“Warning: mothers being used as a unit of measurement ahead”
Hey what the fuck I wasn’t ready
Even crazier if you think in human lifetimes. Taking the global life expectancy of 72 years, the beginning of our era was 28 lifetimes ago.
Middle Ages ended 8 lifetimes ago.
As an American, this is American math. “Thats 4 school buses” “those are 9 football fields!” “Thats the weight of 35 fully grown hippos!”
Like, its not THAT unbelievable. A lot can happen in a human lifetime.
But it’s not a human lifetime, it’s a generation…or 25 years in this case.
As a 27 year old… Same thing
You just hold on to that thought, for as long as you can :)
Idk, they had kids a lot earlier than 25 for the vast, vast majority of world history.
Maybe their first kid, but a lot of families (i come from catholics) had a lot of kids
Similarly: we all come from an unbroken line of people who had children.
It may be that throughout history not having kids is common. Gay people who never had children may have been common. Ugly, poor or unpleasant people who never managed to find a partner may have been common. Asexual people may have been common.
Straight people who had sex but never had kids were probably not common, just because good contraception wasn’t available.
Still, if you’re a person who, for whatever reason, is not going to have kids, none of your direct ancestors can understand that life.
Similarly: we all come from an unbroken line of people who had children.
indeed we come from an unbroken line of animals who had offspring. you can hop back one generation at a time til you get to our early ape ancestors, then those shrew-like things, reptiles, fish, then single cell organisms, in the end you’ll reach the very first cell to ever exist, one single cell from which every living thing evolved.
Not just people, it goes back all the way to the origin of life, whether that happened here or elsewhere and life just somehow ended up migrating here.
There’s an unbroken hereditary line between each of us and cells that first tried to eat mitochondria and instead of breaking them down into one meal’s worth of energy and nutrients, they ended up forming a symbiotic relationship, giving our ancestors (and us) the ability to take more energy from the oxygen that was slowly filling the atmosphere than it was causing damage and surviving the earliest known mass extinction as well as snowball earth.
Then our lineage was able to survive the Cambrian explosion, I’m guessing that’s than brains evolved and suddenly life could control a wide variety of different shapes and body types and it did before settling in to the more common body types that survived to this day.
We survived countless mass extinctions, including all of the major ones, like massive asteroid impacts that rained molten glass all over the globe just from the rebound and made today’s global warming seem quaint. Each of our ancestors was able to survive to the age of reproduction without getting eaten by the giant insects of the Carboniferous (though we were still in the water so kinda lucked out), we survived the early oceans/seas, the emergence of amphibians and reptiles. We survived the dinosaurs, probably as tiny nocturnal rodents. We survived past that when birds and mammals diversified after the dinosaurs were gone.
We survived when primates started changing the very nature of the game of survival, despite several other species getting a head start on populating the globe. For better or worse, we took the planet from Neanderthals, homo erectus, the Denisovans, the hobbit-like hominids, and any others that left Africa before us (not to mention dominated the competition inside Africa).
Only at that point did we start surviving the brutal history of our species and all the wars, famines, plagues, natural disasters, building collapses, personal disagreements that could have turned violent, religions, brutal rulers, collapses of civilization, and emergence of the next set of bandit or war lords.
Also billions of years of single-celled competition prior to that mitochondria symbiosis event.
My bloodline ends with me, and everything ive ever done has culminated in this exact moment (at time of writing)
A bloodline ending is also probably incredibly common. But, not once in our direct ancestors has a bloodline ever ended.
That’s actually one of the things that got me thinking about this. My family has a tradition that the first born son always gets a certain first name. My dad’s the third-born male, so he didn’t get the name, and didn’t pass it down to me. But, his oldest brother did, so it’s my cousin’s name.
My cousin’s probably not going to have kids. Or, if he does, they’d be happy little accidents who aren’t part of the family and don’t get the first-born-son name. So that name and that tradition dies with him. It’s a bit unfortunate because over time that first name has become less common and I like the name. So, for the first time in centuries(?) there won’t be someone with that name.
