Dan Snow's History Hit - Pre-historic Women

Episode Date: February 10, 2023

For years we've understood that in the prehistoric hunter-gather world, the men did the hunting and the women did the gathering. Prehistoric man went on adventures, invented, created and drew, whereas prehistoric women stayed home, educated children and carried out domestic chores. Well, research now shows that this wasn't the case. Researchers are taking a closer look at our distant ancestors and breaking stereotypes about early women. Dan is joined by Thomas Cirotteau, co-author of the book Lady Sapiens: Breaking Stereotypes About Prehistoric Women to unearth a new understanding of our origins.Produced by Beth Donaldson and mixed by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hello everybody! Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're going back today, we're going all the way back, we're going to the prehistoric period. We're going to get prehistoric on this pod. Lady Sapiens. It was a project, book, it's a film by three French broadcasters and archaeologists and anthropologists. Thomas Silotto, Jennifer Kernan, Eric Pinker. And they talk about overturning the stereotypes of prehistoric women. These women who lived in Europe more than 30,000 years ago when the temperature was much colder than it is now, if you can believe it. When the Victorians first start to look at these people, they assume that the women stayed at home, raised children, cooked, strangely.

Now it turns out you'll be unsurprised to learn that the past is far more complex. Archaeology and anthropology have started to revolutionise the way that we see these women. It's fascinating stuff. Thomas Zirotto joins me on the podcast to talk about what we now think we know about these prehistoric women. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The Thomas bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity.

Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Thomas, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Well, thank you to inviting me. So, Thomas, every time I see a Stone Age woman depicted, she's standing in a kind of Flintstones dress, a ragged dress, looking after some hairy children in the cave with some simple tools and cooking implements. That is the impression we are given of these women.

Where did these cliches, what's the historiography of that? The starting point of the archaeology is the 19th century. What we know at first of these people living in these prehistoric times, we are talking about prehistory, what's the ending of what we call the Paleolithic. So that's the upper Paleolithic. That's from minus 40,000 years ago until minus 10,000 years ago. So it's the last time that we have hunter-gatherers in Europe or everywhere else in the world. After the people, they're raising animals and doing also cereals.

So it's a very different way of life. But the period we're talking about is hunter-gatherers. And we have this image of what you said, those people dressed in rags, making flintstones. And this is because it started at the 19th century where the society was dominated by men and mainly women didn't have any power, economic power, neither politic power, and they're only taking care in domestic things. So we didn't know at that period a lot about those people living in those so ancient times. But now we have a lot of things that can be said about these people. Like we know how they dress.

We know that they use, for example, needles for making their clothing with that sure animal skin. We know also that they use ornaments, they use paintings, they could maybe cut their hair or dress very nicely because we know that clothes and the way you present yourself to the world is not only a way of protecting you from the outside, from the weather, for example. It's also a symbolic thing. It tells you about the group you're living in, about their beliefs, about what status you have also in the society, if you're children, if you're an adult,

if you're somebody with prestige or not. And so this image, the Flintstone family, I mean, this is the first image that we have, you know, we have to put this image out. Those people that were living in the Upper Paleolithic were not civilized for sure like we imagine civilization is, but they have lots of things like ornaments, dressed, making very clothes with very tiny things. So it's not a good picture of them. So you're saying the historians and archaeologists

have been imposing a vision of the past based on our experiences and values in the present. This is huge news. Well, yes. You know, they're living in this Victorian way of life where you have those images of very hierarchy inside the society, and they impose their way of thinking, of living, on those remains. It's a normal way of thinking.

I mean, logical is the way of thinking, but now we know because of the anthropology, because of the ethnology, because of lots of discovery that has been made since the 19th century that, well, prehistoric person didn't live and dress like rags or people, you know, even if they're living in the nature. Okay, so can I divide up? Let's talk about the anthropology, presumably, is about looking at hunter-gatherer societies more recently in history that we have data for and research into. But what modern techniques have you got, modern ways of looking at these sites that have allowed you to make these judgments?

