Harry Mottram on the changing narrative of early humans and how many of the early advances in medicine, manufacturing and horticulture were probably down to women.
From being dragged around by their hair by knuckle dragging cavemen to a more nuanced view of how women made many technological advances in our development has seen paleoanthropology change.
In the last two decades there has been a revolution in the study of early humans with new skeletons, bones and traces of early hominids discovered, plus the re-examining of finds from earlier decades and of course DNA revealing a different past from when experts talked of ‘missing links.’
Since the discovery of Neanderthals in the 19th century the consensus was those early cave dwellers were really thick compared to us. It took a few thousand years, (goes the story) for us to kill them off – either through nicking their prey, land and caves – or by killing them. The reality it appears is we got rid of Neanderthals by breeding with them – so their DNA lives on through us. Likewise the similar Denisovans interbred with humans – revealing that sleeping around is nothing new.
Neanderthals were very similar to us. They spoke, sang and drew pictures on cave walls. They made clothes, jewellery and accessories and prepared food for cooking. And Neaderthals probably held dinner parties and complained about those new people who had moved into the neighbourhood: homo sapiens.
Apart from hooking up with the Neanderthals and the Denisovans in an early version of Neolithic Tinder what did we do for around 200,000 years apart from dating other hominids?
For decades experts talked about the first humans as hunter gatherers. The men went out and bashed a woolly mammoth on the head with their clubs and brought back hunks of meat for their women folk to barbecue. When the females weren’t cooking Ice Age steaks they er… gathered. Which suggests in their spare time they went blackberry picking or hooking down wild apples. It now looks like early humans filled up their days with a multitude of tasks with keeping warm, making clothing and food processing as the Ice Ages ensured survival was number one priority. It meant the birth rate was low since food was not always abundant which gave women agency in experimenting and inventing.
In other words women weren’t (to put it non-medically) banging out the babies. They were manufacturing clothes, making tools and weapons and processing foods as well as hunting either on their own or with the men.
And my theory of how the copper age began was over one of the hearths in Anatolia or the Balkans when rocks containing copper ore made up part of the fireplace and when women were raking the ashes they spotted the metal. Initially it would have been a curiosity but by experiment they realised by further heating and working it became a much harder and useful material. In other words 9,000 years ago women – certainly those who tended the fires – began the Copper Age.
I would go further and to suggest women were more likely to be involved in early health care tending hunting wounds, creating splints and using herbal remedies and even carrying out amputations and basic operations.
Cat Bohannon in her book “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution” argues there would have been specialist roles including nursing, medical care, and midwifery.
There’s also the question of smaller female hands which were more dextrous than male hands to thread bead necklaces and other jewellery, and thread needles to weave and sew garments of animal skins and natural fibres from nettles and flax. And this familiarity of plant life would have seen women also experimenting with planting and sewing seeds – and creating the beginnings of farming.
Which brings me to the rise and rise of Cheddar woman. We know about Cheddar man and how Somerset teacher and resident of Cheddar Adrian Targett who was claimed to be connected to the 9,000 or so year old skeleton found in the caves nearby. Possibly a dark skinned migrant from modern day Turkey by heritage the Neolithic individual could only have arrived here with the help of family and friends including of course Cheddar woman. His clothes, his diet, his decorations and quite possibly his copper hunting weapons were as likely as not manufactured by Cheddar woman.
Rapscallion magazine
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