I thought about it a bit, and realized, it’s probably actually fairly common. When you’re the end of a chain like that, you might feel pressured because everybody before you had carried on the tradition and passed on the name. However, that has to be the case, because if your father or grandfather had failed to pass on the name, you wouldn’t be around to see it.
There are probably “bloodlines” ending all the time. But if you’re part of a “bloodline”, it probably feels like a big deal because everybody until you has ensured it survived.
(Having said that, “bloodlines” are a dumb concept, since each parent provides about 50% of the DNA. So, even if you’re a “Trey” and share the same name with your dad and grandfather, you only share half your DNA with your dad and a quarter with your grandfather. In a sense, you could say that the strength of every bloodline is cut in half with every generation. That is, unless you’re breeding with blood relatives, and then the bloodline may be strong, but the genetic disorders are even stronger.)
First law of socio-genetics: Celibacy is not hereditary
From some book of Murphy’s laws I found at home as a kid and fell in love with
Not necessarily accurate, though.
See selfish genes (ideally from someone other than Dawkins), and gay uncle hypothesis.
I don’t know what a selfish gene is and I cba to read a textbook right now, but IF you really want to take this seriously, a recessive gene is enough to make the statement untrue.
I do however suspect that this joke law was meant as a joke.
tldr: natural selection doesn’t select for fit individuals, it selects for genes, and at the population level. Plenty of species have strong drives in individuals that will destroy their individual fitness, like bees and ants, but those genes survive just fine.
Also the unfortunate truth of rape. Rapists aren’t exactly picky
My parents are/were 90. I started telling them they’ve been alive for more than a third of the history of the United States. They loved hearing that shit.
The greatest difference between us and our distant ancestors isn’t intelligence. It’s the knowledge we’ve inherited. Education is humanity’s greatest achievement.
We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. I’m grateful to those who lifted us up, and I’ll humbly do my part to lift those who come after us.
It’s society & available materials.
If you took all your knowledge 10k years ago the daily life would still fairly resemble the lives they had.
10k years ago you can legit skip to making steel by making a charcoal furnace with bellows. Steam engine is also straight forward, animal husbandry could get you way more food per animal in a generation, and basic hygiene makes lives way longer.
I can go on but in short there’s loads of knowledge pretty much anyone can bring to 10k years ago that changes lives significantly.
animal husbandry could get you way more food per animal in a generation
My dissertation chairman was involved in a research project in India back in the 1960s. Some agricultural extension folks had gone there because they had assessed Indian cattle as “weak” and “sickly” and were trying to introduce American breeds as a substitute. The locals wanted no part of these animals and eventually the researchers tried the radical approach of asking them why not. Turns out that while these cattle could plow 50% more land in a day, they ate twice as much food as the Indian breeds.
The light went on in their heads and they set about attempting to cross American cattle with Indian cattle and breeding the most efficient animals. Turns out they couldn’t get any more efficient than the original Indian breeds.
How do you get iron ore in quantities that would allow to build anything worth building & maintaining?
(And what would you possibly use a resource-extremely-hungry steam engine for that needs to be fed that a wooden watermill couldn’t do? You would need to build up society/economy even to justify a usecase for a watermill, otherwise you just build a monument.)You could build an electric battery 10k years ago, but what for?
Where do you get species directly suitable for animal husbandry?
Or ppl to produce & use higiene products?
I can go on but in short there’s loads of knowledge pretty much anyone can bring to 10k years ago that changes lives significantly.
I absolutely agree with that.
Between what the people 12k years ago knew and what just about any person today knows, you could start agriculture, building houses, at least the idea of digging wells, hygiene, the wheel, writing, and probably some others. A decently educated person in history, technology, or science (and I don’t mean university-level) could add metalworking, astronomy, and animal domestication. The biggest limits to what you could do up to the industrial age would be megafauna and dieing before you accomplished it. If you passed on education, scientific theory, and the knowledge you had, there’s a fair chance those things could be continued after you died.
As far as society goes, there is good evidence chimps have society, as well as early homonids. I’m pretty sure we had that 12k years ago, too.
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12k years ago is the stone age and before agriculture. The ice age would just be ending. You don’t have the calories to do much beyond exist.
