- cross-posted to:
- showerthoughts@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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When numbers divide
25 is too old for most mothers the farther back you go.
Not even that far back, modern medicine is wonderful
This is framed like 80 generations is a small number, but that’s huge. Culture and civilization moves so quickly that even 3 generations ago life is barely recognisable. I can’t even imagine what life was like 40 generations ago.
Many people don’t realize that the amount of change our culture goes through in a lifetime is unfathomable historically. Before the 1800s it took a good decade for news to truly travel around to everyone in a region, and that was considered timely if it happened at all. Farming, hunting, homemaking, war, stayed exactly the same for dozens of years at a time and changes were usually made abruptly due to conflict before stagnating again.
The lengths Americans will go to in order not to use the metric system is insane.
I am interested in learning about this metric time.
metric time actually was a thing, and it sucked so nobody used it.
The French tried to impose “metric” time way back in the day. Even they learned that was a bad idea and quietly dropped it. The solar system seems to prefer it’s base12 time.
I think it maybe helped give rise the the saying: “The French follow no one. And no one follows the French.”
What is the conversion from imperial mother to metric mother? About 1:1.26?
And if everyone of your ancestors was unique (so no inbreeding) 80 mothers ago there would had to be 280 = more than 1.2 septillion people on the planet
And if your grandmother had wheels she would be a bicycle.
Village bicycle*
This assumes a single child per set of parents, doesn’t it?
No I’m talking about the amount of ancestors in the 80th generation back not the total amount of ancestors. It doesn’t matter how many children each set of parents had for that number.
Yeah only 2 generations ago, LGBT people were considered mentally ill. 4 generations ago women were considered unfit to vote. 8 generations ago about half the US though it was OK to own slaves. It takes a while for ideas to die out. That’s why US elections turn out the way they do.
Humanity isn’t progressing uniformly forward like this. Lgbtqia+ people were considered normal part of society by various cultures. Also Magnus Hirschfeld was an advocate for lgbtqia+ people a hundred years ago. Slavery has been transformed into modern slavery because the western world has found other, more concealed ways to force people into labor. Ideas may die out, but they will pop into people’s head again and again.
And yet discussing progress in this manner can be a confort. All that you said was true… But what the person you replied said was also true. Two generations since fertilizer or two generations since we locked in Malthusian anarchy[please note I do not espouse Malthusianism]. Three generations since the worst war known to man and three generations that did not experience that kind of war. Glass half full, glass half empty. It’s correct to question the myth of unstoppable progress thru which you can just kick your feet up and relax. But equally is it important to keep perspective remember that, yeah, eight generations ago chattel slavery was a bonafide institution and four generations women were unfranchised. Things get better and they get worse. We make progress and it is wiped away. We still keep trying.
Two steps forward. One step back
two steps forward, random.randint(1,4) steps back.
That’s not a well-founded assumption. The average age of first birth was only 21 as recently as 1970. Go back a few hundred years and it’s way younger than that. Many women throughout history became mothers as soon as they were able (right after the onset of puberty). Many cultures had rites of passage into adulthood for boys and girls of that age. There was no such thing as adolescence.
As the other commentator says, medieval Europe was mostly early twenties. Studies of stone age remains suggest a first birth age average of 19.5 and contemporary hunter gather societies have a comparable average. Sexual activity generally begins earlier, during adolescence, but the most “reproductively successful” age for beginning childbearing has been shown to be around 18-19. Also, this age at first birth isnt “Average age of a child’s mother” as many women would have multiple kids over their life, so the average sibling would have a much older mother at birth than the firstborn.
Its important to remember that puberty has shifted massively since industrialisation, "menarche age has receded from 16.5 years in 1880 to the current 12.5 years in western societies". So the post-puberty fecundity peak, that use to happen 17-19, when women are fully grown enough to minimise birth complications, now happens at a disressingly young 13-15. Not only is this a big social yuck for most western societies, but it’s reproductively unideal, because of the complications linked to childbirth at that age.
Huh, that’s interesting. Do we know why the menarche age has receded?
if you click that second study link it’s exactly about that
In Western Europe at least back to the early medieval period it was common for anyone who wasn’t nobility to have their first child around 22. The younger you are the more likely you’re going to have serious (fatal, back then) complications. It was the nobility that was marrying off barely pubescent kids.
It was the nobility that was marrying off barely pubescent kids.
Same as it ever was.
Could we say (for no other reason than I’m stoned and it sounds good) the rough average mother-age is 18-ish? Then there would be roughly ~110 mothers since Jesus cheated and respawned for our sins.
What was it like outside of Western Europe?
No idea, I’m not as read up on that. It would shock me if it was significantly different just because risk of death from complications is a hard biological line the younger you get, pre-modern medicine.
There are definitely cultures who have practiced polygyny to get around this issue. Some still do today, for example in many different countries in Africa where people still practice a pastoral life.
First births yes, but what about average age? Our ancestors may have been second born, third born, eighth born etc
High maternal mortality meant that having more than about 7 children per woman was rare. Total fertility rate was about 4.5 to 7 in the pre modern era. Population growth was low due to infant and early childhood mortality though.
If you start having children at age 12, you can have a child every year and reach 7 children by age 20. Without contraceptives, people weren’t having such large multi-year gaps between children like we do now.
Maybe 23 would be a better average, but even if wvery women in your line gave birth at 12.5 that only doubles the other. And its fair to say not every mother would have been a first child. Also many still would have been born later than 25, so it probably evens out pretty well.
I knew my great-grandmother, few people do. My great-great-grandmother is an ancient picture on the wall of my dead grandmother’s house, from a time when photography was new, a scant few years past daguerreotypes.
4 mothers back is all I can summon, only remember 3.
4 mothers back is all I can summon,
What’s the spell?
“I’m feeling hungry and mildly pregnant”
I knew two of my great grandmothers (yay for really young parents!). I know I met two others but didn’t really know them.
I was told that I met my great great grandmother once when I was a toddler but I don’t remember it. She died at age 99.
Let’s push it one step further and frame history since agriculture, 9500 years ago, against the upper limit of a human lifetime now, about 100 years. This would mean recorded times started only less than 100 human lifespans ago. Bleh
I was thinking that it’s now 81 mothers ago, but then I got distracted by the fact that there was no year 0AD and now I’m thinking that roughly 80 is good enough.
A wild Danzig approaches
So that’s about 13,000 homo sapiens mothers?
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