Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture
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Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture
#2The author fails to present any serious evidence for their claim. I suspect that sexism began long before the invention of farming.
Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture
#3The author fails to present any serious evidence for their claim. I suspect that sexism began long before the invention of farming.
It's a slippery slope, but I don't think they're directly claiming the cause of sexism. Instead, the point they're claiming is: "Women descended from plough-users are less likely to work outside the home, to be elected to parliament or to run businesses than their counterparts in countries at similar levels of development who happen to be descended from hoe-users."
So the bulk of the argument stems from some initial qualitative assessment of the region's agricultural state (i.e. hoe or plow) and then comparing it to present day stats for the metrics he outlines.
Your suspicions are probably right, but I don't think the author would even disagree necessarily. I think this is just an interesting look into one of the factors that may have been responsible.
Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture
#4Idiocy of opinion piece journalists correlates inversely with penis size.
Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture
#5A claim about "all-powerful mother goddesses" before the end of the fifth millennium BC is inherently unhistorical. The submitted article notes, "For each group, the data included a description of its agricultural methods as far back in time as it was possible to go using historical evidence or, in the case of groups which did not have a written language, the first time they were observed by outsiders." That's much nearer in time than the transition to plowing the article refers to.
There was no writing anywhere during the earliest part of that transition, and if we saw statues of voluptuous female figures in some places (as we do) from that far back, it is at least as likely that the statues are porn as that they are representations of powerful goddesses. Archeology has historically systematically underestimated, perhaps for delicate readers, the amount of sheer erotic art that was produced by early human beings. The oldest surviving human art on at least two continents is crude drawings of vulvae, so the working hypothesis until additional evidence is found is that ancient human beings did not have a highly developed religion of "all-powerful mother goddesses" but rather incoherent local folk religions that didn't exclude teenage boys (the ancient artists of surviving ancient art were mostly teenage boys) from producing crudely drawn and crudely sculpted porn.
See The Nature of Paleolithic Art by R. Dale Guthrie (published by the University of Chicago press)
http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Paleolithic-Art-Dale-Guthrie/dp...
for much more about the evidence, as analyzed by an author who is a specialist in Pleistocene megafauna (including Homo sapiens) and himself a fine visual artist.
AFTER EDIT: It boggles my mind that I can link to a source in my comment and still have "readers" here ask what my source is for a factual statement in this comment. The source I linked is the source. (The book I link to is by a research scholar, and itself cites dozens of thorough sources about all aspects of human prehistory.) The book I link to is a lot better than any Wikipedia article. (I am a Wikipedian, painfully aware of how many good sources are missed when amateurs edit articles on Wikipedia.)
Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture
#6In Guns, Germs and Steel Jarred Diamond mentions that there were less than ten places were farming was invented, and that cultures descended from these centers usually retained their selection of crops. So with the link between the plow and some specific crops, it seems that the sample size could potentially be as low as less than ten ( instead of 1200 language groups).
Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture
#7The author fails to present any serious evidence for their claim. I suspect that sexism began long before the invention of farming.
It's a slippery slope, but I don't think they're directly claiming the cause of sexism. Instead, the point they're claiming is: "Women descended from plough-users are less likely to work outside the home, to be elected to parliament or to run businesses than their counterparts in countries at similar levels of development who happen to be descended from hoe-users." So the bulk of the argument stems from some initial…
If anything the invention of farming may have lead to less violence and greater equality. This was a period of time when humanity transitioned from the Hunter to the Farmer.
Farming promoted development. It did not hold it back.
Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture
#8The author fails to present any serious evidence for their claim. I suspect that sexism began long before the invention of farming.
Which author? The Economist author, or Alesina, Giuliano, and Nunn, the authors of the academic study? The Economist is just giving description of the results for a popular audience, so I don't think they have to provide serious evidence.
The original academic article can be read here:
The Quarterly Journal of Economics http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/19/qje.q... (open access full text, at least for now)
I haven't read it, it is a peer reviewed publication, so I imagine they do have some evidence.
Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture
#9A claim about "all-powerful mother goddesses" before the end of the fifth millennium BC is inherently unhistorical. The submitted article notes, "For each group, the data included a description of its agricultural methods as far back in time as it was possible to go using historical evidence or, in the case of groups which did not have a written language, the first time they were observed by outsiders." That's much n…
> it is at least as likely that the statues are porn as that they are representations of powerful goddesses
I'm not so sure there is or needs to be a distinction between the two. Penis goes in, life comes out. You can't explain that. Well, paleolithic man couldn't. But they could draw/sculpt it and revere it for both its pleasure- and life-giving properties.
Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture
#10Idiocy of opinion piece journalists correlates inversely with penis size.
So.. Opinion pieces by women are all completely flawless?