There are papers talking of indications of cultivation starting around 10000 BC in Egypt, and 9000 BC in India.
I don’t think you would have much impact. Even if we assume you are extremely good at learning new (i.e. old) languages, extremely popular (everything you suggest is done), and you have a rich benefactor who houses and feeds you, you are still lacking the giant supply chain stack that is absolutely required to get anything done in the modern world.
The only thing I could maybe get done is making some extremely bad and extremely expensive soap. Concrete or metals would be so far out of reach, I might as well work on a perpetual motion machine or try to transform lead to gold. Just go into the woods and try to mine some iron and you see what I mean.
The average modern person knows probably less about agriculture and building houses than the average person 12k years ago, and those are pretty intuitive.
The wheel isn’t some complex contraption that needs to be improved over generations. It’s probably the most simple tool imaginable, but it’s also useless unless you have roads.
I’m always amazed how modern people have no idea how useless they would be just a few hundred years ago.
The guy on the primitive technology channel smelled iron from orange bacteria. He used 3 different methods with his most complex tools being stone and clay. Copper and tin are generally easier, and are exposed on the surface in many areas. The only thing stopping people from figuring out bronze earlier was location and luck. I think the bronze age starting 7000 years earlier would have had an impact.
I know how to make black powder, and generally know how to source it. Between that and bronze, you could have guns over 11000 years earlier than we did.
I’ve built houses.
I know the basics of making paper. Even if I didn’t, clay tablets are easy. Writing 4000 years earlier would necessarily advance knowledge if nothing else happened. Throw in some math and the concept of zero and you could advance knowledge in those areas by thousands of years. Math isn’t relevant? Some of the oldest structures we have around use math and astronomy. Imagine if we had those 5000 years earlier.
One of the bigger reasons people don’t learn more languages is because they don’t have the time or interest. One of the best ways to learn is immersion. Being in a situation where you have to learn a new language if you want to communicate with anyone else would certainly be a motivator to put in the effort.
The iron from Primitive Technology is maybe enough for a small piece of jewelry like a ring, and that’s from many runs of very time consuming and labor intensive smelting. I’m not a metallurgist, but it also looks pretty bad. Even if it was modern tool steel with no impurities, 20g of iron pellets is pretty useless if you don’t have a forge.
Your knowledge and skills are impressive, but I very much doubt that’s common, and you most likely use modern tools to build houses. I’d be surprised if you could build better houses with sticks and stones than the stone age people who have been doing it for generations.
I’ve seen videos of people who make paper traditionally, and I remember that knowing the basics of it is about as useful as knowing the basics of making a rocket. Unless you have actually made paper and gun powder from scratch without any modern tools, I will not believe that you could do it.
I have to agree with you regarding writing and math. Also social sciences like philosophy, ethics, psychology, education, etc. Any tool you can use with only your brain would be be very helpful.
But I think the biggest issue would be convincing people to try new things. For all I know, photovoltaik could be a gift from a time traveller, but there was (and is) much opposition to it because many people are so conservative. If you started explaining electricity to people in the stone age, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d be banned or worse.
That’s why I said tin and copper are easier. There were locations with native copper deposits, much like finding gold in streams. Copper is easier to work, tin is pretty easy relatively speaking, and the two give you bronze, which allows proper tools. That’s part of why it took about 2000 years after bronze before we had iron. The guy from Primitive Technology is working from a very poor ore source (and is actually doing trial and error). That said, I doubt you could get much more than the idea of iron accepted by a Neolithic culture in a lifetime.
Sure, I’ve built houses using modern tools, but I’m also aware of the techniques used in older wood buildings. I could be an adequate apprentice for the first house I built, and could build a second on my own.
I didn’t say gun powder, I said black powder. It’s far simpler and safer. I made some before I was a teenager. The hardest part is finding saltwater and the only tool you need is a mortar and pestle. If they didn’t exist by 10000 BC, then I could “invent” that, too.
How easy is it to find a copper deposit? What do they look like? How much should one expect to find? What would you do if you found a significant amount?
