What does female sexuality tell us about evolution and pre-historic sex?

[Ava5]

The fact that it's so complex and responsive to patient, fear-free stimulation and so easily hurt by the wrong kind of handling? Women's bodies can be played like violins by a skilled partner: we have clits, we're sexual from head to toe if properly caressed and there're the multiple orgasms. All this seems like a total evolutionary waste if Homo Sapiens have always primarily engaged in the rapey patriarchal model of sex.

Is it all just a carry-over from our bonobo DNA? Is it supposed to facilitate pair bonding (maybe the 2nd trimester horniness is part of this)? It also all seems really excessive if it was all just intended for making babies. Just musing here.

First when excavating graves from pre-history it is often very difficult to tell male from female.

It's not difficult to tell adult male from female. Adult females have a wider pelvis and a pelvic structure that is very different from adult males. If the pelvis is not present it's impossible to sex adult skeletons, but you would know they were adult/juvenille (teenager). However, you would not be able to detect males from females pre puberty, but you would know they were pre puberty.

You would be able to tell what they ate though because the teeth, surprisingly will still be intact (some teeth). Usually rough grains seemed to be the basic diet, that wore down the dentine, but it's not known if this caused pain.

Pre historic graves often have a surprising mix of skeletons, male, female and non specific (pre puberty). Which gives rise to familial graves, a bit like we have today. It's unlikely that the family died of a disease and were buried, because the rest of the group would have left the bodies and moved on, if they could or the family would recognise disease and left the group. It would not be a family in the sense as we know it now.

Here is a picture of one

The easiest way to tell if a skeleton is male or female is by looking at the shape of the sciatic notch of the pelvis. A male's pelvis will have a V shaped sciatic notch and woman's will have a wide U shaped one. If the skeleton is of an adolescent or child, this is the only reliable way of telling without doing a dental DNA test (if there is enough dental DNA and if you're 100% sure that the skull comes from the same skeleton, which in certain burial practices might not be a given). Before about 20-25 both male and female skulls will be more grassile and it's more difficult to tell from the brow ridge or mandibular flare.

It's also difficult to see from grave goods whether a skeleton belonged to a male or female. It would depend on the social system and religious beliefs of the culture they lived in. It might be that a female skeleton that was buried with the accoutrements of a warrior was a warrior (in which case the skeleton will might carry extra clues to this), it might be that she was a member of a social caste that was of the same rank as warriors, possibly they died fighting for their village and were accorded the rites any other warrior would have got. We simply don't know for sure.

I think it's very unlikely that hunters/warriors were only men while women loafed about tending fires or wandered about finding limpets. In the same way as I think it's unlikely that men sat around fires beating their chests while the women folk got on with the business of keeping the extended family group alive. To my mind those ideas are based on patriarchal notions of sex roles and don't really take into account that, until we settled down to sow and reap, patriarchy probably didn't have a foothold because people were forced to live much more collaboratively in order to survive.

On the subject of Time Team, it's not a bad old starting point to understanding ancient cultures. Prof Aston was very definite about it being a tool to educate as well as entertain.

OK, I think my "Prehistoric Protein levels led to Women Warriors" theory is looking pretty dicey....

On the subject of Time Team, it's not a bad old starting point to understanding ancient cultures. Prof Aston was very definite about it being a tool to educate as well as entertain.

Well Time Team has led to a family meme in our household....we now shout out "Ritual! whenever we see something that can't be otherwise explained...

On a related note....and I know this is a bit of a derail, but it has concerned me for a while....

Is Time Team sexist?

Because there are many...many scenes of three old guys standing around pontificating while several extremely qualified women are down in a muddy hole digging away. And Phil, especially, seemingly barges in when someone finds something (and it seems like mostly women) and blusters for the camera. "Weeel now! Whadawe 'ave 'ere!?"

But.....

Then you have Carenza and Helen and Raksha...and many of the go-to specialists...and they get good airtime....

But I swear I male-cringe when Phil jumps in and starts mansplaining a piece of pot to a woman who probably has a PHD. "Weeel little missy...looks like a 'andle from a pitcher now don't it?"

