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A study has compared the bones of Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age women to those of modern female athletes:
Grinding grain for hours a day gave prehistoric women stronger arms than today's elite female rowers, a study suggests. The discovery points to a "hidden history" of gruelling manual labour performed by women over millennia, say University of Cambridge researchers. The physical demands on prehistoric women may have been underestimated in the past, the study shows. In fact, women's work was a crucial driver of early farming economies.
"This is the first study to actually compare prehistoric female bones to those of living women," said lead researcher, Dr Alison Macintosh. "By interpreting women's bones in a female-specific context we can start to see how intensive, variable and laborious their behaviours were, hinting at a hidden history of women's work over thousands of years."
Also at Science Magazine, The Guardian, WUNC, and The Verge.
Prehistoric women's manual labor exceeded that of athletes through the first 5500 years of farming in Central Europe (open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aao3893) (DX)
Related: Divergence in Male and Female Manipulative Behaviors with the Intensification of Metallurgy in Central Europe (open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0112116) (DX)
Lower limb skeletal biomechanics track long-term decline in mobility across ∼6150 years of agriculture in Central Europe (DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2014.09.001) (DX)
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Saturday December 02 2017, @11:07PM (8 children)
Nope, that's more myth than fact.
For example, in the Middle Ages, the amount of labor a typical peasant owed to the local lord was often rather lower than taxes are now (about 60 days, or 1/6 of their time, rather than our 25-30% of income), and the Catholic Church had about 80 or so holy days that the peasants had off from work. So that's not quite like having weekends, but it wasn't like they were constantly working all the time either.
Also, farming is a profession where there are bursts and lulls of activity based on seasonal cycles. In the spring, there's a big burst of work to plow and sow the fields. In the summer, you have to go out and check to ensure the plants are healthy, but that's far less labor intensive. In the fall, there's a big burst of work to harvest everything before the plants are dead and the food rots on the plant. And in the winter, your job was to sit inside and do seed prep work and processing (e.g. threshing). If you have animals to worry about, obviously those chores don't stop, but keeping a small number of, say, pigs, is mostly a matter of making sure they get some food and water periodically and make sure their waste is cleaned up if it's inside. The big burst of activity for animals is usually in the spring, when new young animals are usually born and you have to ensure that they're properly domesticated.
So no, it wasn't like everyone was constantly slaving away. In some ways, a typical dirt-poor person is worse off now than their counterpart from centuries ago.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Saturday December 02 2017, @11:31PM (1 child)
Well that is certainly true.
But as you said, you don't get a break from animals.
"In some ways" is a pretty equivocal statement :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @05:08AM
This, however, is not:
--R.A. Lafferty
(Score: 4, Interesting) by KiloByte on Sunday December 03 2017, @12:12AM (4 children)
You mean, medieval peasants had better smartphones and caviar and fine wine for food stamps?
Today, everyone (well, not in Eritrea...) can count on at least free shelter with breakfast, showers and periodically clothes — those living under the bridge are there on their own substance-influenced wish.
Just try to calculate how many days of your income are enough to get enough of cheapest food to last you through the year, including staying hungry during the hungry gap. No real house (just a barebones wooden cottage, or worse), no heating, electricity. No car. No entertainment of any kind, other than what costs you nothing but time. Oh, and if you're in Poland, you do get to buy booze — if you don't, it is poured out before your cottage and you need to pay anyway.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @02:34AM (2 children)
> Today, everyone (well, not in Eritrea...) can count on at least free shelter with breakfast, showers and periodically clothes — those living under the bridge are there on their own substance-influenced wish.
Maybe where you are. Here in Melbourne, Australia we have what appears to be a growing number of homeless people. Rather than drug-addicts the two most common categories are mentally ill and indigenous, I'd say. Whether some were alcoholics before or after they became homeless I don't know. The one thing I can say for sure is that our system has failed these people.
Would they have been better off back in the day? Maybe, there was more sense of community when the communities were smaller. Then again, maybe they wouldn't even have lived this long.
(Score: 2) by KiloByte on Sunday December 03 2017, @04:33AM (1 child)
But, do those homeless people die of starvation? Their standard of life might be not what one could wish for, but it's bad only compared to other people in the same country — they still live like kings compared to an average peasant from medieval Europe or even certain places on Earth today.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @05:10AM
You say it as if it were a bad thing.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday December 04 2017, @09:43PM
That's news to everyone who's ever actually worked with the homeless. Or even knows anyone who was or is homeless. Some are drunks and druggies, but quite a few aren't, and are instead ordinary people down on their luck. For example, one very good friend of mine lived out of her car in a Walmart parking lot for several months until somebody took pity on her and took her in - not an addict, not mentally ill, just someone with abusive parents and an abusive boyfriend and nowhere else to go.
And you might be thinking "But the government has programs that prevent that. You have Section 8, public housing, that sort of thing, right?" And you're right, those programs exist, and the homeless are better off because they exist. Where you're wrong is in thinking that they cover everybody. A common scenario: Somebody is qualified for assistance, fills out the forms, but in between sending in the forms and getting the voucher back they lose their home. So now they're homeless, and they can't get the letter with the voucher in it that would give them a home back. That kind of scenario means that government assistance does a lot more to appear like it's fixing the problem then actually fixing the problem.
As for homeless shelters, the really big problem with most shelters is that they typically refuse to house men and teenage boys with women and children, which means that going into a shelter frequently involves splitting up the family with no guarantee that they'll ever see each other again, and not infrequently leaving the teenage boys without a parent around. That's changing somewhat, because the shelter organizations recognize the problem, but still an issue.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Sunday December 03 2017, @12:57PM
Sorry but your education on agriculture is off by a few centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-field_system [wikipedia.org]
Similar to your description, from early Mesopotamia until the dusk of Rome you had the Two-field system where you planted once a year. But from around 800ad Europeans were planting twice to three times a year.
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