How did cave women deal with periods?

[howmanyleftfeet]

How did our ancient ancestor women deal with periods before we wore clothes?

Periods must have been terribly inconvenient then - did they have periods the same as us?

Do the kind of apes we're close relatives of, have periods like us? Do other animals? Do they really just walk around bleeding?

I can't help wondering if maybe they didn't have periods as heavy / as long as ours. Am I right in thinking, sportswomen who are super fit often don't have regular periods? Presumably cave women would have been super fit and on the move a lot. (Or they wouldn't have survived). Did they perhaps menstruate less often?

Could it be that women didn't ovulate / menstruate except in quieter seasons when not on the move?

I think it’s just as simplistic to say that that’s a modern, sexist view of the past, but you’re right, I was being somewhat flippant. I certainly wasn’t suggesting that they were unfit. However, we don’t know that they did hunt and, even if they did, I don’t think it requires the level of superfitness that would suppress menstruation.

well if it was when they had a fur covering, maybe it wasnt as noticable, or maybe they didnt have them as we do, be a good way to get picked off by a predator smelling of blood for a week

Also I wonder if it was that inconvenient before clothes. It's mainly the blood getting on clothes or other fabrics like chairs that is the annoying part. And the embarrassment of this happening. But if fabric doesn't exist to get stained, and it's happening to every female member of the tribe so it's not embarrassing, would it even be a problem really?

Sometimes modern women's periods return early when they are exclusively breastfeeding, but the difference is we don't tend to carry babies/toddlers constantly and sleep with them - a baby/toddler with constant access to a breast is going to be on and off much more frequently than a modern ebf baby who is fully clothed, with a fully clothed mother, frequently in buggies/cots/chairs/on the floor etc.

So 9 months of pregnancy plus maybe 2-3 years of intensive breastfeeding, means they might only have a period every 4 years.

Add a later puberty, lower life expectancy and there wouldn't be that many periods to cope with.

Constantly pregnant then dead before they were 30 perhaps.

I've wondered about babies in cave times in places where people wore furs and animal skins to keep warm. Did the babies keep pooping on the animal skins and was this annoying as hell to their mums?

Dried out animal dung is still used in some parts of the world. Lovely!

(Not that I'm judging - more a desire not to strap animal dung to my own fanny every month)

Buttered - they would probably have been much more in tune with their babies toileting cues and would have avoided poo inside/on clothes.

Why are we assuming that cave people were malnourished? They were probably much healthier than we are today.

Really?

So we're talking post-fire, cooked food, beginnings of language and culture etc. Living in family groups. 'Elders' would be in their twenties, grandparents a rare thing, mostly in their early thirties. Infant mortality well over 50%.

They weren't dim, as evidenced by the swimming reindeer sculpture in the British Museum:

Yes I suppose so Smoggle, they would have practiced what we would call elimination communication but still, there must have been quite a few accidents.

Fascinating subject.

Maybe you’d just wipe or wash it off as with snot, poop etc

I think I’ve read that in places where they don’t have nappies children will wear crotch less clothes and just squat to pee and poo from toddler age.

Mockers - when we talk about average life expectancy, remember infant mortality was really high. So the average life expectancy at birth might have been 30, but if you survive til 5, you would probably live into your 50s (30,000 years ago).

They didnt have regular periods, some hardly had them at all. Women had an average life exectancy of perhaps late 20s. Theres a lot of theories that richer, noble woman were seen as chosen by gods due to their regular menstruation in laterminoan and mycenaean culture, and all sorts of strange rituals connected to it, especially in Sparta.

Women had an average life exectancy of perhaps late 20s
Is that the average for adult women, or the average of all females born given 50% infant mortality?

So like a pad? Makes sense that dehydrated animal dung would be absorbent

Weren't they also very hairy all over?? So the hair may have soaked up alot of the blood. They wouldn't have had blood just running down their legs making a mess because they were covered in fairly thick hair.

If we go back to our half-ape state, we probably didn't care about the blood running down legs. Does a dog in heat care? Does a cat care about poo crumbs on its bottom.

It's a quiet scandal that most of the world's population today in low income countries, the vast majority of children & many adults, especially women, are malnourished. Nobody wants to point out what a huge economic drain this is on these countries' development. Not being malnourished is a modern development for humans.

There are very interesting studies on modern-hunter-gatherer society women in deepest jungles. Low body fat %s, low iron intake, low protein intake, constant activity, constantly reproductively active -> low flow when they do menstruate. They only have about 80 periods in total lifetime to deal with compared to the 400 we modern western women can expect.

Near constant pregnancy or nursing

Women had an average life exectancy of perhaps late 20s

Isn’t this misleading? As in, if you survived childhood you stood a reasonable chance of living into your 40s/50s?

I'm trying but failing to find any good info about how traditional artic peoples dealt with women's periods. The period hut features in some native American stories (I also heard about huts in East Africa). Only makes sense for settled communities, though.

Would cave women/ people have been continent? I’m just wondering if this was something that evolved with the invention of toileting facilities or whether mankind has always been “toilet trained”

Because if not I guess people would be used to the feeling of liquid running down their legs and it would be a whole different situation to the one we imagine