Well, let's take an example, okay? Let's take, for example, the research of the Lady of Calvion, which is an astonishing discovery because it has been made in 1872. So that's a real, real old discovery, a skeleton discovered inside a cave near the French and Italian border. And this skeleton is very astonishing because it has a lot of objects, very prestigious objects like a hat or that resemble like a hat made of shells and also teeth of deers, which is exotic things for this region because you don't find a lot of deer in that region near the Mediterranean Sea. All the body is completely covered with ochre. It has also very fine flintstone that comes from a place more than 200 kilometers from the site itself. It has also beads and ornaments

and it has also this engraving on the wall, a horse. And it looks like it has been hunted because it has like straws on it, like it was, you know, hunted by spears or whatsoever. And at first, when the archaeologist Émile Rivière discovered this corpse, he thought that this corpse belongs to a man because it has very strong bones. Because, you know, when you have a strong muscles, these strong muscles are pulling the bone and make your bone very, very strong. So he thought that this skeleton was a man, a hunter, and a horse hunter. And this interpretation followed up until the end of the 20th century when a whole team from Henri de Lumley at the IPH in France, there was a guy, a Czechist priest who analyzed the hip of this skeleton.

And he discovered that this hip didn't belong to a man, but belongs to a woman because the hips were so wide, wide open that it tells that it's not a man, it's a woman, because she surely had babies during her life. And so the hips was the hips of a woman. And it changed all this representation about what the woman looked like, what the man looked like. And it says that, well, this person was buried with a lot of prestige, with a lot of extraordinary objects for that time period. And it's not a man.

It's a woman. So the people who buried that person give to that person these objects and these objects disappear from the world of the living. Who tells that they have beliefs and they accept to give to that corpse these objects for her afterlife, maybe trip or journey. So it gives you an example of how we can now better think about those group of people that lived in those very ancient times because they had beliefs, they had very skillful talents of craftsmen making those objects, these incredible objects, not like we had those who were in the sedation of people living in rags, in caves, and so and so. So all those different discoveries, and I'm not telling you about the DNA, what we found

inside the teeth or the bones, which is astonishing also. Well, if it's astonishing, tell me about that, please. So this new technique of DNA is quite incredible because scientists now can read the DNA of these ancient people living very, very far from now. They take those DNA from the bone and they compare to our DNA to see how all these genes, for example, the genes of the eye, of the skin, of how our metabolism also works. And they discovered that all those European people that lived at the pre-pareoethnetic time had dark skin and blue eye.

That's incredible because we thought before that, well, we know that Homo sapiens came from Africa. So we know that the first settlers that came into Europe, they were surely dark skinned. settlers that came into Europe, they were surely dark skinned. But what we thought is that because they lived in our latitude, the evolutionists said it takes around 10,000 years to change the color of the skin because we need European more rays from the sun to synthesize this vitamin D, which is, well, I have to explain that because it's quite difficult, but I will try to keep it simple. We need to build our skeleton to fix the calcium inside our bones. We need vitamin D, and vitamin D is produced by the skin. If you have dark skin, you have less vitamin D because the X-rays from the sun didn't go inside your skin,

which is not a problem if you live in Africa because you have a lot of sun. But if you live in Europe, you have less sun, so that can be a problem if you don't synthesize this vitamin D. So scientists thought that when people arrive from Africa, they should change their color of the skin to synthesize this vitamin D. And that's not what they found inside DNA. They found that the dark skin stays very long until the Neolithic, until 8,000 years ago. So that's very near from us. So all those Paleolithic people had dog skin. That's very mind-changing for our representation of those people in that time. And why they keep these dog things for so long, even living in our poor sunny country, because they eat the marrow of the bones, because they eat the fat of the animal,

where you have a lot of vitamin D. Also, you have it in fish and in the fat of the animal. and in the fat of the animal. So because of their way of living, their alimentation, what they eat, they stay dark-skinned. And they found also that they had blue eyes. More than 80% of these skeletons discovered in the arthropeliotics had blue eyes. And they say it's because they prefer

to mate with people with blue eyes. And they say is that because they prefer to mate with people with blue eyes. That's more a cultural thing than a biological thing. A blue eyed guy or a blue eyed woman had more chance to find a mate. As a blue eyed guy, I'm very happy to hear that, Thomas. Well, I don't have blue eyes, you know. Well, you're still very attractive. Don't worry. Yeah. This is Dan Snow's History here. More after this. How much of a tyrant really was