I’m sure they had adequate house building apprentices back then. We’re talking about uplifting stone age people, not fitting in.
Wikipedia says gunpower and black powder are the same thing, wut whatever. How do you make it? I knew you need saltpeter, but I wouldn’t have a clue how to find that, and even if I found some by chance, I wouldn’t even know what it looks like. And even if I did, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I know almost nothing about black powder, but I feel like I know more the average person.
I absolutely agree (I didn’t say it wouldn’t change things), but the first decades/generation would still be pretty basic, much of the knowledge wouldn’t be applicable until you build your tools, get basics sorted, build safety nets, etc.
For everything you need a willing society bcs one individual can’t do it all - it’s either you dig/build one well & others feed you or you do the efforts communally. Same with metalwork, that’s a whole specialisation in the most basic sense (you need a workforce & resources for them to gather ore, work it, and forge anything of useful size - metalwork to produce a few grammes of metal per year isn’t worth it, so you need a city-sized community at your disposal, and you need to get to that point … unless maybe as an expensive way to just pass the knowledge for later gens to put it to good use, which might be successful, unless forgotten or the community doesn’t survive).
Animal domestication can take generations too in some cases (bovids), you need to first focus on docile females, and once they stay in a designated area (either like a valley or even fenced fields), you need the resources (food) to keep them alive there. So you need to build up agriculture at scale first. That why we found the first real domestication evidence around ancient cities, not random villages.
Yeah, if I was going to jump start domestication, I’d start with chickens or sheep/goats. Chicken and goats can eat just about anything, so can be fed scraps and quickly become a net positive. They’re also smaller and easier to manage than cows. Goats can be troublesome, but their risk is limited by their size.
Domestication on both those species started about 10000 years ago, so it would only speed things up by 2000 years.
Smart, but you would need to be in specific area to get chickens (south Asia?) & goats (middle East?) suitable for domestication, which would still take several human generations to achieve - so in your lifetime you would just pass the knowledge (in case someone was interested) but otherwise live your life without seeing the results.
It’s not like livestock domestication didn’t start about asap after there were conditions for it (cities, stable food production, some bureaucracy/specialisation/trade, etc)etc.
If you went back 10000 years you definitively would have become an inventor or philosopher of sorts (assuming you could speak their language)
Well, I guess it depends on your education, but we get taught things in elementary school that wouldn’t have been invented or discovered for thousands of years back then. And some technologies you likely could make without many pre-requisite technologies themselves
If the average person went back 10k years they would be regarded as insane or heretical. Even assuming communication wasn’t an issue, way too much of your knowledge is built upon things you don’t understand and don’t exist. You can’t do anything with electricity until you can refine metals and make copper wire. No average person knows the precursor plants for medicine. Brick making is beyond the average person and you wouldn’t have a kiln anyway. Working without metal tools makes most processes the average person would know impossible.
You just start with math, there’s plenty of math the average person learns in an average school curriculum that you could re-“invent”. After that people would start taking you more seriously
Now they might consider you heretical or blasphemous still. If you played your cards right you could try to present yourself as a messenger from god although I personally really wouldn’t want to go that route
Have you ever read “Lest Darkness Fall”? It’s a great exploration of these concepts. Dude gets isekai’d back to the Roman Empire. All of his ideas fall on deaf ears because “obviously the Roman Empire is the peak of all cultures” and there’s no room for improvement. Except for his idea for an optical telegraph system, they really fuck with that. Honestly an amazingly realistic book haha.
Math is probably the least useful at that age, maybe later in the bronze age it gets more useful as society can support some knowledge work. 10k years ago people don’t have time for math, the majority of people are focused solely on survival. That’s stone age and the very beginning of agriculture.
I absolutely agree (I didn’t say it wouldn’t change things), but the first decades/generation would still be pretty basic, much of the knowledge wouldn’t be applicable until you build your tools, get basics sorted, build safety nets, etc.
I’m trying to make the distinction between the ability to just ‘make’ as a proof of concept & actually apply that knowledge at scale that makes any difference in that accident context. Like metalwork - without (smol-)city-sized communities (labour, and accumulated resources like winter food & shelters) it doesn’t make sense bcs you don’t end up with enough use-cases.
