While it was many years since i did study archeology myself I have to question some parts of whats being said by some other posters. Hunting in teams, hearding animals and seting traps is well established but where dose this notion of poison come from? I would call the idea to poison the animal you intend to eat very risky to say the least.
As for the gender roles there is no real way as to tell who did what in the neolithic more the speculations based on what people where buried with and to be brutaly honest what they where buried with could be anything from there own tools to gifts to the gods/ancestors. âOh mom died so lets send granddads old bow with her. Im sure he would like that!â.
The one thing we do know is that homosapiens has the same genetic setup today as we did in the neolithic and from that we can assume that men who are naturaly stronger would have done more jobs where strength was important while women would keep the childern safe. There own and others. This is not in any way saying that women would not be hunters. if anything it just says that its more likely that men would have carried the dead animals home after the hunt and not much more.
This is alot of classic archeology that places the woman at home and hte man out hunting but more modern archeology shows that most proberbly just about all jobs where shared. The real shift into more specific roles that can be more proven dose not accure until farming really takes off. Farming was hard work and took alot of time so it almost demanded the men to go to the feilds while the women took care of the rest atleast until they came back.
Its pure specualtion but if you really want to make specific roles that somewhat fits into the âhistoricalâ view of the subject you should proberbly put gathering at 50/50, hunting at 60/40 and farming at 90/10.
Again i have to point out that im in my 30s and have not studied archeology for some 10 years now and what I was taught and was able to read might not be up to date anymore.
Oh and i know its not 100% the same but i sugest looking at the early egypthyian society. Men and women where from what we know pretty much equal there and shared all tasks. The only real gender differance there seams to be is that almost always its men shown hunting Dangerus animals or being guards/soldiers.
Iâd add to that that there are not many useful poisons in neolithic Europe. You could have gotten opium latex or Belladonna, but neither of them are fast-acting. Additionally, the concentrations of either required for lethality as far beyond what you could fit on a weapon. In short, Barbed and attaching arrowheads would probably do a lot more damage more effectively. ( arrowheads can be made to detach either with the head on a separate small piece of wood attached to the shaft, or simply as a function of the sinew becoming soft when mixed with blood. If you ever use a bow with real Flint arrowheads, you will quickly realize that sinew does not like blood, ironically LOL)
As a fun little addition. Arsenic wich is known to be poison today and used as among other things rat poison was during the classical age used as makeup to make your skin more pale. There was also arsenic used in claypots and such wich by todays standards should have killed people that ate from it but obviusly it dident or it would not have been used in such quantity!
Pipes have been made of lead since Roman times until very recently, and it is well know now how toxic it is. It is not always that easy to relate toxic effects to the root problem.
The Romans also used uranium to color some of their tiles. Uranium has been used as a colorant even to this day. I often find and test pieces of it in my lab.
Well itâs not just grave goods. We can extrapolate some things about gender from other remains, eg the presence of female figurines in Tripolye settlements indicates some important position for females, while cultures that do not have female figurines might not. Also linguistic and cultural roots can be reconstructed to a degree (going back to my Yamnaya analogy, one of the pieces of evidence for women being more important in the west is by following the role of women in mythology that is descended from people who spoke languages that migrated out of the western steppe and comparing it to mythologies that originated in the eastern part of the Yamnaya Horizon. But if you have studied archaeology at uni you will know that 90% of our field is interpretation of remains, so you shouldnât be too fast to throw out grave goods completely.
I would go one step further though and say that in farming cultures women do as much of the work as men. The proximity to home, and the sheer amount of labour required for subsistence, let alone profit, not only makes it easier for the entire family unit to work the farm, but makes it a necessity. If I had to hazard a guess (and now Iâve wandered into guesswork), real job divisions (with a few exceptions, eg some theories say that long distance raiding in the Danube region may have been very male dominated since it was about stealing wealth to pay for doweries) probably started with proto-urbanization and the creation of specialised jobs created by surplus, and even then in the lower classes it probably was not that divided. But again, context is everything, and we need to remember not to fall into the trap of saying âthe world was divided into semi-nomadic hunter gatherers, and settled farmersâ because there are a mass of types of societies in between those two (and even ones that do not fall into a spectrum between them).
In a more mobile society remember that men canât take care of infants though, only women can do that until people work out how to get milk from animals. I feel like sometimes that gets forgotten just a tiny bit.
Modern Humans inhale tar and carcinogens into their lungs for their own amusement even though they know how unhealthy it is. Humans are really stupid sometimes. Then again a poison wouldnât have to be fast acting, humans are great endurance runners and simply chasing injured (or even uninjured!) game down until it dies of exhaustion is a documented hunting method, perhaps itâs a case of "every little helps.
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The point about nursing is important. Children had to be nursed for at least a year, and I would suspect this continued longer than in our modern societies. (As is seen in my contemporary tribal societies). If a woman were killed, children could fall back on other nursing family members to a point, but this would strain the family.
