14 DAY TRIAL // From antiquity till very recently, the western society was still a patriarchal society, were man ruled; that pattern still applies to many current cultures.
J.M. Adovasio, an expert on perishable prehistoric artifacts and the founder and director of the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute with Olga Soffer, an expert on the Paleolithic Period and peoples of the Old World and a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign come with proofs pointing in their book "The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in History" that during our prehistory women ruled the world.
They say women have always been major players in human society, not simple baby-machines who took care of the children, gathered roots, nuts and berries and relied on their hunky males to bring home the meat. "Female humans have been the chief engine in the unprecedented high level of human sociability; were the inventors of the most useful of tools - called the String Revolution; have shared equally in the provision of food for human societies; almost certainly drove the human invention of language; and were the ones who created agriculture."
The stereotypical image of the early woman is derived from that of the woman in recent history, and early paleologists fixated on stones and bones and "assumed that it was a man's world back in the Pleistocene and earlier", a deep scientific ignorance.
Only recently, new techniques and technologies allowed the study of more perishable artifacts and other "womanly" items. The authors looked for evidence about the greater role played by women in primitive societies from the fossil record (artifacts and ecofacts); the behavior of the monkeys in general and of the great apes in particular; and the behaviors of current hunters-gatherers populations, like the San (Bushmen) of the Kalahari Desert (southern Africa) and the Australian Aboriginals, plus genetic and molecular biology. "In which we look back from present conditions to early human evolution and find that the female pelvis may well have saved all us humans from a life of bowling alone as well as letting us become super smart."
In classical hypotheses about the Upper Paleolithic society and economics dominates the stereotype of the "mighty hunters setting out to slaughter mammoths and other large animals."
"There is no evidence of Upper Paleolithic assemblages of enough hunters - 40 or so - to take down a mammoth, much less the number needed to wipe out a herd. Only the foolhardiest would attempt to kill an animal that stands 14 feet high and has a notoriously bad temper when annoyed."
Per contra, most of the animal remains found in sites like Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic belonged to small mammals like hares and foxes. "The picture of Man the Mighty Hunter is now fading out of the annals of prehistory."
27,000 years ago, at Dolni Vestonice, it appeared that all individuals (men, women, children, elderly) contributed to the work of living communally.
Researchers found evidence that huge nets, probably woman-made, were employed over large areas to trap prey. The fact that women wove is proved by fiber artifacts and 200 "Venus" figurines (complete or pieces) from the European Paleolithic, "the most representational three-dimensional images made in the Gravettian period some 27,000 to 22,000 years ago. Nothing is their equal before this period from anywhere in the world, and thousands of years go by before anything comparable appears again".
In a research, Adovasio and Soffer found that what was regarded as braided hair on the Venus of Willendorf, for example, was in fact a carved hat, made similarly to current American Indian baskets. "It is not unreasonable to think that, among the functions involved in this Upper Paleolithic masterpiece, it served as a blueprint or instruction manual showing weavers how to make such hats."
The authors also found that other Venuses wearing woven hats also possessed "bandeaus, belts and string skirts", probably revealing "a social category of their own." "One can conclude that the clothing on the Gravettian Venuses symbolized achievement or prestige."
The precise manufacturing of the fabrics "leads almost inevitably to the conclusion that they were created by the weavers themselves, or at least under the sharp-eyed tutelage of the weavers."
"That it was almost surely women who did most of this fine weaving and basketry is one matter to which the ethnographic record appears to be a reliable guide."