Age & Gender Distribution in Paleolithic Populations?

[Lew Rockwell Fan]

I've gotten curious about this & haven't found anything yet. Seemed like the sort of thing some SF fans might have filed away somewhere. Anybody seen anything more than pure guesses on this subject?

BTW, to the anon mod who took down my archeology gag post, I bear you no ill will. To prove it, I have an extra sense of humor, only slightly used (it belonged to a devout Skopets) that I can let you have at a nominal price.

 

[Star-child]

That might be a very difficult thing to pin down, because it will vary depending on the climate and food source of different populations. For instance; groups that hunted dangerous game might have had higher male mortality than average, while groups that dealt with seasonal food shortages may have had higher maternal mortality rates than average. So I don't see finding one global number. You could have two neighboring populations with wildly different mortality distributions just because of their food gathering technology/traditions.

 

[hitmouse]

Sex ratio ( at birth, at least) is likely to have been 50:50 m:f, since this is found in all modern human populations and there is no good reason to suppose it would have been any different in paleolithic times.

 

[Parson]

Sex ratio ( at birth, at least) is likely to have been 50:50 m:f, since this is found in all modern human populations and there is no good reason to suppose it would have been any different in paleolithic times.

Actually today its about 105 males to 100 females at birth.

Gender Ratio

 

[hitmouse]

Actually today its about 105 males to 100 females at birth.

Gender Ratio

Fair enough. I was simplifying, but I think the principle remains.

 

[CupofJoe]

I think the evidence just isn't there. The populations were low and scattered. The remain especially of infants are hard to preserve.
I've seen work on Roman demography and remains [in Rome] but not much before times that.
The Roman stuff is skewed because there was a custom [or law I can't remember which] that infants that died under the age of one weren't really noted or recorded. So infant mortality looks low but new/newly born remains are found in homes. Rome was probably the most urban place around so families may have support the elderly longer than was usual elsewhere. If I remember correctly the demographics looked similar if not better than those of the Middle Ages in northern Europe; people frequently lived into their sixties [an beyond], most men lived in to their forties, and I think women died slightly younger [in their mid thirties].
There might be something in looking at Original Australian and Native American societal figures. While their societies weren't paleolithic, they were closer to that than the West at the time anthropologist got interested enough to start researching...

 

[Brian G Turner]

I've gotten curious about this & haven't found anything yet.

So far as I can tell, we struggle to make any assertions about the structure of paleolithic societies, and much of what we think we know comes from the field of anthropology through comparative studies. There's little direct record, except for enigmatic exceptions such as Gobekli Tepe, but even then burials - which might preserve records of populations - don't start to generally appear until around Neolithic approx. 4,000 BC and even then it's initially reserved for the upper classes. What is it you're specifically curious about?

BTW, to the anon mod who took down my archeology gag post, I bear you no ill will.

Best if we avoid anything relating to current affairs, even when discussing ancient history.

 

[olive]

Paleolithic is a huge period though. Isn't Göbekli Tepe, at the end of it?

The traditional idea that the number of men would diminish by hunting big game makes sense at first glance, but if you consider a life concentrated on survival, they probably have worked together much much better.

It's really difficult to imagine without any direction of evidence. I'm making it up as I go.

Men on average, die earlier than women. They are larger and larger species tend to die younger overall. As far as I understand it's not known how exactly this works in human species, but I think generally being bigger is a disadvantage in the long term, esp. at the old age compared to being small. Men also take bigger risks. I don't know how accurate or correct this information is, but I remember reading about boys' frontal lobe developing slower than girls' at a young age and so making them bad at judgments and thinking about consequences and are more likely to die because of accidents and violence but that makes sense to me because this probably also makes them better fathers and mates. There is also the famous male tendency for heart attacks and bleeding out easily, the difficulty of male blood clotting naturally. They are also more likely to get genetic defects in extremes -positive or negative- than women aren't they? Please correct anything if wrong. Modern medicine might have changed all this of course.

Women overall have better immune systems than men. Their bodies are better with infection. But they probably died often in childbirth. They probably started to have intercourse much earlier than today, just after they started to menstruate. Because they need to procreate as many times as possible and the few of the children will survive. So they should give birth to as many babies as possible. A hard winter or famine, disease could strike and most of the tribe could die just like that. [Also this explains why the belief systems they created didn't have specific figures as one source of evil -including the classic paganism- after all, they were wisely scared of hard winter, famine, and war. May be close as an example, but Greeks were scared of Ares, not Hades if I am not mistaken. Hades is not 'evil', it is naturally a dark figure because it is death and the afterlife.]

The women highly likely hunted and fought with men because it is a very harsh life of survival. Probably you would start to work as soon as you are old enough to be able to carry something useful. And also hunt or gather or do some adult works from at an early age.

