The Cloud People:
"'...still want the child [Daraku, Aryuk's daughter] carries, to be another hunter or another mother for them...'" (p. 192)
I have picked up some ideas about primitive societies but do not know how up-to-date they are:
unrestricted sexuality before incest tabus were imposed/accepted for sound biological reasons;
matrilineal descent because paternity was not known, indeed the causal relationship between sexual intercourse and childbirth might not have been known;
both sexes gathered fruit and berries;
sexual division of labor began with the hunting of large animals because pregnant or breast-feeding women could not easily creep or run after prey.
Hence, the beginning of the distinction between hunters and mothers. On this set of assumptions, if the Tulat were still at that earliest social stage, then Aryuk would have known neither who his children were nor who their mother was.
Although Corwin negotiates for Daraku to rejoin the Tulat, she and her baby die in childbirth. When Aryuk comments that the baby's death is good, a mammoth trumpets, the wind loudens and the Tulat fore-sense "...a cold summer." (p. 193)
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I did not realize at first which of these two peoples, the Cloud and Tula, were matrilineal and had no clear conception of the male's role in reproduction. Then I saw you mean the latter, which surprised me a bit. However primitive the Tulat were, socially and technologically, they were true Homo sapiens, which makes lack of knowledge of the male role in reproduction rather late.
On average, women are about one fourth or one third less strong than men. That would be another factor in not having women hunt large game animals. With the usual exceptions, of course, esp. in emergencies.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
We don't know how relatively strong men and women were back then, though.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
If today, in the most technologically advanced countries of the world, despite plenty of food and access to medical care, women are still about one fourth to one third less strong than males, I see no reason not to think that was not the case 15,000 or more years ago. Esp. since life was so much more precarious then.
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: people back then had more robust skeletons than we do, so would be physically stronger; this is partly because of genetics (humans have been getting more gracile for a long time) and partly because of their very active lifestyle.
However, human beings have been getting steadily less sexually dimorphic for a long time too -- h. sap. sap. is less dimorphic than its predecessors, and within our species the differences in stature and other features have been diminishing for at least two hundred thousand years, albeit slowly.
So the relative physical abilities of the sexes would be about the same as now, though a woman from 15,000 years ago would probably be extremely strong by our standards.
Note that hunter-gatherers were very well-nourished and were about the same size as people in the most advanced countries now.
They had a high-protein diet (mostly meat) and low disease load because of their sparse populations and frequent moves.
(And there were no dense farming/urban populations to act as incubators and reservoirs of disease organisms.)
Human stature took a massive hit with the development of farming and didn't fully recover until the last couple of centuries.
Ksor, Mr. Stirling!
I should have remembered these and similar comments by you in other blog pieces. Esp. how hunter/gatherers were so often much better nourished than agricultural peoples. Anderson himself made similar observations when making his Scandinavian/Germanic characters bigger and stronger than many from the Mediterranean area.
But my basic point still seems to be true: that, on average, women are about one fourth to one third less strong than males.
Ad astra! Sean
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