Deebster@infosec.pub
on 23 Jan 2025 02:18
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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.
sinkingship@mander.xyz
on 23 Jan 2025 02:32
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So that’s about 13,000 homo sapiens mothers?
shalafi@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 02:38
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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.
TheBat@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 04:10
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4 mothers back is all I can summon,
What’s the spell?
_stranger_@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 04:29
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“I’m feeling hungry and mildly pregnant”
stinerman@midwest.social
on 23 Jan 2025 04:45
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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.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 02:46
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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.
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 23 Jan 2025 03:33
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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.
bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
on 23 Jan 2025 03:41
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It was the nobility that was marrying off barely pubescent kids.
Same as it ever was.
Sabre363@sh.itjust.works
on 23 Jan 2025 03:59
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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.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 04:32
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What was it like outside of Western Europe?
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 23 Jan 2025 04:34
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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.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 04:45
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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.
I don’t see how polygyny gets around the issue of risk of death from pregnancy.
Polygyny would get around the issue of men getting killed.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 06:03
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Polygyny is where one man has many wives.
Kayana@ttrpg.network
on 23 Jan 2025 11:32
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Edit: This first point was wrong, but the second point still stands.
Polygyny wouldn’t solve the aforementioned problem if we suppose that the birth rate of men and women is roughly the same. If one man has many wives, some of whom even die, then several other men won’t have any wives.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 15:09
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The birth rate of XY babies is actually slightly higher than XX babies. On the other hand, babies with higher testosterone tend to have weaker immune systems and so are more susceptible to infant mortality from disease.
Otherwise, I’m not sure what the problem is with men who don’t have wives? They simply don’t reproduce. Throughout history men have reproduced at a lower rate than women. In polygynous cultures it’s only the very powerful and wealthy men who have many wives. The poor and powerless men have few or none.
Kayana@ttrpg.network
on 23 Jan 2025 16:24
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Huh, really? I thought there were slightly more women than men, but maybe that depends on the economies etc.
As for your second point, yes, exactly. They don’t reproduce. So it doesn’t matter if many men get one wife each, or if a few men get many wives each, the number of pregnancies won’t change, and the number of pregnancy-related deaths won’t change either. So (again), I don’t see how polygyny helps in this situation.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 16:55
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I guess I’ve forgotten what the problem was exactly. High maternal mortality? How is that not solved by having many redundant wives?
Which does nothing to help with the issue of mothers dying from pregnancy, unless there’s something more that you know?
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
on 24 Jan 13:19
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Multiple wives => redundant wives. Solves the issue of mothers dying in pregnancy. The more wives you have, the more you expect to survive to be able to care for the children. Having only one wife, on the other hand, means all your eggs are in one basket (apologies)!
There is no such thing as redundant wives in a total sense.
There’s only kidnapped wives, or dead or single men. That’s the only way you get a relative surplus. The amount of women remains the same whether you do polygyny or not.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
on 24 Jan 18:56
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I’m sure there’s some kidnapped wives historically. Some wives bought from their fathers. But there’s also plenty of women who have consented to marry a man who already has a lot of wives. The issue has to do with resources and political power.
A rich and powerful man has a lot of resources available for his wives and children. A poor and weak man has few or none. Your chances of escaping starvation and death are much higher with the rich and powerful man.
Notice that I made zero mention of love. Marriage for love is a luxury of modernity, of wealth and power overflowing. You didn’t marry for love in the days when a bad year meant there was no food to last through winter.
HonoraryMancunian@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 06:58
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First births yes, but what about average age? Our ancestors may have been second born, third born, eighth born etc
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 07:23
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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.
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
on 23 Jan 2025 14:13
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Based on my own genealogical research, the trend I typically saw was 6-8 kids, between 18 and early 30s, about 20% of which died. Plus consider that some of those will be sons, and some daughters never become mothers, 25 is pretty spot on for the average age for a mother-to-mother generational gap.
Yes abd the field of genealogy, the size of a generation is given as 25 years. I believe specialists of genealogy who had to defined this metric did think about the way couple had kids in the past.
emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.de
on 23 Jan 2025 07:00
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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.
Acamon@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 07:58
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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?
shneancy@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 12:25
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if you click that second study link it’s exactly about that
TheWolfOfSouthEnd@lemmygrad.ml
on 23 Jan 2025 11:13
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Don’t they say teenagers/adolescence were invented in the 50s as that was the first time people were able to afford to allow their kids to carry on education?
