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?

suspect there may have been a bit of racism at play there. We have pelvic floor and sphincter muscles for a reason.

I agree. Most animals are pretty well potty trained, it's not nice to shit in your house or while running from a predator or having sex.

WRT breastfeeding time alone, there is recent evidence of great disparities between different prehistoric cultures. Some would nurse until the child is 4 or older, others only 1, others somewhere in between.
How are the able to establish the timings with prehistoric cultures? I know the higher the primate the longer they breastfeed so would assume humans the longest?

So many questions. How did they know how to have sex ?

How do cats?

Surprisingly, life expectancy was limited often because of tooth related problems. Infection was deadly and by a person’s 30s their teeth would have suffered a fair amount of decay. This could have proved fatal for many.

Also, the image of “cave people” is often majorly distorted. We were far more socially civilised than many assume. In order to sustain a decent gene pool, we would have to communicate and cooperate with large numbers. Additionally, we haven’t physically evolved to be that different from early Homo Sapiens (examples such as tolerance to lactose can be found in Europe). I don’t believe that our menstral cycles would have been markedly different as our environment and lifestyle in the western world has only changed very recently and yet there is no evidence that women experienced different menstrual patters before the industrial revolution.

Furthermore, there are reports of ‘28 day calendar’ markings from before the Neolithic period suspected of being menstral tracking.

Also, our best evidence that menstral cycles weren’t too different is that those living less so-called developed hunter-gatherer lifestyles still have fairly regular periods. Malnutrition does cause period regularity to decrease but to declare all Hunter-gatherer tribes malnourished is to look exclusively through western lenses.

As to how women coped with periods before modern luxuries? Free bleeding may have been popular as we lived in a hot climate during the early days of Homo sapiens. But who knows...

Meganwills the joke wasnt that funny the first time, did you have to make it twice?

I am gc but turning threads that have literally nothing to with trans in to threads about trans is boring and puts people off.

Would it kill you to discuss women and theur bodies?

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).

Possibly men would - until comparatively recently, women tended to have a higher mortality due to - guess what? - CHILDBIRTH!

I imagine it would be just like any other mammal that menstruates.

Female unspayed dogs menstruate.
It just drips out occasionally.

Dogs don't menstruate.

Female dogs do - When they are on heat they bleed

I have had 4 female unspayed female dogs who all regularly bleed

It isn't menstruation. They bleed, but it isn't menstruation. It has a completely different function.

Google...

Is 1 surviving baby per woman enough to sustain a population

It may do if the majority of surviving children are girls. (And on average, females are naturally tougher than males).

So - family group of 1 male, 3 females - potentially 3 viable offspring every few years, and if 2 of them (say) are female, that is further breeding potential.

Other way round - 1 female, 3 males - only one pregnancy so even if 2/3rds of pregnancies are female, much lower population. (Especially with 50% infant mortality)

Haffiana - pedantic much?

It’s the rarest equivalent

Stone age hunter gatherers would have had a baby every 3/4/5 years as each baby would need to be breastfed and carried for an extended period - a mother could not have nourished and carried two infants simultaneously.

I believe that many aboriginal peoples killed or abandoned infants under about the age of three if the mother had dies - just because it wasn't possible to care for them. (I can remember reading this donkey's years ago, but I can't recall where.)

I think I can answer the q about twins.

There’s a book about mitochondrial DNA - the seven daughters of eve - and it talks about a cave woman having twins and how luckily a nearby tribe had recently lost a baby and so they were able to take one of the twins otherwise they would have had to kill the smaller/weaker one. I read that book at around age 16 and have never forgotten that horrifying thought.

It's not pedantic to clarify that bleeding during heat is not menstruation. There are two completely different physiological processes in operation.

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.
I remember seeing a program where it explained that the thigh bones of ancient man had the same deep groove in it that today is only found in elite athletes.

How are the able to establish the timings with prehistoric cultures?

From ancient teeth! As they grow, children's teeth lay down new layers of enamel, which contain an element called Barium that they get from breast milk. So by looking at the distribution of barium in the teeth of skeletons of children, you can tell at what age they started weaning and at what age they stopped breastfeeding altogether!

From ancient teeth! As they grow, children's teeth lay down new layers of enamel, which contain an element called Barium that they get from breast milk. So by looking at the distribution of barium in the teeth of skeletons of children, you can tell at what age they started weaning and at what age they stopped breastfeeding altogether!

That's fascinating, thank you!

Haffiana - pedantic much?

It’s the rarest equivalent

Really, no it isn't. It isn't at all. It is oestrus, and it is the time when an animal is fertile. It is far closer to the sort of mucus shed during ovulation. It acts as a signal to the male that now is the time to mate, and that the female is receptive, which is most animals only happens at certain times (unlike humans). And it is in small quantities compared to menstruation which involves the shedding of the womb lining.

Very very few animals menstruate.

I suspect that many infants died in childbirth or soon after and there would have been wetnurses readily available among a woman's peers in the case of twins. This was the case even in relatively recent times - maybe around a hundred years ago or so - when maternal death in childbirth or the birth of twins could leave a baby in a precarious position.

(My mother had a memory of a Traveler woman whose baby had died co-nursing twins of a farm wife in return for food for herself and her family. The Traveler family camped on a patch of the farm for about a year while this arrangement lasted).

Moss, leaves, wool, grass.

When human beings were not quite human and didn't wear clothes - well, think about bitches. They menstruate too. They leave stains.

This is one of the most interesting threads in aaagggeeessss!

And as is often the case on threads like this - there's some incorrect/misunderstood (and bizarre comments - incontinence/how to have sex!)

Life expectancy - this is low because the first 3 yrs were brutal and the next 10 were very difficult. If, however, they lived past 20, modern science now believes that it was not unusual for early man to live until 50 - 70.

Menarche - early woman periods probably started between ages 7-14. Which is the same as today. There have been variations - when we first started living in settlements which resulted in less fitness and higher sickness. And 'modern' times - malnutrition disease etc meant our periods were delayed by about 5 years. It's believed that childhood was shorter so females did have babies eskruwr than we do.

There's some really interesting articles online. Suzanne Sadedin, Hanson/Gluckman research and loads of others. If I could go back and make my own choices, I'd love to have studied evolutionary biology....

Estrous cycles, sorry. Still they leave stains.

Probably the same way as women did in Regency times. Bed rest and rags which were then burnt. Periods apparently were much shorter in the past.

In terms of survival I imagine we would have been much safer from predators if we weren’t leaving a trail of blood behind. It seems odd that nature left us vulnerable in that way.

In terms of survival of the species, menstruation would send an olfactory signal that a woman would soon be fertile and would attract male attention.

Reliance on the sense of smell would have been much greater than for us- and of course, there would not have been the shame about natural body odours that exist in our societies.