One of the comments reads : Actually, we will probably never figure out, was it man or woman. but I thought this comment of the professor was an interesting eye opener. https://mastodonapp.uk/@MarkHoltom/112070436760917344
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Cool thought, but why is this in meme /C/ ?
A man makes blankets and he “works in textiles” a woman makes blankets and she “has a hobby making quilts”.
Derek, halt! Unga unga, no cave cuddles now. Me check bone-calendar, unga bunga, big chance for baby bump. We wait, sky spirits nod-nod. Timing everything, unga!
Sure, that was the way for woman to use a calender…
Lol, mansplain harder! I’m sure it had nothing to do with wanting to know when their next period was due, to, you know, know when their next period was due, and be prepared for that, without it having anything to do with a man… 🙄🤦♀️😂
The crux with all of those “first calendars” (idk which one is meant here, but there are multiple who claim this) is that we don’t even know if it’s a calendar at all. I mean, if this professor’s approach serves as an eve-opeher for some, we should retell it whenever possible, yet it doesn’t reflect any of the questions we should ask ourselves when seeing 28 carvings in a bone. Assuming that htis can only be a calendar is just the hidden assumption that numbers 25 and up could not have played a role anywhere else, because ppl were to primitive for those numbers somehow.
Perhaps they tracked how many calves in herd they had, or how many horses they had or how many bows they needed to make or how many children there were in the village. Perhaps they wanted to go higher and track something completely different and only got to 28 before they abandoned their approach to whatever they were doing.
eve-opeher
LOL. I guess if it reads, it reads
Yeah, no way to know what gender someone had so we just pick one based on our twisted worldview where some gender must be better than other because reasons.
we just pick one based on our twisted worldview where some gender must be better than other because reasons.
The only one doing this here is you.
In which words did I choose which gender that inventor was?
well you seem upset that an archaeologist suggested it was likely a woman, so something made you mad
I am as upset with suggesting it was a man, as some may try to do.
Maybe my comment sounded weird with just the context of the post, but I wrote it also with other comments in mind.
Not sure why you got down voted because you are absolutely right
- we don’t know
- society ascribes everything to the male
If we defaulted to “he or she” then things would be better but we simply don’t. It is always the man’s contribution.
Bruh relax
We should have a neologism for gender neutral version of “mankind” definitely.
I am just this one person always pushing a stick into an anthill every time gender is assumed out of preference and getting all the hate from both sides.
a man with a wife.
it’s good to know when it’s time to spend couple of days hunting the sabre tooth tiger.
Wife bad amirite
PMS deniers 🤣
Tell me you’ve never found the man in the boat without telling me you’ve never found the man in the boat.
Oh no my loved one is about to experience terrible pain that comes every few weeks, better complain about how this affects me and go do my own thing for awhile
More like he needs to know when to take a break when she’s most fertile so they can procreate. He’s already gone by the time she’s having “her time of the month”
I mean the lunar cycle is roughly 29 days with the argument that it’s 28 if you don’t count the new moon.
I realize this is a neat thought idea but it I think best demonstrates how easy it is to jump to conclusions.
In English common law, a “lunar month” traditionally meant exactly 28 days or four weeks, thus a contract for 12 months ran for exactly 48 weeks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_month
So, depending on the legal framework, a 28 day marker could be very useful. If they were actually tracking the moon, you’d think it would be 29 units even though a lunar month can vary between about 29.1 and 29.9 days. Then again, 28 notches on a stick means 29 sections, so…?
It’s interesting that a woman’s menstrual cycles is approx 28.1 days on average, with a standard deviation of 3.95 days. That means 28 days is a lot closer to the average menstrual cycle than the average lunar month. But, the standard deviation is a lot greater.
Other than tides, why do you need to know when the next full moon is? And can’t you just look at the moon and see how close it is waning to the full moon?
Not saying the calendar is definitely a woman’s, but wanting to know when you’re going to start leaking blood onto everything near you seems like a good reason to track a period.
So, since Islam uses the lunar calendar, you’re telling me that the reason why they use it is to track menstruations?
Good to know they are attentive to their women’s needs
I’m saying you don’t need to make marks on a bone to track the lunar cycle… you just look up.