Sergio@slrpnk.net
on 23 Jan 2025 04:18
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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.
Shawdow194@fedia.io
on 23 Jan 2025 05:12
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Two steps forward. One step back
Comment105@lemm.ee
on 23 Jan 2025 05:44
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Wonder how long it’ll take before we get to step forward again. As far as I’m seeing, we’re in for a long ride back. Not just for 4 years.
dumbass@leminal.space
on 23 Jan 2025 06:02
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It wouldn’t surprise me if Trump made it President for life.
sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml
on 23 Jan 2025 06:24
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I pray america doesn’t last his lifetime or that it dies with him
No way that would last long, it’s just not how Americans tick
Sergio@slrpnk.net
on 23 Jan 2025 06:18
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This has happened before. Even after Abu Ghraib Bush Jr won re-election. Even after Iran-Contra the Republicans won re-election.
But the fact is that they do not have the answers. They can only take things for themselves, and hope that people give up.
sevenapples@lemmygrad.ml
on 23 Jan 2025 08:06
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Civilian Drone Strike Obama and Palestinian Genocide Joe aren’t better
VoterFrog@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 12:39
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The American people are pretty fickle. It won’t take long for them to become unhappy with the Republican party. Of course once that happens and you and I are celebrating “Yay! We got rid of the fascists!” they’ll be going “Hmm… These other guys are pretty uninspiring. Maybe we should try fascism again.”
* There’s a big asterisk here that this is all predicted on elections continuing unabated. Which is not a given.
thespcicifcocean@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 17:08
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two steps forward, random.randint(1,4) steps back.
flora_explora@beehaw.org
on 23 Jan 2025 07:36
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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.
TheWolfOfSouthEnd@lemmygrad.ml
on 23 Jan 2025 11:16
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They were institutionalising out of wedlock mothers aswell, at least in the UK and Ireland.
Ulvain@sh.itjust.works
on 23 Jan 2025 04:35
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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
BudgetBandit@sh.itjust.works
on 23 Jan 2025 06:08
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Depending on the religion, yes. Otherwise it‘s 12 years per mother, 14 if you’re late.
fibojoly@sh.itjust.works
on 23 Jan 2025 06:35
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You would have a lot more death during pregnancy / childbirth though.
OneWomanCreamTeam@sh.itjust.works
on 23 Jan 2025 12:56
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That’s also assuming you’re the first born of the first born of the first born, and so on. And the further back you go, the more individual kids the average mother is likely to have. After all, you had to have like 12 kids just so 3 of them would make it past 9.
So your greatx12 grandmother might’ve started having kids at 15, but she still might not have had your ancestor till years later.
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 10:55
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And if everyone of your ancestors was unique (so no inbreeding) 80 mothers ago there would had to be 2^80^ = more than 1.2 septillion people on the planet
OhNoMoreLemmy@lemmy.ml
on 23 Jan 2025 12:34
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And if your grandmother had wheels she would be a bicycle.
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
on 23 Jan 2025 17:52
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This assumes a single child per set of parents, doesn’t it?
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 15:39
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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.
slazer2au@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 11:34
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The lengths Americans will go to in order not to use the metric system is insane.
prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works
on 23 Jan 2025 13:07
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I am interested in learning about this metric time.
Dasus@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 14:54
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Oh?
“450 mothers ago” is roughly 363,500 megaseconds ago.
To be fair, measuring that in moms seems more intuitive.
It’s also about the speed of light in millifortnights (2.9e8), within a 4% error margin.
prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works
on 23 Jan 2025 19:13
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I’d like mothers represented metric tbh, I’m in a meeting and not able to do the math rn but if anyone else can oblige …
Dasus@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 19:22
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You can probably propose a new SI-base unit of “a mother”, but what does it measure?
“Metric” just essentially comes from “metering”. People confuse “metric” with “decimal”, which is sort of the point of the person I replied to. While metric time technically exists insofar as you just use seconds as the base unit, omit minutes and hours and just do SI-prefixes, the French did also try decimal time, but it was just horrible.
So if “mother” was the base unit and it measured something, in this instance time, the advent of agriculture was roughly four hectomothers ago. Or 0.4 kilomothers, if you will.
prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works
on 23 Jan 2025 19:27
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Mother as a unit of time.
Ty
Edit the mother epoch presumably is the same epoch as all time, just … related to the mothers as above.
But see we already got the base unit of a second for time. But for generations, perhaps?
