My family and I just got the February 2009 issue of National Geographic today, which followed a featured article about Neanderthals. It got a lot of stupid letters about how certain people look like the Neanderthal reconstruction (which, as one grateful reader pointed out, was of a female and not the traditional male) but one of the letters was just utterly absurd. Letters are published in the magazine but not online so you would have to actually buy the issue to see it. I've transcribed it:
"The Neanderthal researchers are smart people, so I'm sure they thought of this. Political correctness being what it is, I guess they could not mention it. But it's clear what probably happened. The Neanderthal women started going out hunting with the guys, researchers say, to put better cuts on the table. Maybe they liked hunting better than being stuck back at the cave with the kids. Lacking high-quality, subsidized child care back at camp, they decided to cut back on having babies. Fecundity dropped below the replacement level, which had to be pretty high in those days, and bingo--extinctionville. Women's lib did them in."Mikk Hinnov
Bridgewater, New Jersey
So basically: Feminism will make us go extinct!
Can this possibly be for real? Are we being baited? Looking at what actual conservatives say and Men's Rights Activist websites, it seems entirely possible that this is serious.
It looks like one of those familiar "evolutionary psychologist" articles that set out to justify sexism and don't really bother to back up their claims. It's also got that casual, "edgy" tone that I see so often in arrogant conservative articles.
Frankly, I'd rather have us go extinct than have to live in an unjust world where people are defined by what's between their legs rather than what's in their hearts and minds.
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Unfortunately, I think the guy was for real. The idiot probably does believe what he says.
I'm with you. I sometimes get so frustrated and wonder if we'll ever have a just society where women and men are treated equally. If not, maybe we deserve to go extinct.
If men want to have more babies, they can stay home and raise them. No need to force anyone into pseudoslavery to keep the human race going, men and women can decide for themselves who will not work to keep up the 2.0-2.5 birth rate we need. Problem solved.
Am I missing something? Did the neanderthals become extinct? Or did they evolve into modern people?
I have always read that things were the other way around, that the invention of agriculture meant that men spent less time hunting and more time seeking ways to become dominant and controlling, resulting in the development of patriarchy.
Although, judging from Hinnov's letter, I would have to say that neanderthal man is still with us.
I think Neanderthals were evolutionary cousins of Homo Sapiens, kind of like how chimpanzees are evolutionary cousins to humans. So while we had common ancestors at one point, we were evolving on seperate evolutionary branches (hope that wasn't too geeky, heh).
Also I've read the same thing about how agriculture gave rise to increase in patriarchy. That's why there were a whole bunch of powerful goddesses in prehistory but the power those goddesses had were chipped away until mostly male gods had power.
"I think Neanderthals were evolutionary cousins of Homo Sapiens, kind of like how chimpanzees are evolutionary cousins to humans"
Much closer. Neanderthals were our closest relatives, so much so that they were sometimes considered a subspecies of Homo sapiens, (though iirc analysis of their DNA determined them to be a distinct species of Homo).
There is actually a lot of controversy over what happened to neanderthals. Some archaeologists think they interbred with homo sapiens, while others think they died out without contributing to our gene pool, or various possibilities in between. The genetic material that they have been able to isolate from the few neanderthals they've found hasn't matched any known modern DNA, but there are so many gaps in the possibilities that that's not decisive.
I don't think anyone really knows for sure what societies were like before agriculture and, especially, writing. That kind of knowledge is pretty limited when just examining a culture according to the materials they left behind (and, often, only certain materials survive for us to look at, limiting our abilities even further). We can make guesses, and look at modern hunter-gatherer societies, but there's no guarantee that we have all the information we need or that the modern hunter-gatherers are actually reflective of ancient hunter-gatherer societies.
Also, neanderthals really weren't much different than the homo sapiens of their time (who weren't much different than we are now). The idea of neanderthals as idiotic cavemen who barely knew how to bang two rocks together - or who club their women and drag them back to their cave - is pretty old-fashioned.
Part of me thinks this guy might not be serious. I don't know anything about Neanderthals, but I do know that calling someone one is an insult.
He probably was serious, but can you blame him for saying this? I've read a lot on this site about having kids is irresponsible and undying support for abortion which, lets be honest here, does reduce the population of future generations.
I can see where he would get this idea from.
The first problem with this guy is that he assumes that there was first a division of labor and then it disappeared when women "decided" to hunt alongside the men. But what if this egalitarian feature was indeed the default for them because of their environment? Why does he assume that their system was in need of a "women's lib" in the first place?
And you know lot's of other things cause population declines as well, but oh well, who cares about that little thing called science anyway.
So population control controls the population? Who would have guessed!
Of course reproductive freedom reduces the number of a population. That’s kind of the point, to control one’s own reproduction and to have only children that one is willing and able to provide for. And industrialization and equality do lead to a decline in population growth. I just don’t see how this is a bad thing. All this guy has done is point out the obvious and then conclude that a declining rate of population growth causes extinction.
