Human advancement was due to feminisation of the species.

[Garlick]

Thought you might like this! From the introduction:-

Humans only emerged from the caveman era once females realised the toughest males didn't always make the best partners. Why go for brute force when you could instead choose a clever tool-maker with better social skills? This preference for more intelligent or creative males meant testosterone levels dropped and modern humans evolved to become slimmer and more easier to live with.

theconversation.com/early-humans-had-to-become-more-feminine-before-they-could-dominate-the-planet-42952

I'm no anthropologist but it seems to make sense.

Just some pictures, for no particular reason :)
Hutu woman with wood and toddler - now
Iriquois women processing grain with baby on board - 1664
English women stack hay with children playing - 1859

Do you know, Copper, I think you might be onto something there.

If we look at what happened when living in settlements began I think that can give us quite a lot of clues. Agriculture was actually harder work than hunter/gatherers were used to. If we look at a lot of religions we see the same fall from paradise where we lived a life of ease at one with the earth. In the Bible, people are punished by having to toil in the fields. I'm bringing this up because folk tales come from somewhere and can give us clues to the stories people headed down.

Agriculture was more reliable in the long term, but required more man hours in the field - literally in this case, as women had to have more and more children. Society also seems to have moved towards family groups rather than tribal at this point, as land/possessions could be handed down like never before. This may have been the point women's role changes further as the paternity of children became a much more pressing issue. The birth of Eve at this point in history came after Lilith disappeared in the tale.

A massive tangent, but I find it interesting anyway! But the article is surely talking about an time before civilisation. Let's not forget the importance of language, while tool making is of course crucial, passing on knowledge in an efficient way, as well as the ability to think and plan in abstract ways must have been key at this point.

Sailor, you're probably right about the verbal histories recalling paradise as a foraging economy.

Wikipedia: Nutritional standards of Neolithic populations were generally inferior to that of hunter-gatherers, and their life expectancy may well have been shorter too, in part due to diseases and harder work - hunter-gatherers must have covered their food needs with about 20 hours' work a week, while agriculture required much more and was at least as uncertain.

The hunter-gatherers' diet was more varied and balanced than what agriculture later allowed. Average height went down from 5'10" (178 cm) for men and 5'6" (168 cm) for women to 5'5" (165 cm) and 5'1" (155 cm), respectively, and it took until the twentieth century for average human height to come back to the pre-Neolithic Revolution levels. Agriculturalists had more anaemias and vitamin deficiencies, more spinal deformations and more dental pathologies.

More on nomadic foragers: The egalitarianism typical of human hunters and gatherers is never total, but is striking when viewed in an evolutionary context. One of humanity's two closest primate relatives, chimpanzees, are anything but egalitarian, forming themselves into hierarchies that are often dominated by an alpha male. So great is the contrast with human hunter-gatherers that it is widely argued by palaeoanthropologists that resistance to being dominated was a key factor driving the evolutionary emergence of human consciousness, language, kinship and social organization.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution

Garlick's image "English women stack hay with children playing" actually features "while men actually cut the hay in the background and it doesn't need to be mentioned". Quite clearly visible.

Yes, you're right, TT. Nice painting, isn't it?

I didn't realise I had to highlight the presence of men when posting pictures of women taking their children to work! It would be nice if said men were sharing the childcare as well as the work - there are pictures of this, but pretty small as a proportion and the children are usually big enough to be helping.

For me, the pictures illustrate women's flexible ability to do several jobs at once. And continue to raise questions about how we ended up with modern ideas about labour division and gender roles.

I will be careful to point out male persons in any photos I post in future, though. Oh, maybe I won't

The European tradition is that agriculture is men's work, with women called on to fill in at times of the year, like haying, when there was work for everyone, though dairying was one area where there was year-round employment for women. But then rural life had a lot of jobs which weren't directly on the soil and didn't relate to crops raised for sale, and women did a lot of that peripheral work.

Somewhere I read that in societies where the population was limited by the amount of productive land, like Europe or China, land was the most valuable asset and men worked on it. In other places, like Africa or North America, there was plenty of land, so farming was low-status work and women did it. Furthermore, in those places where land was scarce, women were considered so peripheral that a family would have to pay a dowry to a husband in order to make him willing to let a woman live on his precious land, whereas among Africans or American Indians, at least a wife was a useful labourer, and a husband would have to pay a bride-price for her.

The Chinese ideogram for "man" is field-strength. It's explained here ("husband" is also fun):
www.themaninchina.com/readingchinesecharacters.htm

That makes sense TeiTetua - the hierarchy within farming is still with men at the top!