Julius Caesar? Would we have ever stood a chance against the first dinosaurs? And did Helen of Troy really have the power to launch a thousand ships? Well, you can expect all of this and more from The Ancients on History Hit. Join us twice a week, every week, as we explore some of the greatest moments of our ancient past. Subscribe to The Ancients wherever you get your podcasts. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes,

who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. You mentioned the hunting, the eating of bones. You point to some really interesting burials in which women have been found with hunting tools as well, which suggest it wasn't just the men out chasing animals around. We found inside woman greys flintstone that could be used for making weapons. But as we know, it's not because you find those in a grave, it doesn't tell you for sure that you're a hunter

or that you hunt. It's still the same story in a lot of archaeological other findings, like in antiquity or in medieval tombs. You cannot say you find a sword engraved, well, this person must be a warrior. So it's the same story of prehistory. But there's this guy in South America who finds a lot of graves, of woman graves, inside a region with lots of flint tomb and lots of point of arrow inside the grave. tombs from the man, he made some statistics and some analysis of the overall way of life and to make some parallel also with hunter-gatherer society that could be the same as this group in South America. He said that those women were hunters and they hunt big animals because it's not only also the idea of what would they do with these weapons.

You know, they could just, I don't know, hunt rabbits, for example. But because they know that at this period they have some quite big game, he said that, well, women from this group were hunting those quite big animals. And we have also evidence in Europe that women also participate in the hunting effort. Because hunting at that time is not only the killing, it's a whole organization of the tribe. Imagine you're going into a trip on the mountain. Before going on a trip into the mountain, you have to make your bags. So you have also to buy a bag, to buy some stuff, to buy your tent, to have some good clothes, shoes, and you made some kind of schedule. First day you go there and then you will sleep there and you will put your time there. And this is where you get the water.

This is where you get the food. All the logistic of this journey is quite a thing, you know. And in this prehistoric time, it's also a thing because you don't have any, I don't know, supermarket to buy you some food. If you don't have it, you have to think about the water. You have to think about all the things you need. And it's all the group that goes hunting. That's 30 people that you have to feed, that you have to find water, that you have to find shelter. And so these 30 people, I'm thinking about a site in France near the river Seine,

it's called Pinsvent. They killed more than 75 reindeer on three weeks. So that's a very short period of time. And that's a lot of meat. I mean, it's more than three tons of meat for this third person. So all those people are involved in hunting, even if they didn't all kill those animals. They have to watch when those animals are coming. They have to trap them. And after you have to cut them, you have to take the skin off. You have to take all the things that you need off.

It is a lot of work, you know, 75 reindeers. Could you imagine taking the skin of 75 reindeers with only flintstool and cut off those big muscles, share it to each other. So women were involved in these big hunting period at that period of historical time, even if we think that in Europe, they weren't killing these animals. Because there's another guy in Bordeaux who analyzed the upper limb of the body of skeleton from Europe. And he found there's a dissymmetry on male skeleton and female skeleton. He find here, the elbow, when you throw something very often you make injury your muscle

are pulling apart bone it's a lot of pain and you find these injuries only on male skeleton not on female skeleton that's said that women were not involved in throwing spears. They were involved in other activities. If they don't throw spears, they don't kill animals. But they participate in the hunting effort in other ways, like taking care of all the logistics of the camp and also treat the animals when they are killed, taking care of the skin, taking care of cutting the flesh, share it with the other member of the group, treat it,

dry it, or cook it. I don't know whatsoever, but women were a very important part of the hunting process. As you're talking, I'm thinking, how do we get our information about these people? Is it basically purely burials or do you come across the equivalent of Pompeii and Herculaneum? Do you ever find sites that have been preserved in other ways or is it just what they do with their dead? Archaeologists find also things in these archaeological sites not only on remains. They found objects which could be in this camp because in Pinsmoor, for example, we don't have any human remains.

We only have the everyday life of this person during these three weeks of occupation. We have the place of the tent, we have the fire, we have places where they chop the flint tool, we have the place where they pull the skin off the animals, we have a place where a small child is trying to build a flint tool because the rocks are all shattered in very, you know, not an intelligent way of thinking.

He was just banging two rocks together. This, for example, inside, we have a lot of information without any human remains. We have also the analysis in labs, as I was telling you, like DNA, which tells us about the portrait of these people, the metabolism of these people. We have also the teeth that will tell you the growth, what they are eating, because with the strontium, for example, which is quite an equivalent of the calcium. But the strontium is radioactive. So it gives information of where those people were going because strontium is in the nature.

