Peptide analyses reveal female leadership in Copper Age Iberia (C. 2900–2650 BC) | Hacker News Reader

Peptide analyses reveal female leadership in Copper Age Iberia (C. 2900–2650 BC)

nature.com

30 pointsrntn41 comments

Some of the inferential steps in this article are… “heroic” might be a polite way to put it.

“Furthermore, the fact that none of the infant burials found in Valencina have grave goods suggests that, among the communities that lived in or frequented this site, social status was not ascribed by birth (and therefore no significant inheritance of wealth occurred), contrary to what would happen later in the Early Bronze Age)32. Therefore, it is fair to assume that the individual inhumed in structure 10.049 gained a prominent social position through merit and personal achievement and did not ‘inherit’ it by birth.”

I mean… on the basis of the tombs that have been found you want to infer that? Sorry but there’s ten other stories that fit the available evidence. This interpretation really stretches credulity beyond the breaking point.

The entire article (please actually read it before interacting here) is built upon multiple staggered leaps of faith and ends up collapsing. The authors should study high-school level probability theory.

Yeah, I could even buy the first part, I don't know archaeology and can't say which inferences about the society you can make based on the existence or absence of grave goods in that era.

But it's one thing to characterize the society of the time based on the totality of evidence, it's another to ascribe "merit and personal achievement" to one specific person.

-Excavations near Bristol revealed copper wires, indicating their use of wired telegraph.

-Excavations near Nowherabad revealed nothing, indicating their use of wireless telegraph.

If you google the name of the authors you can see that some of them have a political agenda to push.

This is an interesting find, but it's not surprising to find a woman of prominence in that era. Before agriculture really took off, hunter gatherers were pretty egalitarian and a lot of kinship systems were matrilineal.

Also, I think that it's more likely that this person was a shaman, than a chief, but that's just a speculation on my part.

This is the copper age and the late neolithic, so agricultural, not hunter-gatherer era.

Humans were a lot better before they invented agriculture.

They may well have been matrilineal because prior to IVF etc, you could be certain who the mother was but not the father.

It has its good points but shouldn't be assumed to be an expression of high ideals.

Most likely, quality of life went up for most people thanks to agriculture. Before that, war, abortion, exposing unwanted infants and insisting some people just leave the tribe and not come back were some of the means humans used to keep population levels sustainable and avert mass starvation in hunter-gatherer societies.

>They may well have been matrilineal because prior to IVF etc, you could be certain who the mother was but not the father.

According to research I've read, pre-agricultural societies, and even more recent tribal hunter-gatherer societies, frequently had no concept of monogamy at all, and didn't worry about who people's fathers were, because children were raised by tribes/villages at large. Monogamy was an invention that came about with agriculture, because that's when the concepts of land ownership and inheritance came about.

>Most likely, quality of life went up for most people thanks to agriculture.

Actually, no: human height dropped about 30cm with the introduction of agriculture, because nutrition in an agriculture-based society is much worse than in a hunter-gatherer society. It took many millennia (as in, only very recently) for human height to get back to pre-agricultural levels.

I notice you didn't rebut my assertion that some portion of the population was murdered or banished (banishment being a thing that can also result in death). So perhaps most people were better off, except those that were murdered and perhaps except those who mourned those who were murdered and missed them.

Also, I'm unaware of hunter-gatherer societies inventing much in the way of technology. Technological progress seems to require settled cultures.

I happen to like modern tech and don't desperately wish I lived in a hunter-gatherer culture.

Yes, apparently one factor that prevented malnutrition from claiming more lives in the pre-agricultural era is that 30% of the population was culled through homicide, leading to the population remaining below the environment's carrying-capacity.

>30% of the population was culled through homicide, leading to the population

Is that from murder, or war (presumably inter-tribal), or both?

We're not exactly doing much better in modern times. See Russia's war against Ukraine, or the 100M+ killed in WWII.

The source I read said inter-tribal warfare was a major source of homicides, but I can't recall if intra-tribal murder was a major factor as well.

It's certainly odd that such a seemingly important fact(?) doesn't appear at all in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer

You should considering adding that factoid and your backing evidence.

Unfortunately I don't remember source where I read about this and a quick search didn't produce any results. I may have even found the article on HN.

Does it sound like something that would be true and provable for all hunter gatherers across the entire planet for some two million years?

( From first humans to present day hunter gatherers )

Is it true for present day hunter gatherers?

How could it be determined for (say) hunter gatherers in modern western Europe?

