7. 100 BCE - 100 CE Women and the Roman Empire

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 beings originated in Africa and the first 150,000 years of human history occurred there. Discoveries by paleoanthropologists over the last century have shed incredible light on our prehistoric past, but real breakthroughs and restructuring of human knowledge came in 1974, with the discovery of Lucy.  Historians have stated, “No other set of hominid remains found before or after is as renowned as ‘Lucy’.”  Lucy was found in fragments in the mountains of Ethiopia. Her discovery helped to challenge accepted theories of paleopathology and evolution. Her discoverer asserted that her remains were evidence that the human ancestral tree had the wrong trunk. Decades later, more evidence came to light that confirmed this hypothesis. The human tree was more like a bush with lots of different branches that occurred at the same time. Neanderthals, for example, are likely an extinct branch of the tree, rather than an immediate ancestor of Homo sapiens. If we got this wrong, what else have historians gotten wrong? 

Evolution: Human evolution is challenging to reconstruct, and 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 wider hips and gave birth three months too early in order to be able to birth the skull 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 100,000 to 60,000 years ago did humans begin to traverse the globe. Humans made their way into the Middle East and Europe around 45,000 years ago. 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.
This was perhaps before gendered constructs. 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 aboriginals 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. What happenedHumans made it to the Americas somewhere between 30,000 and 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 Clovis people. They abruptly disappeared 11,000 years ago. 
The discovery in 2007 of an ancient teenage-girl 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.
The final phase of human migration occurred 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. ​Sometimes you got to get through your feet do you see the beauty on the other side

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Hunter Gatherer Culture: 95 percent of human history occurred during what we call the hunter-gatherer period. One of the things we know about this period is that the small bands of people who traversed the earth were far more egalitarian than their “civilized” relatives. Second, our progressive view of world history insists that their move toward agriculture was a revolution dragging them slowly into the future of mankind, a step closer toward industrialization, modernity, success, dabbing, and eventually, bottle-flipping.
These early Paleolithic peoples lived in small, deeply personal, bands of 25 to 50 people.  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, resulting in egalitarian social structures.  Because of the more desperate struggle to survive and the lack of any formal, lasting bureaucratic structure, women and men were arguably less regulated than their descendants. Lack of specialization allowed men and women to become masters of a variety of skills, although likely differentiated by gender. 
There is evidence in central Eurasia that women rode horses and participated in war; women's graves include armor, swords, daggers, and other symbols of a warrior. In China women were found buried with symbols of healers and shamans, “strongly suggesting an important female role in religious life.”
Despite the fairer social structure, this was by no means a golden age for women. Food was often scarce. Grub Hub and Instacart were thousands of years away. 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% of the Paleolithic diet.There is also zero evidence of the existence of tacos at this time.  Can you imagine? So women were basically crushing it like a cheap taco shell. 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. Polygamy certainly existed but was not popular, and divorce seems to have occurred frequently among young people.  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? 

Hunter Gatherers: 
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.  Take that Farmville!
Some feminist historians go so far as to claim that in these hunter-gatherer societies gender relations were reversed. They base this argument on our prehistoric ancestors primitive understanding of cause and effect, which led to women augmenting a spiritual status as magical creatures that bring about life. The creation stories that survive and portray female pagan goddesses in all their sexualized glory may be evidence of this. 
But 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. 

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. 

[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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Bibliography

Beard, Mary. SPQR : A History of Ancient Rome. Liverlight paperbacked. New York: Liverlight Publishing Corporation, 2016.

Beard, Mary. Women & Power: A Manifesto. Liveright Publishing Corporation: New York, NY, 2017.

Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Octavia." Encyclopedia Britannica, November 13, 2019. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Octavia-wife-of-Mark-Antony.

Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Julia Agrippina." Encyclopedia Britannica, January 1, 2022. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julia-Agrippina. 

Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Julia Daughter of Augustus." Encyclopedia Britannica, October 14, 2021. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julia-daughter-of-Augustus.

Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Vipsania Agrippina." Encyclopedia Britannica, October 14, 2021. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Vipsania-Agrippina. 

Clabaugh, Gary K. “A History of Male Attitudes Toward Educating Women.” Educational Horizons. Vol. 64, No. 3, Spring 2010, 166. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ887227.pdf.

Cleghorn, Elinor. Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World. 2021. Dutton: New York: 2021.

Fikes, Robert. “Kandake Amanirenas.” Black Past. May 22, 2019. https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/kandake-amanirenas-10-bc/.

Hinsch, Bret. “The Criticism of Powerful Women by Western Han Dynasty Portent Experts.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49, no. 1 (2006): 96–121. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25165130.

Mead, Rebecca. “How nasty was Nero really?” The New Yorker Magazine. June 14, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/14/how-nasty-was-nero-really. 

Roller, Sarah. “6 of Ancient Rome’s Most Powerful Empresses.” History Hit. September 28, 2021. https://www.historyhit.com/ancient-romes-most-powerful-empresses/.

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

Primary AUTHOR:

Jacqui Nelson, MMH

Primary Reviewer:

Dr. Nancy Locklin-Sofer

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

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