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?

Pass, since cats are continent, I would assume humans would be.

Oh I thought cats were trained as kittens

(Domesticated ones obviously!)

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

^

Surely your life expectancy would drop with each subsequent pregnancy / childbirth? Even just a simple infection could kill you.

I reckon if you made it past child bearing age I. E. At that time it was probably around 30, you'd have a fighting chance of making it into your 40's or even 50's.

I read a book years ago about some native woemn in north america or canada who sat around in a particularly mossy spot and told each other the stories of the tribe - sounded quite nice...

Pass yes, by the mother cat though!
Lots of wild animals choose particular areas to toilet, don't soil where they eat/sleep.

If 50% of babies die in infancy, but then everyone else lives until 50s, average life expectancy would be late 20s.
But it's misleading to think this means most women die by their late 20s.

They would have been pregnant or breastfeeding most of the time so would have had very few compared to us

@MangoFeverDream

Im not sure about prehistoric times, but in the times Im talking about no, women, even well off nes generally lived to abut late 20s. hey very rarely find skeletons much older.

Fertile women were also prized assets, as awful as that sounds.

What times are you talking about Patroclus?

Just think of the amount of disease around, infection potential and lack of any medicine.

Im talking about arund 1400 BC as thats my area.

Life expectancy was much longer 30,000 years ago then (the Stone Age) - if you survived infancy then adults would live into their 50s.

@Smoggle is that definitely adult women? Just wondering because so many women die in childbirth. And it’s certainly not unheard of for facts about men to be abstracted into facts about people in general.

Blibby - interesting point. Of course, 'cave women' would have had fewer pregnancies & births than women from later agricultural/industrial societies, so you might expect longer lifespans. I know there have been studies of the oldest skeletons from anglo-saxon burial sites, and their have been as many or more elderly female skeletons than male.

We cannot be sure because the fossil record is incomplete, but so far as we can tell, stone age men and women in their 40s and beyond were extremely rare. We speculate that they may have been reverered for their wisdom and memory, but that is just a guess. The Mold Cape (British Museum, another of Neil McGregor's 100 Objects) suggests there was a cult of youth, with leadership in the hands of teenagers.

If women only lived to their 20s, they would barely be able to have enough surviving babies in that time to sustain the population.

I'm sure I read somewhere that a diet relatively low in protein makes for a later puberty (and it's not that long ago - 1930s - that it was entirely normal not to start your periods until you were 16 or even older). So you'd have a few periods, then get pregnant, then breastfeed exclusively, then have a couple more periods, then get pregnant again and so on. Any period of dearth, with a sudden drop in calorie intake that lasted several months would knock menstruation on the head for a lot of women - women in Japanese POW camps during World War II often stopped bleeding for the duration.

There have been (possibly still are) cultures where menstruating girls go and sit in a hut till it's all over.

I read periods are far worse now as a rule too. So free bleeding wouldnt have been as traumatic!

Anglo-Saxons did not live in caves. They had agriculture so plenty to eat, relatively speaking.

We may be culturally squemish about the likely fact that most stone-age mothers and fathers may have been in their mid-teens.

Lets say a stone age woman has her first baby in her late teens. It dies aged 3, and she has another baby when she's 21, and a third baby when she's 25. She then dies of old age at 27. Her breastfed 2 year old can't survive without a mother and also dies. Maybe her 6 year old will survive. Is 1 surviving baby per woman enough to sustain a population?

So much we don't know.

We know that modern Europeans all have a fair bit of Neaderthal DNA in them. Whether this was broad-mided neolithic multicultualism or coercive abduction of females is anyone's guess.

Life expectancy was about 30 - 35 then. And the women would have been pregnant / breast feeding for their entire adult lives. I doubt that they'd have had many periods at all.

Also if a woman dies at 27, has a couple of babies die at 2 or 3 and one survive, lets say to 30, that gives an average life expectancy of 15.

Average life expectancy of 30 does not mean that most people died at 30.