If the pelvis is not present it's impossible to sex adult skeletons

Is this true? I'm sure there are many cases of skeletons sexed from skulls alone, or even parts of skulls.
I have a friend who is a senior lecturer in osteology, I should ask her :)

Regarding ethnography, there have been several TV programmes looking at remote tribes, both by Ray Mears and another guy who's name escapes me.
The hunting thing is interesting. I remember one programme where the men went off on a several day's hunting trip while the women stayed home and did the gathering. The hunting was very prestigious and they men set off with great ceremony.
However, it wasn't really successful. They were looking for small animals like monkeys. I think they caught one squirrel after 3 or 4 day's away.
They were pretty fed up about it, but went back to the village and celebrated the success, and shared out the "kill".
Meanwhile the women had been managing fine by themselves and ate pretty well, although vegetable stew type fare.
Even though the tribe had no influence from western patriarchy, roles were highly gendered though. A woman going on the hunt was unthinkable.
Also, they discussed sex, and although the women laughed and gossiped about sex with their men, it was pretty clear than sex was expected of them. Although they seemed happy with this. They were laughing and joking about how their men would act if they didn't get their sex.

It is possible to sex a skeleton from a skull. There are markers on adult skulls that are fairly clear. Adolescent skulls are less clear as they all tend to look like adult female skulls, so more grassile, no heavy brow ridges, no mandibular flare etc.

It's also possible to DNA test tooth pulp which will show categorically whether the skull came from a male or female.

On the subject of teeth... if I recall, when teeth wear down slowly over time due to grit in ground grains, the nerve in the tooth retracts as the dentine hardens so there would probably have been little pain.

Okay, this is really wild speculation...

Given that there are health related issues from having an older father, it would make sense for women to have a preference for younger men?

As younger men generally have a more female appearance than older men, would it not make sense for women to be sexually attracted to gracile people (women and men in their twenties)?

Tooth pulp does not exist in skeletons that are prehistoric and breaking down teeth to try to extract a remnant of pulp is probably hinderance. I'm skeptical of the heavy brow ridges because, patriarchy! Heaven help us all if females were given a more ceremonial burial than males pre history. Gender did not exist pre history. Biology did.

There is a huge amount of research based on extracting DNA from prehistoric teeth! It's an entire sub discipline in both human osteology and archaeozoology.

There are also many sexually dimorphic features of the skull including brow ridges demonstrated for humans in contemporary populations on a statistical basis. It's not some made up thing.

DNA is different from chromosome. Brow ridges are indeed a part of the differences between humans, but as a difference between sex? It's new and it's coming from a study in which those who study it have been raised in a society that has gender and sex. Gender being the dominant.

It's not new at all! What are you talking about?

Anyway, gender socialisation in post history might well have changed the dynamic of the skull, we know socialisation can change the brain, especially during adolescence. We also know that this change can happen until the brain is about 25 years old.

It is new. It's only happened within the last two centuries. That's new! You do have to factor in cultural and gender approaches when analysing data.

Skulls have become less sexually dimorphic over time.

Then why are you specifically picking out brown ridges?

All scientific evidence about the physical differences between males and females that has been demonstrated using scientific methods in the last two hundred years is equally dubious under your explanation.

Gender did not exist pre history. Biology did.
I have no idea how you can know when gender roles became part of the human condition.

I would argue that gender differences certainly did exist in prehistory, because we can see variable outcomes for men and women in different prehistoric cultures in areas such as diet, bone modification and mortality profiles.

On a separate note, you can sex skeletons from ancient DNA, because there are different sequences for specific genes on the x and y chromosome. You can identify sex by looking for those specific genes in DNA.

Also, you can sex boys and girls, and skeletons still within the mother, just with a lesser degree of certainty depending on age. A neonate is more dimorphic than a seven year old, for example.

Sylvia.. (thanks for correcting my spelling, I knew I was wrong, but couldn't work out how! )

We know that fewer male babies live to be adults even now for various biological reasons so it might be that women might be attracted to more adolescent bone structures. Whether for preferential reasons or simply because there were fewer typically structured males about.

Really interesting thread, I love this sort of stuff. I think SomeDyke has made a lot of sense.

I have read a lot of books and papers about prehistoric people and I think we don't really know much about them at all. We make educated guesses based on archaeology, grave goods etc. but we cannot be sure. We know a lot about history because it is written down but we shouldn't assume prehistory was the same. Just because patriarchy exists now does mean it was always that way, but it is hard to prove the contrary because much of the interpretation of archaeological evidence has been done by men under patriarchy IYSWIM.

Everything I have read about pre-farming societies suggests that they were far more egalitarian than later cultures, and I would guess that there was far less distinction between the sexes. Everybody needed to pull their weight to survive, the idea that weak, helpless women needed to be looked after by strong, capable men is frankly ludicrous. I think it's also likely that women had far more say in their own sexual relationships than later cultures too. Farming allowed a few, usually men, to gain a huge amount of wealth and power over others. I think this probably lead to a few men collecting (by bribes or coercion) as many women as they could, then free women would become a rarity.

This may already have been covered - I have read the full thread but now I can't remember.

In terms of women protecting themselves. Wouldn't they have been pregnant most of the time?

This is a very interesting thread!