One kilomother would’ve been the early modern human, roughly. Ten kilomothers ago homo sapiens was just coming into being. A hundred kilomothers ago homo erectus would’ve just been coming into existence. A megamother ago we would’ve been diverging into great apes.
needthosepylons@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 23:33
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From your link, I rabbitholed to there and found gold
bluewing@lemm.ee
on 23 Jan 2025 15:46
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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.”
thespcicifcocean@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 17:07
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metric time actually was a thing, and it sucked so nobody used it.
itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 23 Jan 2025 22:22
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It didn’t suck exactly, time is just so much more prevalent than other units that switching to a new system was even more contentious. Current time is just as arbitrary (although maximizing for maximum number of prime factors is pretty nice, even if it doesn’t mesh nicely with other metric units)
Overshoot2648@lemm.ee
on 24 Jan 2025 01:05
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Metric really missed out by not being dozenal. SMH
Bearlydave@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 13:34
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What is the conversion from imperial mother to metric mother? About 1:1.26?
dnick@sh.itjust.works
on 24 Jan 2025 00:07
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They were discussing converting the AU to 1 ‘your mom’ as a better frame of reference, but France wouldn’t sign on
Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 15:35
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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.
humorlessrepost@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 23:58
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But after enough stagnation, at least we’ll get the great scattering.
samus12345@lemm.ee
on 23 Jan 2025 17:32
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25 is too old for most mothers the farther back you go.
ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
on 23 Jan 2025 17:51
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Not even that far back, modern medicine is wonderful
emptiestplace@lemmy.ml
on 24 Jan 2025 01:25
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Enjoy it while it lasts.
silasmariner@programming.dev
on 23 Jan 2025 22:46
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Kilamaos@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 23:11
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So from your article, it seems to say the opposite
The female average age of conception is 23.2, AND this includes a recent rise, so it would be even lower than that when considering older times
Also, it’s unclear if the average also accounts for the fact that there is are significantly more child being given birth to in the very recent past, which would skew the number way up
silasmariner@programming.dev
on 23 Jan 2025 23:34
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I don’t think 23 is wildly off from 25, and honestly this is just the first one I found that mentions it, I’ve seen various different sources for different reasons in the past. But the average is based on genetic mutations, and obviously in any given human it’s irrelevant how large a generation is as to how much genetic mutation is contributed by the generation. Like even if there are 8 billion people today, that doesn’t imply that you somehow got more generic inheritance from your parents than they did from theirs back when there were 6 billion people or whatever. Judging average to be the average per generation (a reasonable inference given the methodology) the last few years won’t make much of a difference in a timescale of 250k years
I can’t find the article I vaguely remember from a while ago, here’s another random one that has mothers in the bronze age ranging from 16-40ish researchgate.net/…/314262257_Bronze_Age_Beginning… although you can’t really infer much about averages from that.
Anyway yeah there have been periods in time when average age of mothers was younger, but generally if you look back on a long timescale it’s been older than people seem to assume. Seems to be quite common to have the notion that women all had children at 16 or whatever back in the day but not much to really bear that out that I can find.
RedAggroBest@lemmy.world
on 23 Jan 2025 23:36
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Every time I see people argue this I always wanna ask, are you considering that people don’t stop having kids after 1 or 2? I’d wager that most women had the majority of their kids around that 23ish mark when you include that lady who had 10 kids from 15 to 35
Yeah, I might not remember it exactly, but I’ve heard that about 9 out of 10 people of all our history haven’t died yet. Which can be neatly misinterpreted as a surprisingly optimistic chance of not dying.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
on 26 Jan 18:40
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Probably the same as I do with finite time - stress myself about things I cannot influence. Or perhaps I’d finally have time to learn not to do that - it’s a task for several lifetimes, I’m afraid :)
threaded - newest
A wild Danzig approaches
Whoops, I’m suddenly bleeding
.
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.
So that’s about 13,000 homo sapiens mothers?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t see how polygyny gets around the issue of risk of death from pregnancy.
Polygyny would get around the issue of men getting killed.
Polygyny is where one man has many wives.
Edit: This first point was wrong, but the second point still stands.
Polygyny wouldn’t solve the aforementioned problem if we suppose that the birth rate of men and women is roughly the same. If one man has many wives, some of whom even die, then several other men won’t have any wives.
The birth rate of XY babies is actually slightly higher than XX babies. On the other hand, babies with higher testosterone tend to have weaker immune systems and so are more susceptible to infant mortality from disease.