(Side note: lactose tollorance after end if nursing was not widespread, if I recall reading thisâŚ)
One could argue that, given the risks involed with birth and the need to have children to perpetuate the tribe, women were performing a task with parrelels to tribal defense (e.g. risking their lives to save the people), albeit in a less historically appreciated way. (A theme in my latest writing).
Yeah itâs one of those things that when gender equality comes up Iâm always hearing âwell girls could/can do this too!â which is an excellent point, but then people forget that nursing is at least one thing men physically can not do, it has to be done by women. edit Iâd add to your tribal defence scenario with my two pence that men are probably much more expendable than women in terms of the long term survival of the tribe (ie a tribe can get by with only a few men but lots of women, but if there are a lot of men but only a few women then youâll soon see a population implosion).
You are right about Lactose Tolerance, Iâve seen that in a number of places (I think I read it most recently in Jean Mancos âAncestral Journeysâ but unfortunately I left my copy on a train so canât check that reference). From what Iâve seen Lactose Tolerance is an adaptation in response to increased reliance on dairy products (which came first the chicken or the cheese?), and even today lactose intolerance is more common in societies that do not have a lasting history of pastoralism and by association dairy produce)
My original worry had been that females would be relegated to gathering and fleeing from bad guys while all males would be warriors and hunters, as is so common in video games. It seems that the consensus is that gender roles in the Neolithic are not understood to the point where they can be accurately mapped out, though I totally agree that there would be a propensity for certain obvious roles based, if nothing more, on the anatomy of the human body. In short, it sounds to me, as well as looks as though from the screenshot, the developer has chosen a more egalitarian route. \o/
I remember Herodotus wrote at some point in his History book that he agreed a tradition where children were not even presented to his fathers until they were 5 years old or so, because before that children death was very likely, and fathers should not met a son that still could die young⌠mothers thoughâŚ
Kinda hard for the mother not to meet the child when she has to give birth to it thoughâŚ
or the old school option: have no females at all like the og Age of Empires. For me the ideal would be if you could shape your tribe the way you want (within reason), if you want a egalitarian society then you can try and push your tribe that way, if not you can try to push it the other way. But thatâs a lot of work and no way would I expect the team to deliver that, Iâm happy to see a fairly egalitarian route used.
If anything i have to agree with that Women would have been more valued then a average man especialy if it was one that was good at giving birth. I would imagen since its the case of cultures all around the world at a time when we actualy have wrighten records that these women and women in gerneral would be a very valuble thing to have in once tribe and therefor they would be protected. A woman thats good at giving birth without dieing is worth alot more then a average man to the tribe.
I VERY much like the idea that we would be able to affect the culture of the city in the game on a level of not just how much they care about gods and entertainment but that we could twist it to male or female dominated.
Would you create a society that is split 50/50 equal for all or would you make one where the women cant leave the city limits or live without a man? Maybe one where men are keept in barraks, only allowed to do sports to entertain the women while in essence being nothing but sexslaves to them?
The possebilitys and replay value just exploaded.
@nuLoon I do get that trust me. But in the end its just a game. And something so small shouldnât matter. The tribes the location the tool, yea, but gender, just not something that will change or add to the game play.
At what age will women start giving birth? How long will they live? How often will they be pregnant during their lifespan? What chance do they have to miscarriage? Do they die from child birth or from the environment? How likely are their children to be female and not male? What percentage of the population will be infertile?
These are all variables in part of a formula that determines population growth, hence city size, hence resource consumption, hence settlement stability or risk of collapse from over-population. When a simulation is being designed so that every system is interconnected and every variance has long-term consequence, it matters.
Hunting in teams, hearding animals and seting traps is well established but where dose this notion of poison come from? I would call the idea to poison the animal you intend to eat very risky to say the least.
Itâs very difficult (but not impossible) to directly detect poison in the archaeological record. However, almost all known foraging societies who hunt using a bow and arrow use poisons extensively. They greatly decrease the amount of time it takes to run down an animal after shooting it. Iâm not a biologist so I donât know why the poison doesnât spoil the meat â but clearly it doesnât. Therefore, most archaeologists agree that if you find arrowheads, itâs highly likely they were used alongside poison.
Not a biologist neither (but my wife is). For what I understand some poison are lethal only is there are directly in contact with blood. They do not go throught the digestion process. As a modern exemple (not perfect of course) the HIV virus cannot go throught digestion.
Moreover, cooking process can break the poison molecule and made it harmless.
Taking this way too in depth. This game has potential. But a team this small doesnât have the resources to put so much focus on detail so small as omg what are women doing over men.
Iâd rather them put more effort into better mechanics than focusing on gender and what they do. I donât care if babies were being brought in by storks. Again your are getting hung up on something so small.
Perhaps the purpose of the discussion is to give the devâs ideas which they can choose to go with or not. I think our discussion, regardless of itâs complexity, furthers their aims. Of course, in a prehistoric game which aims to be authentic, fertility, children and the role of both men and women would be of a high degree of importance*
Behjati-Ardakani, Zohreh et al. âAn Evaluation of the Historical Importance of Fertility and Its Reflection in Ancient Mythology.â Journal of Reproduction & Infertility 17.1 (2016): 2â9. Print.
