1. t0 15,000 Before gendered constructs

Paleo-anthropologists can track human evolution and migration in prehistory using the remains of women, which have provided some of the most important breakthroughs in our understanding of the past. There is great variation between hunter gatherer groups and the gender dynamics that emerged.

Human evolution took FOREVER, like 6 million years, but eventually the humans we are today emerged from our apelike ancestors. Hominids, as we were known, evolved in stages. Originally people assumed that evolution was linear, one stage morphing into another, but discoveries by paleoanthropologists over the last century have shed incredible light on our prehistoric past. The real breakthrough with evolution came in 1974, with the discovery of Lucy, a Australopithecus, a hominid ancestor, who likely lived around 3 million years ago! Historians have stated, “No other set of hominid remains found before or after is as renowned as ‘Lucy’.”  This was the first complete hominid ancestor– and it was a FEMALE!

Lucy was found in fragments in the mountains of Ethiopia by a team of white, male researchers who were apparently rocking out to the Beatles song– Lucy. Lucy was short in stature for a full grown female, standing only 3.5 feet tall and her arm-to-leg ratio was much more ape-like than human. Her skull was quite a bit different from ours as well and with their small cranial capacity, this group of hominids likely could not think and conceptualize the world in the same ways we do.

Her discovery helped to challenge accepted theories of evolution. Her discoverer asserted that her remains were evidence that the human ancestral tree was less linear than the diagrams of evolution usually portray. The human tree was more like a bush with lots of different branches that occurred at the same time. Neanderthals, for example, lived at the same time as other hominid groups and interbred with them. Decades later, more evidence came to light that confirmed this hypothesis, including the Dikika child, who people refer to as Lucy's baby, although of course they probably lived thousands of years apart.  If we got this wrong, what else have historians gotten wrong? If an erroneous family tree falls out of our history, does it make a sound?

Evolution: Human evolution is challenging to reconstruct. We know that slowly humans evolved to have larger brains and a frontal lobe allowing us to manage complex ideas and plan for the future. We also began walking upright, which required our human ancestors to develop a big toe, more flared hips to support our abdomen and upper bodies, and the S-curve in our spines- hence all the back problems! This illustrates that there has perhaps been too much discussion of the benefits of how we evolved and not enough attention to the challenges our advantageous traits have produced. For example, the massive human brains that make us such a smart species, despite the existence of flat earthers, which seems to contradict this,  would have also made birth impossible. Women developed even wider hips and gave birth three months too early in order to be able to birth our big brains from the small female pelvis: this helps to explain colic and babies desire to be swaddled in that early period of their life. Which development came first; the wider pelvis or the larger brain is difficult to discern.  Hopefully, it was the pelvis.  Ouch!
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Migration: One of the biggest areas for improvement was our knowledge of human migration and its dates, again it is women, or rather their likeness, that helps illuminate this history. Only about 1.8 million years ago did humans begin to traverse the globe. Humans made their way into Southwest Asia, or the Middle East and Europe. 20,000 years ago an Ice Age pushed most of those peoples into southern and warmer regions.  It is from those peoples that we learn the most about human beings as they recorded it in various cave paintings and in discovered graves. In eastern Europe, as early as 35,000 years ago there is evidence of more permanent settlements, which included numerous female sculptures known as Venus figurines depicting the female body with exaggerated bodily features. We have no idea how these figures were used… were they worshiped? Were they sex objects? It’s hard to know. 

This was perhaps before gendered constructs (and no, we don’t mean anatomically correct robots!). One of the ways we know where groups migrated is the presence of women because they made it possible for the species to regenerate and make a mark there. Human migration made it all the way to Australia through the networks of islands in Indonesia as early as 60,000 years ago. In Australia an elaborate rock painting done by Aboriginal Australians showed a God of creation known as lightning man (no, not Usain Bolt!) with his smaller wife etched below him with exaggerated breasts and genitalia.  Humans made it to the Americas somewhere around 15,000 years ago, and it is believed that this occurred in numerous different migrations over land, ice, and sea. These early Americans were known as the Paleoindians, who were followed by another group called the Clovis people. The Clovis culture abruptly disappeared 11,000 years ago. 

The discovery in 2007 of an ancient teenage-girl’s remains in an underwater cave in Yucatan, Mexico, exemplifies the antiquity of female presence in this continent. Named by archeologists “Naia”, her remains are estimated to be 12,000-13,000-years-old. She had a hard life full of malnutrition and an early pregnancy.

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The final thrust of human migration was into the Pacific Ocean and probably only occurred about 3500 years ago. Interestingly, both men and women traveled to these newly discovered Pacific Islands clearly indicating the intention of settling. 
Hunter Gatherer Culture: 95 percent of human history occurred before “history” was recorded. These early hunter gatherer peoples lived mostly in small, deeply personal, bands of 25 to 50 people. At some points in the year when food was plentiful these bands would gather together into even larger groups of hundreds of people. At these major events marriages were formed, and crucial information was shared. Otherwise these groups moved frequently to follow sources of food and maintained very few possessions as a result. Women also bore fewer surviving children because of the constant movement and limited food supply. They also breastfed their children longer, sometimes up to five years, to help space out births as breastfeeding can sometimes prevent pregnancy– but don’t try that at home!  

Across the world, there was tremendous variation in the cultures that developed. Because of the lack of any formal, lasting bureaucratic structure in most places, there was also less hierarchy in hunter gatherer culture. Men and women were thus a bit freer than their agricultural ancestors and got more free time in their day. Men and women honed a variety of skills, and worked altruistically for the good of the group. Roles and tasks were often differentiated by gender. 