Otherwise, I’m not sure what the problem is with men who don’t have wives? They simply don’t reproduce. Throughout history men have reproduced at a lower rate than women. In polygynous cultures it’s only the very powerful and wealthy men who have many wives. The poor and powerless men have few or none.
Huh, really? I thought there were slightly more women than men, but maybe that depends on the economies etc.
As for your second point, yes, exactly. They don’t reproduce. So it doesn’t matter if many men get one wife each, or if a few men get many wives each, the number of pregnancies won’t change, and the number of pregnancy-related deaths won’t change either. So (again), I don’t see how polygyny helps in this situation.
I guess I’ve forgotten what the problem was exactly. High maternal mortality? How is that not solved by having many redundant wives?
You don’t just “have many redundant wives”. It starts out roughly 50/50 from birth no matter what you do.
You either have more women by having a lot of single men, or a lot of dead men, or by taking women from other places.
Yes I mentioned that earlier in the thread. Polygyny = some men have many wives, others have none.
Which does nothing to help with the issue of mothers dying from pregnancy, unless there’s something more that you know?
Multiple wives => redundant wives. Solves the issue of mothers dying in pregnancy. The more wives you have, the more you expect to survive to be able to care for the children. Having only one wife, on the other hand, means all your eggs are in one basket (apologies)!
There is no such thing as redundant wives in a total sense.
There’s only kidnapped wives, or dead or single men. That’s the only way you get a relative surplus. The amount of women remains the same whether you do polygyny or not.
I’m sure there’s some kidnapped wives historically. Some wives bought from their fathers. But there’s also plenty of women who have consented to marry a man who already has a lot of wives. The issue has to do with resources and political power.
A rich and powerful man has a lot of resources available for his wives and children. A poor and weak man has few or none. Your chances of escaping starvation and death are much higher with the rich and powerful man.
Notice that I made zero mention of love. Marriage for love is a luxury of modernity, of wealth and power overflowing. You didn’t marry for love in the days when a bad year meant there was no food to last through winter.
So yeah, okay. I see your point.
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.
Based on my own genealogical research, the trend I typically saw was 6-8 kids, between 18 and early 30s, about 20% of which died. Plus consider that some of those will be sons, and some daughters never become mothers, 25 is pretty spot on for the average age for a mother-to-mother generational gap.
Yes abd the field of genealogy, the size of a generation is given as 25 years. I believe specialists of genealogy who had to defined this metric did think about the way couple had kids in the past.
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.
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
Don’t they say teenagers/adolescence were invented in the 50s as that was the first time people were able to afford to allow their kids to carry on education?
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.
Two steps forward. One step back
Wonder how long it’ll take before we get to step forward again. As far as I’m seeing, we’re in for a long ride back. Not just for 4 years.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Trump made it President for life.
I pray america doesn’t last his lifetime or that it dies with him
No way that would last long, it’s just not how Americans tick
This has happened before. Even after Abu Ghraib Bush Jr won re-election. Even after Iran-Contra the Republicans won re-election.
But the fact is that they do not have the answers. They can only take things for themselves, and hope that people give up.
Civilian Drone Strike Obama and Palestinian Genocide Joe aren’t better
The American people are pretty fickle. It won’t take long for them to become unhappy with the Republican party. Of course once that happens and you and I are celebrating “Yay! We got rid of the fascists!” they’ll be going “Hmm… These other guys are pretty uninspiring. Maybe we should try fascism again.”
* There’s a big asterisk here that this is all predicted on elections continuing unabated. Which is not a given.
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two steps forward, random.randint(1,4) steps back.
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.
They were institutionalising out of wedlock mothers aswell, at least in the UK and Ireland.
Philomena…very good film.
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
Depending on the religion, yes. Otherwise it‘s 12 years per mother, 14 if you’re late.
You would have a lot more death during pregnancy / childbirth though.
That’s also assuming you’re the first born of the first born of the first born, and so on. And the further back you go, the more individual kids the average mother is likely to have. After all, you had to have like 12 kids just so 3 of them would make it past 9.
So your greatx12 grandmother might’ve started having kids at 15, but she still might not have had your ancestor till years later.
And if everyone of your ancestors was unique (so no inbreeding) 80 mothers ago there would had to be 2^80^ = 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.
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.
Oh?
“450 mothers ago” is roughly 363,500 megaseconds ago.