Would that be via skulls and bones from major outbreaks of conflict every so often or would it establish a pattern true for all generations, etc?

To be honest it sounds more like missionary type comment on uncivilised savages.

That homicide rates for hunter gatherers are much higher than for people in agrarian and industrial societies is firmly established by the evidence, which is spread out across thousands of years of pre-history and a diverse array of geographical locations.

It is also consistent with what we see in the closest relatives of humans: chimpanzee.

https://archive.li/uP7Ax

> That homicide rates for hunter gatherers are much higher than for people in agrarian and industrial societies is firmly established by the evidence

Cool.

That's what I'm asking for ... do you have any?

( Bear in mind, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Korea, The Boer Wars, Crimea (old and new), Ukraine, et al set the bar on homicide in agrarian and industrial cultures )

Yes, this article has a large number of sources:

https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...

That's at best specific to particular groups and at worst speculation based on what exactly?

( By all means do provide some indication of your research )

Within Australia, so clearly within Australia, traditional pre agricultural hunter gathers are still walking about and can talk for themselves.

Moieties | skin groups | kinship is much more complex than anything you've likely experienced and detailed knowledge of { father, mother, grandfathers, grandmothers } (at the very least) form a determination of who is eligible to marry | mate with who.

It's a system that largely maximises outbreeding and mixing.

See, for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_kinship

Unfortunately the invention of agriculture had become a necessity after too successful hunting during hundreds of thousands of years had lead to the depletion of the hunted animals.

Had not our ancestors invented agriculture, they would have eventually become extinct, together with their prey.

hunter gatherers make war with other tribes for the purposes of stealing women. The state of nature is a desperate, miserable circumstance where neither justice or morality can survive.

It should be noted that the identification of inequality/equality with hunter-gatherer/agricultural lifestyles is under attack lately from at least some archaeologists

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/23/the-dawn-of-ev...

That's a wild generalization. At least some extant hunter-gatherer societies (every Australian Aboriginal tribe) are as far from sex-egalitarian as it can possibly get.

My suggestion: read the actual text and while doing so, note the weaselwords. Here's my list:

implies, suggests, fair to assume, suggested, were interpreted as

How does this get published in Nature [Open Access]?

What are you expecting for any article about ~5000 years ago

Something less certain than the headline

When I got my history degree I was told that qualifiers were often GOOD as they don’t overpromise our degree of certainty.

Grammarly has a good article on qualifier usage and over usage

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/qualifiers/#:~:text=%E2%80%8B....

If a paper doesn't have that many caveats it won't get published. Scientists, good ones anyway, are rarely able to speak definitively about almost anything, especially something as hard to study as this.

Except for global warming, vaccinations, lab leaks, phrenology, psychiatry, bloodletting, safety of thalidomide, perhaps?

I tend to assume that anyone who doesnt qualify their statements with so called weaselwords is lying to me. But I definitely think that discussing anything from so long ago better use this type of language, because there is no way to be sure

> I tend to assume that anyone who doesnt qualify their statements with so called weaselwords is lying to me.

In an academic paper?

In anything that can't 100% be proven. Be honest when you mean 'should' and 'suggests' instead of 'is' and 'implies'

>note the weaselwords. Here's my list: implies, suggests, fair to assume, suggested, were interpreted as

They're not weasel words, they're how these papers are supposed to be written. These words are more accurate than saying, "this proves," which would be a lie.

This article is an extreme reach full of improbable assumptions. Anything to make it seem like women has some level of parity I guess. At least their hearts are in the right place but it erodes trust over time.

Questionable epistemology here for nature

They are testing teeth to determine biological sex of prehistoric remains which have previously proven difficult to clearly identify.

This bit is the part most interesting to me:

Second, early 3rd millennium Iberian societies do not display the traits indicative of highly stratified, class-like or state societies identified elsewhere in Bronze Age or Iron Age Europe. As the Valencina record shows, leadership systems in the Iberian Copper Age were at best unstable and financed by a wealth economy rather than a staple economy59. ‘The Ivory Lady’ appears to have drawn her influence, prestige, or power neither from birth, nor from the control of agricultural produce, but from her personal charisma and her achievements.

TLDR: It seems that a society with powerful women may correlate to different social and power structures than male-dominated cultures.

If that TLDR is your own then you may be interested in this book: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496205117/

Yeah, it's my own. My eye tends to go to social dynamics.

Thank you for the book recommendation.

How do you know that the skeletons identify as fenable

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