Despite the fairer social structure, this was by no means a golden age for women. Food was often scarce. In Africa and Eurasia Women, children and the elderly likely provided the majority of the sustenance through their gathering. There’s evidence that up to 70% of the diet of these early peoples came from plants, while meat accounted for only 30%.There is also zero evidence of the existence of tacos at this time. Can you imagine? So women were basically crushing it– or being taken advantage of… hard to say. 

One interesting finding in a 1999 anthropological study of modern foraging groups is that grandmothers can actually help improve the evolutionary fitness of a tribe, as well as her own lifespan, by assuming responsibility for feeding weaned babies and allowing the young mother to produce more offspring. They call this the “grandmother hypothesis.” 

There is no evidence that among these early peoples much of the modern misogyny facing women existed. Although it’s hard to know, there is little evidence of rape, domestic abuse, or emphasis on female virginity, staples of almost every society following this era. In the 1700s when Captain James Cook first encountered the aboriginal people in Australia, he wrote about their tranquility and egalitarian culture. Just decades later when other Europeans followed him to Australia, they found a highly toxic masculine culture that resulted in brutal domestic abuse. Has something changed in those 20 years by the introduction of patriarchal Europe? Or had this always existed and been lost to the record? 

End of the Ice Age: As the Ice Age came to an end between 16,000 and 10,000 years ago natural global warming allowed for diverse plants and animals to flourish and provide a more rich human quality of life. As well as providing the basis for several very successful animated movies. Humans began to settle along river valleys and began a long transition to agriculture. Many have seen this transition as a positive one, but for women there were some unforeseen consequences. 

Historian Jared Diamond in his once-controversial article, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” argued that the invention of agriculture had a horrible impact on human health and led to class differences and the rise of elites, along with sex discrimination.  Yup, he said it.
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Some feminist historians go so far as to claim that in these hunter-gatherer societies gender relations were reversed. The theory rests its case on our prehistoric ancestors understanding of cause and effect. The theory goes that women held spiritual status in society as magical creatures that bring about life, because, the theory purports, our ancestors didn’t understand the role men played in creating life. The creation stories that survive and portray female pagan goddesses in all their sexualized glory may be evidence of this. 

But this theory is pretty dated and the evidence is not widely accepted, and historians, including female historians, doubt this “revision” of history. In the following section we will explore this academic debate to more deeply understand the challenges of prehistory and also to see how the biases of our more egalitarian time can impact our reading of historical events. 

[Setting up the Inquiry] By the end of this era, so much remained in question. How reliable are oral traditions recorded centuries or millennia after they were first told as evidence of prehistoric culture? Isn’t that just a thousands-of-years-old game of telephone? Would humans roam the earth forever? How would agriculture impact gender dynamics in the centuries to come? 

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INQUIRY: What do origin stories say about the role of women?
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Bibliography

Diamond, Jared. “The Worst Mistake in Human History.” Discover Magazine, 1987. http://public.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scanned%20Documents/Intro/Diamond.PDF. 

Gruss, Laura Tobias, and Daniel Schmitt. “The evolution of the human pelvis: changing adaptations to bipedalism, obstetrics and thermoregulation.” Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences vol. 370,1663 (2015): 20140063. doi:10.1098/rstb.2014.0063

Landau, Elizabeth. "How Much Did Grandmothers Influence Human Evolution? Scientists debate the evolutionary benefits of menopause." Smithsonian Magazine. January 4, 2021. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-much-did-grandmothers-influence-human-evolution-180976665/​. 

Pollard, Elizabeth and Clifford Rosenberg, Ed. World Together Worlds Apart: A Companion Reader, 2nd Edition, Volume 1. New York: Norton & Company, Inc, 2016.

Schrein, Caitlin. "Lucy: A marvelous specimen." Nature Education Knowledge 6(7):2, 2015. https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/lucy-a-marvelous-specimen-135716086/​. 

Strayer, R. and Nelson, E., Ways Of The World. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016.

Swaminathan, Nikhil. "Naia—the 13,000-Year-Old Native American." Archaeology. January/February 2015. https://www.archaeology.org/issues/161-1501/features/2793-mexico-cave-clovis-dna-naia.

Primary AUTHOR:

​Kelsie Brook Eckert

Primary Reviewer:

Marieka Brouwer Burg

Consulting Team

Editors

Kelsie Brook Eckert, Project Director
Coordinator of Social Studies Education at Plymouth State University

Dr. Nancy Locklin-Sofer, Consultant
Professor of History at Maryville University. 

Chloe Gardner, Consultant
PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at Edinburgh University

Dr. Whitney Howarth, Consultant
Former Professor of History at Plymouth State University

Jacqui Nelson, Consultant
Teaching Lecturer of Military History at Plymouth State University

​Maria Concepcion Marquez Sandoval
PhD Candidate in History at Arizona University

Amy Flanders
Humanities Teacher, Moultonborough Academy
Ron Kaiser
Humanities Teacher, Moultonborough Academy
Chris Canfield
Humanities Teacher, Moultonborough Academy

Reviewers

Pre-History
Dr. Marieka Brouwer Burg
Professor of Anthropology at the University of Vermont
Ancient:
Dr. Kristin Heineman
Professor of History at Colorado State University
Dr. Bonnie Rock-McCutcheon
Professor of History at Wilson College
Sarah Stone
PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at Edinburgh University
Medieval:
Dr. Katherine Koh
Professor of History at La Sierra University
Dr. Jonathan Couser
Professor of History at Plymouth State University
Dr. Shahla Haeri
Professor of History at Boston University 
Lauren Cole
PhD Candidate in History at Northwestern University
Modern:
Dr. Jack Gronau
Professor of History at Northeastern University