I mean you can look at the moon to get a general sense, but if you want to be more precise then I’d use the new moon as the start and count the days until the next new moon.
As far as why, I mean the seasons generally follow the lunar cycle so it would be a way to count the seasons and time and plan and do literally anything you’d need to do that you’d track time for.
I bet you’d even want to track your menstrual cycle, I just wouldn’t limit it to that.
I think the real “issue” with the OP statement and what my response is meant to say is that it doesn’t have to be either or.
I conclude the moon has a vaj
Mussy?
Moossy
Well duh, Sokka was trying to get all up in it
I just finished TLA. I’d never seen it, and now I have, and it’s gone, and my life feels empty. Why would you bring this up? Why would you hurt me so?
Korra is good, but it doesn’t hit the same, and 70 years is not enough to fully industrialize a society.
Look up the Meiji Restoration in Japan. They went from a feudal, near-medieval society to an industrial society between 1870 and 1920, by the time they were done they are participating in both world wars.
You actually don’t have to suspend your disbelief so hard here, it’s the most believable part of the story of people who can bend elements with tai chi
Even if you take a Western lens to it and say ATLA takes place around 1850 that still puts Korra in the 1920s (and the air nation falling around 1750) and the only thing that really would be innacurate for comparing their timeline to ours is the lack of trains connecting the cities, at least in the earth kingdom where theres a lot of land to be crossed.
I suppose if you assume that Ba Sing Sa is self-sufficient with it’s large farms in the outermost ring then it makes sense from a tactical perspective to have fewer points of entry to the city. You’d also have to assume there’s either significant brain-drain from the villages into the city or that the villages keep to themselves so much that they have no need for better transportation between them
I’m not finding any good sources right now but some of the earliest trains were actually a singular railcar on wooden rails pushed by 1-2 people in much the same manner that the trains in Ba Sing Sa do, just sans Earth bending of course
I over thought this a lot and the only conclusion I could come to is the earth nation should be covered in railway lines. Extremely shortly after some of the first viable self-propelled steam locomotives were invented the first railwaya were built, and within 50 years entire countries were covered in railway lines connecting the smallest towns both that existed before the railroads and many built by the railroads.
The existence of bending would only accelerate this development since right of way would be rapidly built through earth bending, and locomotives could simply have a closed system of water to be bent to produce propulsion. An earth bender could also spin a stone flywheel attached to gears to produce propulsion too. Or combine these with steam propulsion to overcome the limitations of early steam engines and the poorer iron and steel alloys of the time
70 years is not enough to fully industrialize a society
Russia, China
Also, I imagine industry in general becomes significantly easier when you have people that can summon construction projects out of the ground or weld with their bare hands.
Also, society isn’t industrialised. One city state within society is industrialised.
Also, the fire nation was already undergoing industrialisation at the time of ATLA.
Seriously, the Fire Nation had mass produced internal combustion engines in ATLA. They put them in their mass produced tanks. Not to mention the fleet of ships with smokestacks indicating they probably had either diesel or steam powered ships. The Earth Kingdom and Water Tribes are both still in the process of industrializing, but the Fire Nation was already pretty much there, and the United Republic is primarily a Fire Nation breakaway state.
More than likely steam. Don’t need fuel to burn when when you can just make fire with magic. And we know people get employed for their bending ability since Mako got a job lightning-bending at the power plant.
It occurs to me that the solution might be to start referring to men as “wermen” again, and revert “men” to it’s gender neutral roots. That also means we can have a bunch of other prefixes for other genders.
Languages are fun.
That’s also where the “were” prefix in werewolf comes from.
Does that mean female werewolves should be called wowolves? (Or even better, woowolves)
Wifwolves, unfortunately.
lol what the fuck, yeah right, ancient germanic word “man” derives from latin… whoever drew this didnt bother to open up the dictionary once…
¯\(ツ)/¯
I’m not an entomologist.