(Ofc immediate location is a great factor in what knowledge is more applicable and what not - surviving in the Arctic circle would be much different to the some savannah).
I do agree with that!
That’s a beautiful way of thinking about it!
Idk, I’m very whelmed by this, warnings weren’t needed, sounds just about right.
That’s not to say that some of these cities weren’t huge though. Rome had ~750K at it’s peak. Some places in China had 1 million. We just have a lot more huge cities now.
https://www.worldatlas.com/ancient-world/the-largest-ancient-cities-ever-built.html
Huge for that time, sure… But we’ve had concerts with more people than in those huge cities.
True, but a lot of cities that we think of as big are around those numbers. They couldn’t get much bigger because of infrastructure.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-states
Seattle is about 800k https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/washington/seattle
Yeah but you’re comparing the 18th largest city in the US to what were at the time the largest cities in the world. Apples to oranges. Why not compare Rome’s 700k to say… Shanghai? There’s 25 million people in the city proper. Just one city. The population of the Han Empire, recorded in the tax census of 156 AD, was 50.6 million people in 12,366,470 households. The entire empire could now fit in 2 cities.
Seattle could have a lot higher population if it wasn’t obsessed with single family homes and actually rezoned for high occupancy lower income housing. Not even “low income” just lower considering a 1-2 bedroom house can run into the millions in Seattle
Our entire economic system is built upon this, too. The idea that people other than the ultra wealthy can just retire and… not work when they get old for example (retirement funds are biggest shareholders of publicly traded corporations btw).
Developed countries are seeing the damage of growth stopping and we haven’t done much to mitigate it. Productivity per worker is, of course, way up luckily - but so are people’s lifestyle expectations. If we all wanted to live like they did in ancient Greek times (minus the pillaging of neighboring countries I guess), we wouldn’t even need many workers. But people want so many things that didn’t exist 100 years ago, let alone 2+ millennia ago.
For now, we could just solve this by importing more workers from 3rd world countries still experiencing growth. Slow down their economic growth and our decline. But people are racist and don’t want to.
The good news is, once those 3rd world countries have strong enough economies, they’ll also stop producing babies as retirement plans as has been the case historically (you’d have like 8 or 9 kids so you can live on the family farm while they do all the work - when the economy gets better, you stop doing that).
Yeah, basically a brand new species behaving like an infestation in an abundance of (mostly finite) resources, not building sustainable socioeconomic systems that would allow for social & scientific advancements in absence of “infinite™” growth of imaginary numbers (eg gdp).
Far away from Star Trek even when we have those ideals theoretically available to us. (That’s why transporting knowledge back in time wouldn’t necessary be of use.)
This is actually a great perspective to point out against anti-intellectual arguments like evolution being fake, when people ask why humans are not evolving. What kind of evolution can you expect in 450 iterations? That’s nothing in the timeline of the earth. Plus 450 mothers is already more than what some religious fanatics claim is the age of the earth.
Actually, this math is almost exactly how the young earth creationist cult came to their number for the age of the earth. The counted out all the begats in the Bible from Adam to Jesus and multiplied by an average amount of time between births.
What kind of evolution can you expect in 450 iterations?
Actually quite a lot. The pace of evolutionary change is a function of the amount of variation present in a population and the intensity of selection (i.e. the death rate). There was one study done of the variation of bone dimensions present in modern populations of chimpanzees that suggests that the transition from chimpanzee-style locomotion to full bipedality (at least the variant of bipedality observed in Ardipithecus (~5 million years ago) could have happened on the scale of a few thousand years.
This is not to say that it did happen that fast, just that it could have given a strong enough intensity of selection. There is a weird tendency in paleoanthropology for researchers to propose something that might have happened and it becomes accepted by the general public as something that did happen.
Exactly. The fact that our kids can look different from us at all is fucking wild
That’s mostly gene mixing though.
If you had your child alone (a clone), they would look quite exactly like you. It would take several generations to see a change.
