lunar month than a typical menstrual period. But, I could see it being used either way.
Sandi is a comedian and presenter of UK show QI, not a researcher. She’s literally just talking about an epiphany.
“When I was a student at Cambridge…”
Believe it or not, in civilized countries it’s common for people to get higher education for the sake of education.
Her predecessor on QI, mr. Stephen Fry, was also an OxBridge fellow – known as one of Britain’s greatest comedians.
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This is a refreshing comment, if any. Especially coming from a woman. Thank you.
All the idiots claiming it’s the moon and giving more details about women’s cycles are missing the point of the quote.
Which is spelled out, but I’ll place it here.
The idea that it was a woman is just as valid as it being a man, but man is always assumed.
The accuracy of the claim is not at issue. The assumption is.
Who is responsible though? The historian, or the man who inscribed the bone?
I similarly like that feminist theory of Venus statues. They aren’t dummy thicc proto-porn but the perspective of someone who’s pregnant looking down at their reflection in a river and cataloguing the most dangerous/important point of their life.
It makes more sense for the former unfortunately.
The original theory was that it could have been a pregnant women looking down and that’s what lead to the proportions. The idea was they wouldn’t have been able to see themselves in a river or something. But rivers and puddles, not to mention OTHER pregnant women, were extremely common so it’s less likely.
The crux with all of those “first calendars” (idk which one is meant here, but there are multiple who claim this) is that we don’t even know if it’s a calendar at all. I mean, if this professor’s approach serves as an eve-opeher for some, we should retell it whenever possible, yet it doesn’t reflect any of the questions we should ask ourselves when seeing 28 carvings in a bone. Assuming that htis can only be a calendar is just the hidden assumption that numbers 25 and up could not have played a role anywhere else, because ppl were to primitive for those numbers somehow.
Perhaps they tracked how many calves in herd they had, or how many horses they had or how many bows they needed to make or how many children there were in the village. Perhaps they wanted to go higher and track something completely different and only got to 28 before they abandoned their approach to whatever they were doing.
eve-opeher
LOL. I guess if it reads, it reads