“Entomology (from Ancient Greek entomon ‘insect’, and -logia ‘study’)[1] is the scientific study of insects, a branch of zoology. In the past the term insect was less specific, and historically the definition of entomology would also include the study of animals in other arthropod groups, such as arachnids, myriapods, and crustaceans. This wider meaning may still be encountered in informal use.”
pff nah, entomologists are experts at entoming people. you know, like putting them in a tom underground. dead. like that cara loft lady.
i need to branch out with my sources
Scholars seem to agree it stems from Proto-Indo-European, so Latin is not the source.
just lean all the way in and call us vermin
A woman’s cycle varies between 15 and 45 days, averaging 28.1 days, but with a standard deviation of 3.95 days. That’s a hell of a lot of variability from one woman to the next. And the same variability can be experienced by a large minority of women from one period to the next, and among nearly all women across the course of their fertile years.
On the other hand, the moon’s cycle (as seen from Earth) takes 27 days, 7 hours, and 43 minutes to pass through all of its phases. And it does so like clockwork, century after century.
Of the two, I am finding the second to have a much stronger likelihood of being the reasoning behind the notches.
Strange how gender-bigotry style historical revisionism and gender exceptionalism seems to get a wholly uncritical and credulous pass when it’s not done by a man.
Other than tides, why do you need to know when the next full moon is? And can’t you just look at the moon and see how close it is waning to the full moon?
Not saying the calendar is definitely a woman’s, but wanting to know when you’re going to start leaking blood onto everything near you seems like a good reason to track a period. Plenty of women are regular like clockwork, I was at 26 days almost exactly for years.
If you start to notice one thing happens pretty regularly and another thing happens regularly but on a larger scale… Say the monthly moon phases and the seasons, you can use the more frequent one to roughly track the less frequent one.
So you’re arguing that people would have more use to write moon cycles than women cycles? And you talk about bigotry?!
While I agree with you that the teacher in this post is wrong about what this is, I don’t think labeling “gender bigotry” indiscriminately as something both sexes do under one umbrella is accomplishing anything but minimizing the struggle women have endured for basically all of human existence up until the last few decades.
Personally, I wouldn’t fault this woman for thinking what she does if she’s willing to accept a broader explanation later, given that women have literally been sold as property up until a couple hundred years ago.
Women have the right to at least posit the ways they as a group have been held down, and that includes accepting their indignation and allowing them grace for when they’re actually wrong, because without those things they won’t actually learn the truth.
Further than that, I think it’s necessary for learning women now to have the same realization this one did that women throughout all of history save for this recent tiny sliver have been oppressed, even if it’s built on an incidentally faulty premise, that doesn’t mean the realization itself is wrong.
Covering up the discourse by labeling the process of realization as “gender bigotry” is itself an attempt at erasure, and very much puts you on the side of the oppressors, just because you think it’s distasteful to have this realization yourself.
I’m sure gender bigotry exists in the direction of women towards men. This ain’t it.
The gender-bigotry comes from the “what man needs to mark 28 days?” There’s snark behind the comment, and it’s unnecessary. That said, a woman could be just as likely as a man to mark moon phases. But saying “man” doesn’t mean “male” when talking about us as a species from my understanding. Seems like a broader term to use which includes the entirety of the homo-whatevers.
I’m just some guy here and am not educated in this stuff, though!
I doubt the teacher really believed this, and they were likely striving to just open their students’ minds to the idea that most innovations are probably assumed to be made by men
The point would be a lot more impactful if they didn’t make up a story to support their position.
This is a class on anthropology, the point was to challenge the assumptions made when interpreting artifacts/history with little context. No one made anything up lol
Why not use a real and confirmed example, then? Because they do exist.
Making a story up - such that it can be actively undermined - certainly does the job poorly at best, and actively hurts the objective at worst.
Never mind anything, making the abstract connection between one event and the number of marks you scratch on a wall was probably the equivalent of genius of the time, the first mathematician.
A woman invented the windshield wiper. Granted, a man inventes the whole effing rest of the car…
Yep. A bit like a 7 day publicly displayed tracker of days on a 28 day lunar calendar cycle.
Was “I am the God of your Father” an editorial attempt to distinguish the deity from the gods of Egypt, or from the god of a Mother?
