Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

A claim about "all-powerful mother goddesses" before the end of the fifth millennium BC is inherently unhistorical. The submitted article notes, "For each group, the data included a description of its agricultural methods as far back in time as it was possible to go using historical evidence or, in the case of groups which did not have a written language, the first time they were observed by outsiders." That's much nearer in time than the transition to plowing the article refers to.

There was no writing anywhere during the earliest part of that transition, and if we saw statues of voluptuous female figures in some places (as we do) from that far back, it is at least as likely that the statues are porn as that they are representations of powerful goddesses. Archeology has historically systematically underestimated, perhaps for delicate readers, the amount of sheer erotic art that was produced by early human beings. The oldest surviving human art on at least two continents is crude drawings of vulvae, so the working hypothesis until additional evidence is found is that ancient human beings did not have a highly developed religion of "all-powerful mother goddesses" but rather incoherent local folk religions that didn't exclude teenage boys (the ancient artists of surviving ancient art were mostly teenage boys) from producing crudely drawn and crudely sculpted porn.

See The Nature of Paleolithic Art by R. Dale Guthrie (published by the University of Chicago press)

http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Paleolithic-Art-Dale-Guthrie/dp...

for much more about the evidence, as analyzed by an author who is a specialist in Pleistocene megafauna (including Homo sapiens) and himself a fine visual artist.

AFTER EDIT: It boggles my mind that I can link to a source in my comment and still have "readers" here ask what my source is for a factual statement in this comment. The source I linked is the source. (The book I link to is by a research scholar, and itself cites dozens of thorough sources about all aspects of human prehistory.) The book I link to is a lot better than any Wikipedia article. (I am a Wikipedian, painfully aware of how many good sources are missed when amateurs edit articles on Wikipedia.)

It sounds like your problem with the article is that its "mother goddess" interpretation is baseless because there is no written record of that time period. That's valid, except you then proceed to offer your own modern interpretation that is equally as baseless. Just because we are inordinately pre-occupied by porn today, doesn't mean pre-historic people were. If anything, they were hungry, hand-to-mouth wilderness survivors so those big-bellied women are much more likely to symbolize a well-fed person than a pornographic ideal (especially since breasts were not the sex symbol they are today for much of human history, and neither was masturbation to external visual sources). Or they could be literally anything else - kids toys, voodoo dolls, whatever. Like you said, no written record = speculation.

Also:

the ancient artists of surviving ancient art were mostly teenage boys

Sources?

Edit: Anyone care to reply instead of downvoting?

> it is at least as likely that the statues are porn as that they are representations of powerful goddesses

I'm not so sure there is or needs to be a distinction between the two. Penis goes in, life comes out. You can't explain that. Well, paleolithic man couldn't. But they could draw/sculpt it and revere it for both its pleasure- and life-giving properties.

Reverence is the debatable aspect here. Statue of a goddess implies respect, pornography implies objectification and a very different power relationship. So if we draw conclusions about the role of women in that society, interpreting statues as porn versus pedestals makes a difference.

I'm sorry, but when did pornography start implying objectification? Last I checked, both men and women watched porn.

I'm sorry, but when objectification started implying it was a gendered thing? Last I checked both men and women could objectify other people.

> pornography implies objectification

That's a very modern application of those words. The very act of creating a statue is (true) objectification, whether it was carried out due to respect or solely to titillate. I'm not convinced that both cannot be true of the same statue.

And the modern concept of pornography means very little when framed in a pre-Judeo-Christian world. I doubt any of our loin-clothed ancestors shared the shame-based perspective 21st century humans have on the human body. No doubt some statues/drawings of vulvae were made because vulvae were fun things to interact with, and some were made because they were meant to be revered; I'd argue that it's possible for some percentage of those works of art to be motivated by both respect and eroticism, and further that the two motivations need not be considered so inherently at odds.

I agree.

Making a statue in ancient times wasn't cheap or easy. Cheap in the aspect of always living on the edge of life, where a bad season could decimate a living group, and having time to do so. Easy in that tools weren't readily available to get it done quickly. I don't think anyone was just swinging in a hammock on a lazy Sunday - there were no lazy Sundays.

From that you can most likely assume that statues had purpose and significance. They weren't just put up for titillation which is really all modern porn is today.

Hunter gatherers may have worked far fewer hours than agrarian societies, especially if they had just had a decent haul.

> That's a very modern application of those words.

It follows from your argument that because our ancestors didn't share an evolutionary perspective, modern humans describing our ancestors in evolutionary terms is less meaningful.

Put another way, when modern humans describe the process of objectification, it matters not at all if the objectifier says to themselves "I sure am making an object out of this".

>pornography implies objectification

what exactly do you mean by this?

The idea is that porn reduces the actors in it to objects that exists solely to be exploited for the pleasure of others. It is often combined with unease over the power relationship implied, typically of women being subject to men.

The main counter to this is that it's fiction and the actors are consenting adults, and that the only material difference between porn and other crappy fictional films is prudish judgment of (primarily) women's sexual behavior.

> pornography implies objectification and a very different power relationship

that's way too general. There's enough pornography out there, recent and old, where people are just having nice sex without there being some sort of power/dominating relationship nor where things get objectified to the extreme.

> pornography implies objectification

It really doesn't. People can relate to porn in many ways. Unless the definition of "objectification" is so broad as to make the statement meaningless.

>Penis goes in, life comes out. You can't explain that. Well, paleolithic man couldn't. But they could draw/sculpt it and revere it

It was not until 1677 [1] that people started to discover how reproduction works beyond "penis goes in, life comes out". Yet there are no major religions documented before that (in about 5000 years of recorded history) which revered crude vulva drawings. Whereas pornographic graffiti has been widespread everywhere from the streets of Ancient Rome [2] to modern boys' bathrooms.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonie_van_Leeuwenhoek#Discove...

[2]http://www.pompeiana.org/resources/ancient/graffiti%20from%2...

I'm no anthropologist, but the document leaving religions were social organizing at broader scales (market communities and early cities) than the basic coming of age rituals/education that were best left to family, clan and kin (hunters, herders and farmers).

First and foremost, the 2nd link you posted is full of hilarious; thanks for sharing.

> II.7 (gladiator barracks); 8767: Floronius, privileged soldier of the 7th legion, was here. The women did not know of his presence. Only six women came to know, too few for such a stallion.

I don't know that I'm arguing for anything 'major' or 'documented'; for any specific religion or culture; or for anything at all beyond the fact that crude vulva drawings can be either or simultaneously a show of reverence and sexual interest. That we (meaning largely post-Testament historians) haven't documented the intentions of ancient cave-artists as being born of such duality is hardly evidence against that possibility.

History and truth are often out of synchronization (esp. in these days of pervasive propaganda/active manipulation of the population using mass communication technology). The chapters of the human story that played out 15,000 to 5,000 years ago in Africa/Europe/Near East/India are still being figured out by a combination of archeological, genetic, and linguistic research. Concerning the worship of "Earth/Mother Goddesses" vs. "Sky Gods" (e.g. Yahweh, Zeus, Thor, etc.) and the interactions of the different groups of people who preferred (and oftentimes forced upon others) their own visions of deity, if you want to engage rationally on this topic, I recommend researching and understanding (and contesting in an actual rational manner if you believe that the hypothesis is false) the "Kurgan Hypothesis."[1] There are some good books about it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis

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