We’ve cloned cats and had them come out with different markings, genes aren’t that simple
Pre-modern birth ages were more in the range 15 to 20. So rather 5 to 6 mothers per century.
You’re assuming that your matrilineal line is entirely composed of firstborns.
I’m not who you were responding to, but first borns certainly aren’t necessary. High fertility, low marriage age places like West Africa (Niger in particular has an average of 7 births per woman) meet the 15-20 range pretty spot on. A woman can easily have a child every year or so from 15 to 20, then they sort of coast to a stop by their late 20s. The majority of births are early because their so close together.
Average reported marriage age of women in Niger is 19… I’ve lived there, and in the village, it’s 15 or 16. I have seen 9 year olds get “married” but it was really more like a reservation to get real married when she’s 15 or so. Even using official stats, 1 kid before 20 and 3 or 4 kids before age 25 is very achievable.
I have personally met 30-year old grandmothers there who didn’t think anything of it. They’re 75% of the way to average life expectancy anyways.
I would say an average of 5 mothers per century up to 1850 or 1900 sounds about right, and is still a fairly conservative figure.
And the meme is being conservative
The average mother having their average daughter at an average of 25 is historically probably quite an overestimate. 20 would be a much safer guess, but there’s a good chance it’s lower than that too.
Doesn’t change the math that much though, easily less than a thousand generations since the advent of agriculture either way.
Surprisingly no. At least in central and western Europe, child marriages were very much a nobility thing. Securing alliances and such. And even for those the first child may well have been much later.
I don’t have an individual statistic on hand but https://fakehistoryhunter.net/2026/01/18/age-of-marriage-giving-birth-in-medieval-europe/ has collected a bunch of sources that suggest that the usual age of first marriage in medieval Europe for women was around their mid 20s, pretty much the same as today.
I’m not talking about child marriage. Traditionally women were considered to be of marrying age at around 15 or 16 (note that this doesn’t mean they got married at exactly this age – it means the lower bound). The blog you link seems to be intentionally or unintentionally conflating child marriage (prepubescent girls) with marrying between 15 and 20. And indeed the sources it cites seem to largely support an average marrying age of around 20 for women until the 17th century.
This is also of course only for the medieval period, which is relatively recent all things considered. That still leaves 8500 years unaccounted for until the advent of agriculture, and during those 8500 years it’s far more likely for women to have given birth to their first child younger rather than older than in the medieval period.
Although interestingly we have to take into account how many children were born per woman and until what age. Then we have to consider how many survived.
This would push the average age above that of the average age of first childbirth. The child must survive to eventually descend to you. I don’t think it makes the age 25, but likely higher than 15
You’re joking though. Right? Or are you thinking about wealthy people? The ones who might be written about?
I come from several generations of “prom night” conceptions and “shot gun weddings”.
Read the page I linked. It specifically lists sources that specifically talk about peasants in medieval Europe who on average married later than nobility.
Prom night conceptions and shotgun weddings are a phenomenon of the 20th and 21st century and would have been considered absolutely scandalous for most of history.
Yeah, when we’re talking about a 12000 year span and your references don’t go past the last thousand, it isn’t very representative. Relevant, certainly, but do you think that had much bearing in ancient Egypt? And that only gets us halfway through the time span we’re talking about.
uhm, actually the age of marriage basically exclusively depended on the real circumstances. in the roman empire, it was much lower, because rome was eternally at war, which consumed a whole lot of soldiers. that would not have been possible if women hadn’t had a lot of children, for which you’d have to start early.
the christian religion increased the minimum marriage age from 12 (!!) to 15 in the 3rd century CE (late roman empire), because rome stopped being a war-based country and there was simply no need for that many soldiers anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriageable_age
also the same link explains that the average age of first childbirth was significantly lower for american settlers than for european peasants in the early modern age; again the reasoning is that the american settlers were a highly expansive population (roughly a doubling of population every 20 years!! in the time period 1650 - 1880).
Well Rome is difficult, what you said is more true for the Republican era, after that Rome didn’t need to “produce” soldiers they simply offered Roman citizenship and benefits. They were largely able to reintroduce recruit from Provences. The promise of good pay, war spoils, and land also helped.