And the way you have strontium in your teeth tells you if you eat vegetables, if you eat animals, and where those vegetables and animals were living because we know we have a map of all the worlds of the territory where you found those in Europe, in America, in Asia, in Africa. We have all sorts of different things of knowing better now with science on these people. For example, how to tell the sex of a skeleton? on these people. For example, how to tell the sex of a skeleton? We have more or less three or four techniques. The first is to measure the strongest of the bone. This is what the first prehistoric archaeologists analyzed. They say if the bones are strong, it must be a man. If the bones is quite thin. It's a woman. Well, it's not true. It's not very accurate.

The second method is to use the hip. But the problem is if you have a hip, that's perfect. Okay? You can easily measure the hole where the baby pass and says if it's a woman or a man but unfortunately we don't have a lot of fossil with hips we could use dna to find the sex of a person and it's very accurate it's 100% accurate but sometimes you don't find any dna in fossils or you cannot because the fossil is so prestigious and they don't want to take bones and it's destructive. If you put a piece of bones for DNA, you lose it.

And there's a new method that is not destructive and it's been found by a researcher in Toulouse and he works inside with the inner ear, measuring the inner ear, the part where you hear, which is called the cochlea. The cochlea is a form of like a snail, you know? And the form of this cochlea, it differs from man and woman. And you can measure it. Why? Because the cochlea has the imprint inside your skull. And it's a part of the skull that is very strong. And because it's very strong, it lives from ages to ages.

Even one million years ago, even two million years ago, you can trace this cochlea on skulls. And a few months from now, meet some paleontologists, some paleontologists, so people who are working millions of years from now, and you can even find the cochlea on dinosaurs. So this is a very interesting way of sexing those fossils because it's 95% accurate and you can find it very easy if you find a piece of skull because this part is very often preserved. So Thomas, let's finish up by just giving me what you think now is a more accurate depiction of women as they would have existed in these prehistoric groups? Well, what I'm going to say is that you have to be aware of, it's not one woman. We're talking about a very wide period of time. It's more than 35,000 years. You know, it's very, very huge. So you cannot make one portrait of all those women

living in so different places, territories in a so vast and impressive period of time. So women of history are very different from a place to another, from a period to another. So it's not a one portrait. But what we can say is that they have, for example, all that dark skin, and with the majority of them, blue eyes. And they were living in a very group or society that has to be seen as developed. They have their beliefs. They painted their belief on the walls with these incredible pictures that you can see in Spain, in France, in Asia, where you have those incredible paintings of animals,

of different objects, even symbolic things that we don't grasp the sense of it. objects, even symbolic things that we don't grasp the sense of it. They dressed with clothes with lots of meaning and lots of senses. And they also deal with each other in a collaboration way. That means that in the groups for surviving, you have to be collaborative. You don't have to be selfish and think that, okay, I can manage myself on my own. You have to deal with the nature that is not always friendly. And they deal with very harsh time. I mean, the winter is very cold, a minimum between 10 to 15 degrees less than today. So it's quite cold at that period. And you have to manage a lot of things. You're living in the open air with maybe difficulties, maybe predators, just finding your way to find your food,

finding your shelter, trying to take care of your olds, take care of your child. So you have to stick together and to, okay, you're good at that. Okay, you do that. You're good at that. Okay, you do that.

That's the way for sure and simplify it a lot. But the idea of what I'm saying is that you have to be a group, stick together to survive in those prehistorical times. But you don't have to think about prehistorical time with a world of cruelty or animality or brutality. That's not what scientific and archaeological people find. They found a very sensitive, artistic, developed people who are, for me, well, I'm fond of them. I think they're great people, and they are, in a way, our ancestors

because the people on those politic times living in Europe are not our direct ancestors of us, the people living in Europe now. either the man and also the woman, because the women were completely forgotten for years inside this history of prehistory. This is why we made Lady Sepians, to bring them to life, bring their everyday life, their status, their place and their role in broad daylight. Thomas, thank you very much for coming on. How can people see your work? Well, you can read it for this book,

Lady Sapiens. The movie also is possibly in VOD on different VOD platforms. Go and Google it, folks. Lady Sapiens. Thank you.