There’s some pretty odd details in that book, like in Isaac’s supposed patriarchal blessing which discussed “the sons of your mother bow down to you” or it being the only place there’s the male form of gebirah (“Great Lady”) - a title first applied in the text to Isaac’s mother whose name is based on the word for ‘chief.’ Who is supposedly later followed by a figure ‘Deborah’ (‘bee’) who is a leader of the people around the time we now know bees were being imported into Tel Rehov and regularly requeened to avoid genetic drift with local bee populations. Also weird that the events regarding a “land of milk and honey” supposedly take place in a land with no honey and only one discovered apiary.
That apiary gets burned down right around the time Asa allegedly deposed his grandmother the gebirah (“Great Lady”).
I am sure the comments on this meme community post in a niche social media site will not be filled with butthurt men’s rights activists.
You could have at least used the term “misogynist” so as to not imply that men’s rights are a bad thing.
Hey, we found one!
Not seriously, “men’s rights activists” are a specific group of people that only exist to complain about and hate women. They don’t care about men’s rights, they are anti-feminists.
If you genuinely didn’t know this, then I’d love to know what Internet rock You’ve been hiding under. If you’re trying to concern troll, fuck off, MRAs are fucking scum.
-signed, a man.
I’ve definitely heard of misogynists, and of misogynists disguising themselves as legitimate men’s advocates, but I’d never heard of “men’s rights activists” as a specific group of misogynists before this.
Without this explanation, had someone said “men’s rights activists are misogynists,” I would have thought they were a misandrist, because it sounds like a general descriptor and not a specific group.
So what do you call it when someone who’s not a misogynist advocates for equal treatment in the areas where men get the short end of the stick?
Feels good to go with the flow, doesn’t it? And going for the audience’s applause? And while we’re at it, what are “women’s rights activists”, then? The undisputed incarnation of everything that is right and good in the world, I suppose?
-signed, a man, like you.
signed, a man
You could have left this part off, it was perfectly clear you’re a man
Have my upvote!
He died before he could carve 29.
Maybe they were narrating it
I’m a woman and I have never needed to chart 28 days.
that screenshot up there reads like some academic person with too much time on their hands trying too hard to congratulate themselves for solving some anthropological mystery.
Sandi is a comedian and presenter of UK show QI, not a researcher. She’s literally just talking about an epiphany.
“When I was a student at Cambridge…”
Believe it or not, in civilized countries it’s common for people to get higher education for the sake of education.
Her predecessor on QI, mr. Stephen Fry, was also an OxBridge fellow – known as one of Britain’s greatest comedians.
You told me she was a comedian, not a researcher. I told you she was a student. Now you are throwing more facts at me and you need to get a life.
But since before you were born people knew how long a woman’s menstrual cycle lasts. Most likely the Internet existed when you became an adult and thought about measuring things. The society you lived in had existing calendars that you were aware of if/when you had a menstrual cycle. You’ve never needed to “chart 28 days” but someone who lived long long ago may have wondered and they would have had no frame of reference so they decided to count.
I’m a woman and I have never needed to chart 28 days.
Is this because you don’t care when your next period is? Or because you don’t need to record it to remember it?
I can imagine a modern woman might not care if she always has menstrual products on hand or nearby. But, it might have been more meaningful in ancient times when there might have been more taboos associated with menstruation, plus it might have been more important to know as part of family planning. And, it might have been much less convenient to carry around whatever was needed to handle menstruation.
Also, in a modern world where calendars are everywhere, I can imagine someone might say “ok, so my next period will be in early July”. But, there was a time when days and months were not tracked, or were only tracked by priests, etc. In that kind of situation, I could imagine it might be useful to count the days until the next period was expected. On the other hand, a primitive society probably spends a lot more time outdoors and sees the moon a lot more often, so it might be just as easy to go “ok, so my next period will be when the moon’s 3/4 full”.
28 notches means that the bone had 29 sections, which more closely matches a lunar month than a typical menstrual period. But, I could see it being used either way.
Yeah, I don’t get it either. Weren’t most, if not all, ancient calendars lunar based? Far easier to work out a 28 day cycle than a 365.25 day cycle.
This is a refreshing comment, if any. Especially coming from a woman. Thank you.
