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’m guessing the implication is they were tracking their period?
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
Scholars seem to agree it stems from Proto-Indo-European, so Latin is not the source.
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
Never mind anything, making the abstract connection between one event and the number of marks you scratch on a wall was probably the equivalent of genius of the time, the first mathematician.
Ah yes one of the memes of all time . Also true af.
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
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
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.
English is not a grammatically gendered language. Otherwise, all languages have gender.
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.
‘Natural gender’ has nothing to do with ‘grammatical gender.’ The reason we have words for male and female persons and pet animals is because they are male and female. Calling something male or female is not grammatical gender. It’s just reality, something the trans supremacist militia hates.
False, English is a gendered language that lost most of its gender usage. Some words still retain gender, such as blond/blonde.
🤦♂️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.
I though yhe blonde spelling was just used for beer
Male or female beer?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
I don’t know about English, but in French in the 19th century men did enforce the use of homme (men) instead of humain (human) in the déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, and in the language, because they did want to segregate women. It was a purposeful and deliberate decision.
I am convinced it’s exactly the same in English.
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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 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
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.
You are ignorant of recent history then.
Men did do their best to segregate women in the 18th and 19th century. And they succeeded. Even in the language.
Women fighting for women to be recognized in history is an important fight for women to be respected and recognized for their doing, because even now they aren’t.
And I’m not saying it’s an all men problem. It’s a society problem.
Oh, wow. Um…
We’re talking about bone carvings. And you’re well into or after the bronze age.
What I’m referring to is significantly prior to anything you’re talking about. The events you’re referring to are a few hundred years ago, part of recorded history, while I’m talking about the early days of mankind, well before the printing press, paper, or even writing instruments like the fountain pen or quill.
When you go back, well over 1000 years ago, more like 3000+ years ago, why does it matter if a thing was done by a human person with male genitalia or female genitalia?
That was my statement. Either you vastly misunderstood, or you’re so occupied by making a point, you didn’t care.
We’re talking about history where mysoginy left a big footprint because it was made by men that incapable of thinking that women could be more than what they were in their time.
Exactly like today. You’re asking why it matters whether it was a man or a woman, yet this whole conversation sparked because someone said that it could be a woman.
That’s conservatism for you.
I’m not disputing the fact that misogyny was (and is) and big problem, that women’s contributions were either disregarded or coopted by some guy and credit taken away from the actual contributor.
That happened. A lot.
But in the times before the written history books, we should be less concerned about the gender of an individual who we think used a thing in a new/innovative way for the time. I don’t think that studies of bone carvings or other ancient artifacts, being referred to as an “achievement of man” should imply, or was ever meant to imply, that it was done by someone with a penis. In that context, in all cases, for all intents and purposes “man” should, and as far as I know, is, thought of as “human” or “mankind”.
This isn’t a debate about the sociopolitical unfairness towards women, it’s a semantic argument about using the term “man” to refer to a human individual or someone who is a part of mankind. Bluntly, I took the statement in the OP as a tongue in cheek joke by the professor. They know that’s not what it meant, and used the assumption that “man” = “mankind” as the juxtaposition to subvert expectations, to crack wise about it. The same way someone would say “you know what sucks about twenty six year olds? There’s twenty of them” where the premise directs you to think of someone who is 26, and the punchline indicates that your assumption of it being a statement about people who are 26 years old, was wrong. That’s what makes it funny. Granted, that’s not very funny, but it’s the structure of a very common type of joke.
That’s what’s in the OP.
Instead, here we are talking about women’s suffrage for a field where they probably only remark about the gender of someone as a footnote.
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.
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?
Seeing the reactions in this thread, it does seem that a lot of men are indeed enemies of women. Why would it be so hot otherwise to discuss this?
And this reaction of yours is a prime example of jumping to conclusions based on political views.
You can argue, that this bone was used for 400 different things. Without context, arguing that it’s definitely something about menstruation is just pseudo-feminist circle jerking. They just choose this interpretation because it fits their views and goals. That’s unscientific.
What you’re doing here is also not much better. Instead of actually engaging with the argument I brought, you just assume, that everyone who disagrees with a pseudo-feminist interpretation of a bone, must be the enemy. That is not exactly scientific.
you talked about enemity first, remember? you have this view of a fight, and that anyone who dare say that a woman did something and not a man, is fighting men.
You have a very defensive position. Which means you feal attacked. You say it directly when you talk about “enemy”.
You are the problem my friend. Your first comment is aa problem. And the support it receives is concerning and scary.
Nope, I just pointed out, that an absolute statement like the one above is not valid. And the “enemy” I brought up, was used as a description of the position shown by the proponents of the menstruation bone absolutism.
And labeling me as a “problem”, without even an attempt at telling me where I might be wrong is pretty, well, bold?
Think about it, I write, that absolutism is not good, and your first response is “you are evil because you dare question whatever I happen to believe in”.
You don’t help feminism like that. And that’s pretty sad.
Professor: Maybe it was a woman? Just consider it with an open mind.
You: This gender absolutism is the enemy™!
So they nailed it with the 28 day calendar and we are stuck with this one
well yes, but 28 day months dont divide nicely into 365/366 days, so it would not have worked well… uh, hang on. i’m being handed a note. huh. apparently our current calendar also doesnt solve this neatly at all, and is in fact a patched monstrosity more batshit than anything any single malicious person could come up with. well.