Frankly, abortion rights are essential to women’s freedom and overall well being, so obviously feminists are going to show “undying support” for them. If I do not own my own body or have the right to make my own moral decisions I am not truly free. I do think that excessive childbearing is irresponsible and I can’t think of a single reason to have kids that isn’t selfish and irrational, but I won’t ever tell someone that they can’t have kids. I respect women (and men) too much and I expect to be treated with respect in return.
"Lacking high-quality, subsidized child care back at camp, they decided to cut back on having babies."
If only we had some way of solving this crucial problem that the neanderthals faced.
I wouldn't even bother fighting retarded claims like this. Fine, maybe that's what happened. Okay so what? Hey look, a huge sample population of women who are both working full time and yet still having children. Apparently your theory doesn't apply to us. Done.
Extinction is not a problem for homo sapienns, is it? At over six billion we need a lot *more* feminist-led population control so we stop ruining the planet and destroying every species on Earth.
Yeah, that's what I don't get. Extinction from lack of reproduction is really not an issue, even with working women and birth control. Extinction from waste, war and the like however...
Also, I really fail to understand how women hunting with the men would automatically equal falling birth rates. One, women have done manual labor while pregnant throughout history, and two, he really thinks these primitive people just stopped having sex almost altogether so as to have fewer babies? Sorry, not buying it. If there's one thing the human race has demonstrated throughout the ages it's a pretty lousy ability to abstain from sex even when it's in their own best interest.
I can't believe National Geographic even printed that.
Maybe they thought it was funny?
I hadn’t even thought about the lack of birth control. Their only option in reducing the birthrate would have been to not have sex. I don’t think he thought this out so well. Maybe he thinks they just naturally lost fertility because, you know, if pregnant women ever do anything ever they’ll have miscarriages and such. *rolls eyes* Or maybe that exercise makes them infertile or undesirable.
Dear SanyaTheSpiffy, you were right. You were being baited, and you rose to the bait. I am the "idiot neanderthal" Mikk Hinnov, as a couple of your correspondents called me.
I was hoping that the breezy tone of my letter to the National Geographic would mark it clearly as mainly a jest, a gentle tweaking of certain orthodoxies, but I guess orthodoxies don't like to be tweaked, especially in jest.
Had the National Geographic published my letter in full, however, I imagine that the commentary on your blog would have been even more furious. I went on to point out that in the regions of the world where women's rights and status are the most equal to men's, populations are already falling. That applies, among others, to all of Europe and Russia and Japan, and even to the USA, where our population would be shrinking too, except for the massive influx of mostly illegal immigrants. Women in those most "liberated" areas are failing give birth to the requisite 2.1+ childern each that is required under today's conditions of mortality, to maintain the population. Populations are rising only in those parts of the world where women are most repressed and oppressed - for example Africa, the Muslim world and south Asia. Is there a cause and effect relationship between women's "liberated" or "non-liberated" condition and their rate of childbearing, or is that just a co-incidence, or are both the consequence of some third influence? I am not a population researcher, so of course I do not know, but I hope that such researchers and gender-studies academics as might be interested in determining the answer are not being intimidated by the disciplines of political correctness away from objectively studying and publishing on this topic.
Imagine that such studies were done and indeed it were found that the more "liberated" the women are in a given community, the fewer children they bear, to the point that the community's childbirth rate falls below the replacement rate. Imagine that a cause and effect between the two is found, "liberation" being the cause and reduced fecundity the effect. Imagine then that the spread of womens' liberation around the world, to all communities, succeeds. The whole population of the world would begin to shrink. If that goes on long enough, you know the end result - "extinctionville".
But for a long time before that end is reached, the shrunken populations of the world would have become unable to maintain the technology and specialization that so enriches our lives today. Life everywhere will have become "nasty, brutish and short" again - like what we see today in some parts of Africa. And maybe therein lies the race's salvation - in that situation, where women's liberty would be a luxury that can no longer be afforded, a new repression might rekindle the rate of babymaking once again.
You say that you would "rather have us go extinct than have to live in an unjust world... ". That's a rather self-centered viewpoint on a large religio/metaphysical issue - what point the human race sees in its existence as a species in the first place, and whether justice as you define it plays any part in it. The world is neither just nor unjust, it simply is what it is, and we ourselves put labels like "just" and "unjust" based on our nature and nurture on aspects of it. In any case, your opinion is "cheap" since there is little risk of the human race's going extinct in your lifetime anyway (absent something catastrophic from the cosmos). But when extinction is looming in some distant future, the last few homo sapiens left on earth, even the women, might not feel the way you do. By then it might be too late to try something different.
I am not advocating the re-subjugation or continued subjugation of women as the means of avoiding the extinction of our species. But if the liberation of women could result in a turn onto the road toward extinction, that possibility should at least be acknowlegded, not hotly and ignorantly denied, and if extinction of the race is not the choice of the living, countervailing steps would have to be taken. Not necessarily step that preferentially oppress women.