As for marrigeable ages, your sources mostly pull from written documents. Roman society was aggressively patriarchal so daughters were often used as a way to broker alliances or an increase in social status. There is also the payment of dowry that incentives men to marry off their daughters as soon as possible
I’m sorry, but I am also a source.
Anecdotal data isn’t
It is. But only as data point(s), not as a trend or generalization.
You can’t just look at the age of the mother when she has her first daughter. You also have to consider her age at the time of her last daughter. Even if she has her “prom night” daughter at 18, if she later has another daughter at 36, we’re looking at an average age of 27.
Plus talking about the deep past you have to consider infant mortality rates as well. If someone has 10 kids, but only the ones they had after 29 survived then that changes the math.
see my other reply below
Can confirm. My great grandma told me she got married at 18 which made her an “old maid” at the time
Lots of babies and children died before adulthood though, so its actually not a bad bet for 25 as an average birthing age for one that survives to adulthood. Not that every woman would lose her first 2 kids or whatever but enough certainly did to drive the average up somewhat from what it would be with modern medicine.
Always remember: these people were DNA-identical to us. All this life-saving, life-extending, life-improving technology… is always just 2-3 generations from poof
i think it’s also worth noting that a whole lot of children basically died due to malnutrition … think about it. contraception was not existent, so if a woman gets pregnant 8 times, but the family can only feed 2 children, that effectively means that 6 would essentially starve (or die due to other “preventable” diseases, but actually the better prevention than modern medicine is just food, since enough food strengthenes the immune system).
even if you had modern medicine at the time, children would still starve; the thing that really drives down child mortality is just a lower birth-rate altogether, since the family can still feed 2 children, regardless of whether they actually make 2 or 8 babies.
Also decreases in available food impacts fertility and menstrual cycles. If you had very little food you are likely to start menstruation later in life. If you have a hard time getting food you can have an irregular cycle leading to less ovulation periods per year
But they don’t have a single kid, so the average age when giving birth is maybe higher
Tbf, it was also far more common for people to have a shitload of kids, which takes time and thus would mean the mother was a fair bit older for the youngest few. My grandma was the youngest of 12 and her mother was well into her 40s when she was born.
Yeah. As society becomes more complex, maturity and preparedness comes much later. “Growing up” takes much longer.
Go back a thousand years, things were much simpler. There was less to navigate and learn so “the real world” started much earlier.
Look at any other creature without society and see how their life unfolds. They’re “adult” very quickly because within a short time they’ve got enough figured out to go out into the world alone.
Meanwhile, we’re now at a point where it’s normal to have a first child in the 30s and 40s, feeling completely unready.
i looked that up a while ago and apparently the median age of first childbirth was around 21 or 22 for women, though this depends on wealth: wealthy people had children earlier (on average), going down to about 16-18 for many noble women.
poor people often didn’t have children at all.
poor people often didn’t have children at all.
That’s a poor claim to make. The European societies almost always were encouraged to marry off their daughters even the poor. I supposed slightly less men got married accounting for death rates and the possibility to remarry after your wife dies, but that vast majority of poor people that made it to adulthood had children. There was no contraception and women were married off the vast majority of the time.
Anything but metrics…
The advent of agriculture (11.5 kya) was 4.5 hectomothers ago
I came here to say “obviously American, anything but metrics…”, but you bet me to it.
Ehm … Metric … Time?
I may be an ignorant American, but can you explain metric time to me? What is the SI unit of time? Days? I’ll meet you in 4 decidays, 3 centidays, and 20 millidays.
USians are so insulated that they don’t know the rest of the world has 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes each.
Half a cup of seconds
I pointed out that the people in those photos screaming at Ruby Bridges are still alive and vote like mad and my brother was flabbergasted.
My grandmother passed away in 2015, but when she was born in 1922, there were Civil War veterans and people who had been owned as slaves still walking around. She was 43 when the Civil Rights Act passed
I looked up the average age of mothers at the time of their first child birth in 1863 because I really badly wanted to make a joke about a “score” being 20 for that reason.
Sadly the average age was 22-26 so my day is ruined.