Let’s go with 12 28 day months and the overhead days are universal vacation days during summer. There you go.
well yes, the clear answer is to have “days outside the calendar”. this is how the hobbits do it too :)
What about summer not being at the same time everywhere? Which hemisphere do you wanna favor? What kind of problems do vacation days in summer create in agriculture?
Essential work will always need doing on holidays. Anyone doing essential work gets their free days at other times before of after these holidays.
Good point about hemispheres though. Put half of the days in between December and January and half in between June and July. Since it’s an odd number of days (unless it’s a leap year), alternate which of these gets one more every year.
Anyone working with dates and times was cursed in a past life. Timezones are a pain to work with. Daylight savings sucks. Some countries change daylight savings at different times. Some countries change timezones sometimes. Go further back and some countries had their own leap days. Different calendars don’t form neat cycles and must be manually synchronized every few years. Did you know Easter, for about 300 years, needed to be announced by the Pope each year because it was a lunar holiday based on a Jewish calendar but the Christians followed a different one? Also, every now and again we throw a leap second into the computers because the Earth’s rotation is gradually slowing down and 365/366 days isn’t quite precise enough anyways.
13 months of 28 days with an extra holiday at years end, it works so much cleaner than what we use.
Yeah, but then how could we make the important months longer than the rest? That would really piss off Julius and Augustus.
Slightly more sensibly, 12 months is easier to synch to the seasons, and calendars are very important to agriculture. 3 months for each season is convenient.
Thirteen also can’t be divided evenly and is widely considered bad luck.
That’s just what Big February wants you to think.
Man just needs to look at the moon to mark 28 days
Sometimes it’s cloudy. Sometimes you can’t tell if that’s were 2 or 3 days away from a full moon.
The comrades we made alone the way ✌️😔
No meme, only bait.
It’s under the sauce.
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.
So you’re arguing that people would have more use to write moon cycles than women cycles? And you talk about bigotry?!
While I agree with you that the teacher in this post is wrong about what this is, I don’t think labeling “gender bigotry” indiscriminately as something both sexes do under one umbrella is accomplishing anything but minimizing the struggle women have endured for basically all of human existence up until the last few decades.
Personally, I wouldn’t fault this woman for thinking what she does if she’s willing to accept a broader explanation later, given that women have literally been sold as property up until a couple hundred years ago.
Women have the right to at least posit the ways they as a group have been held down, and that includes accepting their indignation and allowing them grace for when they’re actually wrong, because without those things they won’t actually learn the truth.
Further than that, I think it’s necessary for learning women now to have the same realization this one did that women throughout all of history save for this recent tiny sliver have been oppressed, even if it’s built on an incidentally faulty premise, that doesn’t mean the realization itself is wrong.
Covering up the discourse by labeling the process of realization as “gender bigotry” is itself an attempt at erasure, and very much puts you on the side of the oppressors, just because you think it’s distasteful to have this realization yourself.
I’m sure gender bigotry exists in the direction of women towards men. This ain’t it.
The gender-bigotry comes from the “what man needs to mark 28 days?” There’s snark behind the comment, and it’s unnecessary. That said, a woman could be just as likely as a man to mark moon phases. But saying “man” doesn’t mean “male” when talking about us as a species from my understanding. Seems like a broader term to use which includes the entirety of the homo-whatevers.
I’m just some guy here and am not educated in this stuff, though!
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.
Derek, halt! Unga unga, no cave cuddles now. Me check bone-calendar, unga bunga, big chance for baby bump. We wait, sky spirits nod-nod. Timing everything, unga!
Sure, that was the way for woman to use a calender…
Lol, mansplain harder! I’m sure it had nothing to do with wanting to know when their next period was due, to, you know, know when their next period was due, and be prepared for that, without it having anything to do with a man… 🙄🤦♀️😂
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
“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.
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
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.
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Hunter, werehunter, wifhunter. fun!
the real question is how are we going to refer to male wolves?
Is there a practical reason to count moon phases? Like its not impossible they were just counting the moon for fun but is it not more likely they were keeping track of the days for practical reasons ie. the period hypothesis?
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.
I really like that idea, in principle, of a sculptor with no reflection to work from doing a self-portrait. But seriously, even somebody having triplets doesn’t look like that unless they’re like… super morbidly obese already. Even accounting for foreshortening, I mean damn. That kind of figure is a strictly modern invention. But maybe, it’s still an interesting idea. But seriously.
I’ve got a bmi of 19 and it doesn’t look so significantly different looking down when I’m not pregnant, lol. I even asked my husband to confirm it wasn’t hella body dysmorphia. I, uh, am not going to post a picture, but you can plug various values into this visualizer and change the angle of view. It has always been pretty accurate for me.
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
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.)
Yep. A bit like a 7 day publicly displayed tracker of days on a 28 day lunar calendar cycle.
Was “I am the God of your Father” an editorial attempt to distinguish the deity from the gods of Egypt, or from the god of a Mother?
There’s some pretty odd details in that book, like in Isaac’s supposed patriarchal blessing which discussed “the sons of your mother bow down to you” or it being the only place there’s the male form of gebirah (“Great Lady”) - a title first applied in the text to Isaac’s mother whose name is based on the word for ‘chief.’ Who is supposedly later followed by a figure ‘Deborah’ (‘bee’) who is a leader of the people around the time we now know bees were being imported into Tel Rehov and regularly requeened to avoid genetic drift with local bee populations. Also weird that the events regarding a “land of milk and honey” supposedly take place in a land with no honey and only one discovered apiary.
That apiary gets burned down right around the time Asa allegedly deposed his grandmother the gebirah (“Great Lady”).