To be fair, measuring that in moms seems more intuitive.
It’s also about the speed of light in millifortnights (2.9e8), within a 4% error margin.
I’d like mothers represented metric tbh, I’m in a meeting and not able to do the math rn but if anyone else can oblige …
You can probably propose a new SI-base unit of “a mother”, but what does it measure?
“Metric” just essentially comes from “metering”. People confuse “metric” with “decimal”, which is sort of the point of the person I replied to. While metric time technically exists insofar as you just use seconds as the base unit, omit minutes and hours and just do SI-prefixes, the French did also try decimal time, but it was just horrible.
So if “mother” was the base unit and it measured something, in this instance time, the advent of agriculture was roughly four hectomothers ago. Or 0.4 kilomothers, if you will.
Mother as a unit of time.
Ty
Edit the mother epoch presumably is the same epoch as all time, just … related to the mothers as above.
Ty
But see we already got the base unit of a second for time. But for generations, perhaps?
One kilomother would’ve been the early modern human, roughly. Ten kilomothers ago homo sapiens was just coming into being. A hundred kilomothers ago homo erectus would’ve just been coming into existence. A megamother ago we would’ve been diverging into great apes.
Motheric
From your link, I rabbitholed to there and found gold
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.”
metric time actually was a thing, and it sucked so nobody used it.
It didn’t suck exactly, time is just so much more prevalent than other units that switching to a new system was even more contentious. Current time is just as arbitrary (although maximizing for maximum number of prime factors is pretty nice, even if it doesn’t mesh nicely with other metric units)
Metric really missed out by not being dozenal. SMH
What is the conversion from imperial mother to metric mother? About 1:1.26?
They were discussing converting the AU to 1 ‘your mom’ as a better frame of reference, but France wouldn’t sign on
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.
But after enough stagnation, at least we’ll get the great scattering.
25 is too old for most mothers the farther back you go.
Not even that far back, modern medicine is wonderful
Enjoy it while it lasts.
www.openaccessgovernment.org/…/151423/ nah it’s pretty much been the average age of mothers for a very very long time indeed
So from your article, it seems to say the opposite
The female average age of conception is 23.2, AND this includes a recent rise, so it would be even lower than that when considering older times
Also, it’s unclear if the average also accounts for the fact that there is are significantly more child being given birth to in the very recent past, which would skew the number way up
I don’t think 23 is wildly off from 25, and honestly this is just the first one I found that mentions it, I’ve seen various different sources for different reasons in the past. But the average is based on genetic mutations, and obviously in any given human it’s irrelevant how large a generation is as to how much genetic mutation is contributed by the generation. Like even if there are 8 billion people today, that doesn’t imply that you somehow got more generic inheritance from your parents than they did from theirs back when there were 6 billion people or whatever. Judging average to be the average per generation (a reasonable inference given the methodology) the last few years won’t make much of a difference in a timescale of 250k years
I can’t find the article I vaguely remember from a while ago, here’s another random one that has mothers in the bronze age ranging from 16-40ish researchgate.net/…/314262257_Bronze_Age_Beginning… although you can’t really infer much about averages from that.
Anyway yeah there have been periods in time when average age of mothers was younger, but generally if you look back on a long timescale it’s been older than people seem to assume. Seems to be quite common to have the notion that women all had children at 16 or whatever back in the day but not much to really bear that out that I can find.
Every time I see people argue this I always wanna ask, are you considering that people don’t stop having kids after 1 or 2? I’d wager that most women had the majority of their kids around that 23ish mark when you include that lady who had 10 kids from 15 to 35
When numbers divide
Do we have a community for genealogy?
Some of my ancestors came to the United States on the Mayflower and that was only like 8 or 9 mothers ago.
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Yes also this diagram:
<img alt="" src="https://discuss.tchncs.de/pictrs/image/5554e3b2-6602-415c-829c-4e1076363f62.jpeg">
Gives you a clear sense of how quickly things are turning.
In a geological sense, all of humanity isn’t even a heartbeat.
Yeah, I might not remember it exactly, but I’ve heard that about 9 out of 10 people of all our history haven’t died yet. Which can be neatly misinterpreted as a surprisingly optimistic chance of not dying.
haha yes, statistics is neat :)
Also, what would you do with infinite time?
Probably the same as I do with finite time - stress myself about things I cannot influence. Or perhaps I’d finally have time to learn not to do that - it’s a task for several lifetimes, I’m afraid :)