Yay! Feminist Anthropology time!
Alongside drawings of bison and horses, the first painters left clues to their identity on the stone walls of caves, blowing red-brown paint through rough tubes and stenciling outlines of their palms. New analysis of ancient handprints in France and Spain suggests that most of those early artists were women.
This is a surprise, since most archaeologists have assumed it was men who had been making the cave art. One interpretation is that early humans painted animals to influence the presence and fate of real animals that they’d find on their hunt, and it’s widely accepted that it was the men who found and killed dinner.
But a new study indicates that the majority of handprints found near cave art were made by women, based on their overall size and relative lengths of their fingers.
"The assumption that most people made was it had something to do with hunting magic," Penn State archaeologist Dean Snow, who has been scrutinizing hand prints for a decade, told NBC News. The new work challenges the theory that it was mostly men, who hunted, that made those first creative marks.
Another reason we thought it was men all along? Male archeologists from modern society where gender roles are rigid and well-defined — they found the art. "[M]ale archaeologists were doing the work," Snow said, and it’s possible that ”had something to do with it.”
I added the emphasis in bold, but the “that” was already italicized in the article, and it’s probably my favorite part. I love this article, although I’m not a huge fan of the fact that it’s considered so incredibly shocking and radical to imagine that women possibly participated in society 40,000 years ago.
In other awesome feminist anthropology news: it is now somewhat accepted that the venus sculptures, rather than being depictions of female beauty by male artists, were self-portraits by women looking down at their own bodies. The paleolithic figurines lose their distorted proportions and acquire representational realism if we understand that they are self-portraits created by women looking down at their own bodies.
See also: This quote by Sandy Toksvig
When I was a student at Cambridge I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved in it. ‘This is often considered to be man’s first attempt at a calendar’ she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. ‘My question to you is this – what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.’
It was a moment that changed my life. In that second I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked women’s contributions? How often had I sped past them as I learned of male achievement and men’s place in the history books? Then I read Rosalind Miles’s book The Women’s History of the World (recently republished as Who Cooked the Last Supper?) and I knew I needed to look again. History is full of fabulous females who have been systematically ignored, forgotten or simply written out of the records. They’re not all saints, they’re not all geniuses, but they do deserve remembering.
the willendorf sculpture and others like her were /the first selfies/ and its amazing
The paleolithic figurines lose their distorted proportions and acquire representational realism if we understand that they are self-portraits created by women looking down at their own bodies.
I really, really love this sentence.
Creating solutions for space, creates solutions on Earth.
Many of NASA’s solutions for space exploration have been adapted for use on Earth. These adapted technologies are known as NASA spinoffs. To date there have been over 1,800 NASA spinoffs. The Apollo program led to many spinoffs, including CAT scans, better water purification technology, a life raft that can withstand choppy conditions at sea, and athletics shoes that were adapted from moon boot technology. Memory foam was even originally developed by NASA to improve the safety of aircraft cushions. Recently a new technology startup Scanadu developed the first real life Star Trek tricorder, which uses the same technology as the Mars Curiosity rover.
NASA has continued to better lives on Earth by developing innovative technologies for the space shuttle and Viking spacecraft that were adapted to create more functional artificial limbs for amputees and insulin pumps for diabetics. NASA also developed fire resistant polymer fabric, which protects firefighters and military personnel. One of the latest NASA spinoffs, the FINDER radar, helps emergency responders rescue victims of disasters. NASA technology has protected us and we should protect its budget.
NASA is valuable both for space exploration and for bettering life on Earth. The government shutdown is halting innovation. Write to Congress to tell them you want the government shutdown to end and for NASA to continue innovation for space and Earth.
This has depressingly few notes.
Gen X, represent.1964, yo. Proud to be part of Generation Jones!
1966 Right on the cusp between Gen Jones & Gen X. :-)
oh my god, this is from 1947. doesn’t it show how much things HAVEN’T changed that I read through this whole thing assuming it was from a current article or essay, until I got to the date at the end?
Sad truth innit?
Full-size, life-like, fire-breathing, robotic dragon. Damn! That is some FINE engineering!
Link courtesy of Jim Hines’ blog (www.jimchines.com/blog)
In reaction to the chairman of Barilla stating that they would not create ads featuring LGBT folk because they want to maintain the brand of being eaten by “traditional families”, (their pasta…not to be confused with being eaten by traditional zombie families)…. Pasta company Bertolli shows they love everyone and thinks everyone should love all their different shapes, sizes, and colors of pasta.
That’s some pretty awesomesauce there.
Well. All right, Bertolli, I’ll try your pasta. <3
Hats off to Bertolli’s marketing department. XD
I’ve not tried their pasta but their pasta sauces are pretty delicious.
It’s captioned on FB as “Pasta and Love For All!”
Guido Barilla, whose company has almost half the Italian pasta market and a quarter of that in the U.S. said on an Italian radio broadcast Wednesday: “I would never do an advert with a homosexual family…if the gays don’t like it they can go an eat another brand.”
Barilla went further, attacking gay parents and adoption.
“I have no respect for adoption by gay families because this concerns a person who is not able to choose,” he said.
And then he tried to correct himself by saying he just wanted to underline a woman’s role in the household.
Because you know…female members of the LGBTQ community don’t exist
OMG it got WORSE. Nope, never buying Barilla again.