Note: I am talking about ancient Hunter gathers not the modern Hunter gathers because they are not a view into the past.

I feel like Hunter gathers are more diverse than we think.

  • Ithorian [comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    Females actually would have had huge advantage when it comes to gathering, they can see far more color then most males can. Meaning they would have been able to spot ripe fruit more easily and tell it apart from poisonous look alikes.

    As for gender roles we really don't know much about anything before the neolithic revolution, how many there were and how closely they were tied to genitalia likely varied from tribe to tribe. There does seem to be some evidence that matriarchy may have been predominant because all of the earliest religious icons we have found depict goddesses or animals, with male figures being fairly absent.

    Note: early anthropology has always been an interest of mine but never an area of formal study, so you know do your own fact checking.

      • naom3 [she/her]
        ·
        3 years ago

        I know people with Y chromosomes have a higher rate of colour blindness, but social conditioning probably also plays a role.

          • Ithorian [comrade/them]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            I can't find the study right now where they tested it in children and still saw some of the same differences. But yeah I edited my comment cause you're right it's not as definitive as I made it sound.,

    • CrimsonSage [any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Males have the same genes as females, and even in females quadrachromy is very rare; I think it is less that 5% and I am probably erring on the generous side. Colorblindness is more prevalent because the Y chromosome is much reduced and therefore reducing redundancy in that pair, but this is only a tendency not a rule, male still have an X chromosome there and even in females they only have one of the pair active at a time as otherwise there would be an over expression of those genes. As with all things genetics is extremely fuzzy and the more we learn the less and less it seems to be "IF YOU HAVE THE X GENE YOU WILL HAVE Y OUTCOME!!!" genetics is actually starting to look a lot like quantum physics with less concrete binary answers and more conditional probabilities and distributions.

      • Ithorian [comrade/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        less concrete binary answers and more conditional probabilities and distributions.

        I haven't looked into but that sounds 100% true. All the more reason binary genders are pure bullshit.

        • CrimsonSage [any]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Ultimately some things are hard boundaries, but those things tend to be very old and conserved in the genome and if they break then you tend to not become an organism; there is a reason like 2/3 of all successful fertilization's end in miscarriage. Some bits gotta work and cant be messed with, but assuming an organism is brought to term, but for other things there is a ton of wiggle room for variation and mutation. Environment also plays a huge role, like you can have a "malfunctioning" gene that works just fine if you have a healthy environment with little stress. Additionally all these variations functionalities are contingent upon a fractal pattern of other biological and environmental factors.

    • supersaiyan [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      The only bad thing about humans trying to interpret ancient art, and icons is that how to define what gender they think the items are. For example with venus figures how do we define what is "female", or "male". How would we know their gender system is binary?

      "Although discussions of Upper Paleolithic figurines are of-ten framed as though all of the figurines are female, manyare quite obviously not female. There are figurines of nudemales, male animals, and possibly male fantastical charac-ters (e.g., the lion-human hybrids from Hohlenstein-Stadel,Geißenkl¨osterle, and Hohle Fels in Germany), but these arenot interpreted within a sexual framework. "

      https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265090963_Science_the_Media_and_Interpretations_of_Upper_Paleolithic_Figurines