How did cave women look after their babies?

[Lorddenning1]

Ok so I have a 6 week old baby and he has lots of stuff, a crib, Moses basket, cot and a a pod/nest, this is all for sleeping, don't get me started on a pram car seat, feeding stuff...
Back in the caveman times how did the ladies take care of the babies, like in winter how did they keep them warm, how did they keep the babies quiet so they didn't get eaten or killed by other tribes. What about nappies, was colic around then?

I often sit and wonder about these things, also how babies were made, did they just figure it out and then make the connection that everything they had sex, 9 months later a baby would appear,,,

Does anyone else think about these things or do I have cabin fever and need to get out more?

TBH - there is no real evidence that the majority of our ancestors were ever cave dwellers. Caves may have been used as burial area's or sacred sites hence why we find remains there. If you are interested in looking back, have a read of Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear series - its a semi-romance (well - the 2nd book onwards is) but there is a lot of focus on survival techniques and how we think people lived 25000 years ago. It also looks a great deal in depth at raising a baby as well as the mixing of early humans and Neanderthals.

I think about stuff like this too!

I imagine being near a stream or long pond and washing shit and blood off in one end whilst hanging stuff on tree branches etc.

Good question !

Must have been even harder to look after mobile children. Would they randomly wander out of caves or refuse to run away from predators ? Did they go through terrible twos ?

Thoroughly recommend the Earths Children book series, Clan of the cave bear is the first one. It's very well researched and answers all those questions. Just bare in mind it has rather a lot of erotica in the later books.

They likely used a mix of elimination communication and moss/lambswool around infants. Animal furs are very warm, for clothes and bedding, along with straw. Attachment parenting, slings, babies breastfed on demand and co-sleeping won't be crying for long lengths at night. But fires kept lit kept predators away. Food would be pre chewed, mashed with rocks, fed from fingers and ivory or wooden spoons. They teethed on bones etc community and intergenerational living means there was always someone to share holding the baby and even shared breastfeeding. Also living in packs/tribes in tents/clay structures or caves would increase warmth from all the bodies, and wild animals rarely attack large groups of humans so there was safety in numbers.

Such an interesting thread OP.

Thanks for the book suggestions.

Clan of the Cave Bear book series is fantastic.

Realistically infant mortality would have been high for a start.

Babies would have been breastfed till toddlerhood, carried/worn pretty much constantly and likely would have been naked most of the time rather than in a nappy style covering.

I imagine they quite literally had a village to help! I have thought about this have always imagined babies raised as a collective amongst the women in each tribe, sharing breastfeeding, night wakes, taking turns, almost like a crèche style? I may be talking absolute nonsense obviously but it would definitely make sense to do that! We raise babies so isolated now, or I do anyway, we have a whole set of different challenges now. We have all the equipment and fancy gear but I feel like we’ve lost our support systems along the way.

They probably discovered that their MIL wasn't as bad as they first thought she was! 😉

Not necessarily malnutrition, but using a lot of calories carrying a child on your hip/back, walking many kilometres a day to forage and also breastfeeding several times an hour including in the night would have suppressed ovulation. Later societies where there was more food available and women would have been able to leave babies somewhere and not breastfed so frequently would have meant periods returning much quicker - much like now a lot of women find that despite exclusively breastfeeding, their periods return once the baby sleeps for 4+ hours an night.

I think about this stuff too! Congratulations on your baby!
I listened to a podcast once where they spoke about the Menopause Hypothesis which explained that humans and I think whales (?) are some of the only species on Earth where the females go through menopause. They think it was an evolutionary adaptation to avoid grandmothers having babies at the same time as their daughters; this would allow them to practically help, and to pass on how to deal with the complexities of raising and keeping a human infant safe and alive. It fascinated me!

Modern women probably have many more periods to deal with than prehistoric women did - girls would have gone through puberty much later, and then mostly would have been pregnant and then breastfeeding.

This is going to be like that thread where we all discover our menfolk think about the Roman Empire six times a day.

I do think a lot about how prehistoric women would have cared for babies. During the hunter/gatherer era, tribal groups would have been small and mobile. So babies would probably have been strapped on with a sling made of animal skins. From my own experience, babies don’t cry so much if they are held upright by mum most of the time.

I have a friend who grew up in a rural area of a third world country and she says the kids went naked unless it was really too cold. They were all toilet-trained very young as they learned from early days that being covered in wee and poo made them feel cold and smelly and uncomfortable. It was also one of those places where women give birth in silence. Cultural practices can change so much from place to place even today it’s hard to imagine what it was like a hundred years ago, let alone before recorded history.

There are many societies in the world, mainly in developing countries, where baby rearing practices are the same or very similar to what has been done for thousands of years. For example in west Africa, in the villages, babies are trained to pee 'on demand' and mums learn signs of when baby needs to go, so no nappies are needed. Babies are carried on their mother's backs throughout the day whatever the mother is doing so they are usually content and quiet, and can breastfeed on demand. As they progress to solid food they are given food chewed by mum. As they begin to toddle and become a little independent everyone in proximity takes on a collective parenting role. There is nothing in the way of baby equipment used, only some baby clothes and a wrap to secure baby to mum's back. Baby sleeps in bed with parents at night.
I have never seen more calm and contented babies than those in west Africa.

What are we then? Ah I see…..like bats I suppose.

Exclusively breastfed babies that sleep snuggled up next to their mothers don't cry at night - they wake to latch on and fall asleep feeding.

Babies mostly cry at night because they are frightened. All or most other species sleep next to their young.

Never mind cave women, I often wonder how my mum coped without headphones and podcasts in the the dead of night! 😆
in reality I’m sure a lot of prehistoric kids died

I just read a book called The World Until Yesterday By anthropologist Jared Diamond that talks about this. There’s a chapter on childhood. He bases it on his own time spent in Papua New Guinea which has traditional tribes who were uncontacted until the 1930s and were basically living Stone Age lives. Babies were held in slings and rarely put down; child rearing was collective; babies were breastfed until 3 or 4; there would sometimes be infanticide if another one came along too quickly for the mother to cope with two. It’s really interesting. His other book Guns Germs and Steel talks about how agriculture got going in various parts of the world, particularly the “Fertile Crescent” in the Middle East where certain plant species were more amenable to domestication, eventually giving rise to early settled civilisations. Fascinating stuff.

Yes I think about this and I know it’s very weird but whenever I see new couples together I imagine them having sex! Or I wonder what they do when they have sex!!

"how babies were made, did they just figure it out and then make the connection that everything they had sex, 9 months later a baby would appear,"

They saw animals mating?

Random thought about all the proximity living… do you think they had less aversion to the other adults’ bodily smells than we do? Was there a ‘hive nose’ where others’ scent was less repellent? I personally cannot bear sharing space with anyone except my partner and kids!!

%3D%3D

Infant mortality rate would've been very high. High in 1800, and higher as you go back in time.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041714/united-kingdom-all-time-child-mortality-rate/

To be honest this is pretty much how I parented my first baby, only way to keep the peace!

I think looking after children was very much a family/village effort. Young, fit mothers probably handed the babies over to the older relatives whilst they worked. It's an interesting subject!

@Lovesgotme do you think the men would stay with one women or sleep around, would his women get jealous, was there such thing as marriage back then?