But it is also reasonable to think that females were protected by males because protecting women is protecting children and in the end the existence, continuity of the tribe. Also, we are a highly aggressive species and female presence in many circumstances changes male behaviour dramatically. Men tend to protect strange women and children. Women tend to protect children only.

So I think the male would be more 'disposable' than the female. It's a rough, maybe a bad caricature, but it seems there would likely be fewer males than females.

This also explains polygyny. If there are fewer males than females, they probably solved it this way. They need more people all the time. Actually, probably polyandry was another often lived solution to a similar problem, but maybe as all penholders were men building the main historical vision after centralisation of administration and military, it was probably hard for them to imagine a woman with multiple husbands tens of thousands of years ago? Maybe it still is? I also believe relations and acts of women would be far less likely to be recorded than men's.

I don't think paleolithic societies would have some sort of a strict understanding of 'morality' built on genders, sexual orientations, and sexual relations. Only duties. They probably tended to be weirdly more equal than modern societies in many ways because they lived in sync with the natural calendar, they worked, hunted, got scared and got happy all together. Their relationships were more organic and more depended on each other. They did everything together to survive and died young. At most 40s, maybe 50s? There would be exceptions of course, but again women are more likely to get much older than males I guess.

The oldest human culture of the Goddess, the sacred female, has to have some practical, natural causes beyond the 'birth giver'. As a woman when you live much longer, you will know, you will see much more than anyone because all the people of the clan will pass through your 'hands' from birth to death. (You've become a wise woman.) You will know about nature and human nature more than anyone. People will be born to your hands, you will take care of them when they get injured, got sick. You will decide if a girl is grown enough to give birth after menstruating, or ever; probably they will look up to you to tell which couples fit together. When people get old you'll take care of them. When they die, you lay them out. Probably they will expect you even to resolve conflicts. Then you'll have the power of medicine, law, and administration in your hands. And all this probably happened so long in human history, every other belief system looks like just got out of their diapers still. And it is still alive in every human culture.

OK, sorry, I am getting carried away. This is so much fun. In my opinion, there would likely be more females than males if there are no special circumstances.

 

[Biskit]

As a woman when you live much longer, you will know, you will see much more than anyone because all the people of the clan will pass through your 'hands' from birth to death.

There was a 3-part documentary on human evolution I saw recently "Origins Of Us" (Origins of Us - Wikipedia). One of the things highlighted in the third (?) part was the importance of the "grandmother". It seems humans are rare (or unique, can't remember the detail) in having the menopause, giving rise to older non-breeding females able to help their daughters/granddaughters with child care. In particular they presented one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes, which did have a strong split between hunting (men, often unsuccessful, but high-protein food when it worked) and women (including those all-important grandmothers) doing childcare whilst gathering fruit/nuts/tubers.

Whether this is representative of paleolithic society as a whole different matter.

 

[olive]

Of course, we don't know but it makes sense a lot. Thanks for the documentary.

 

[The Judge]

There was a 3-part documentary on human evolution I saw recently "Origins Of Us" (Origins of Us - Wikipedia). One of the things highlighted in the third (?) part was the importance of the "grandmother". It seems humans are rare (or unique, can't remember the detail) in having the menopause, giving rise to older non-breeding females able to help their daughters/granddaughters with child care.

Not unique -- there are apparently a handful of mammals that go through it. And exactly the same grandmother care of calves has been noted among orcas. There was a splash about it in December -- I thought the BBC had something but I can't find it now. Here's one report on it (probably using exactly the same press release) Why do orca grandmothers live so long? It's for their grandkids.

 

[Star-child]

I would be shocked if the lifespans of early humans was long enough to get to menopause. Some aboriginal people living today rarely live past 40.

 

[olive]

I thought of 40s or 50s as how we see 90s and 100s today though. As a very old age at the time, not as average.

 

[Parson]

Actually, life expectancy wasn't much above 40 until the middle of the 19th century. But from what we can ascertain it seems that people who were fortunate enough to be healthy by age 40 could well live until 70 or 80. --- I would offer Psalm 90:10 where it says that the age of a human is 70 or if by reason of strength 80 as some evidence that some people even 3000 years ago made it into old age. ---- Interestingly, (at least to me) in my youth, the 1950's, (sigh!) I can remember sermons on that verse. I've not heard or read one in all my career as a Parson 1981 on.

How Has Longevity Changed Throughout History?

 

[Star-child]

Actually, life expectancy wasn't much above 40 until the middle of the 19th century. But from what we can ascertain it seems that people who were fortunate enough to be healthy by age 40 could well live until 70 or 80. --- I would offer Psalm 90:10 where it says that the age of a human is 70 or if by reason of strength 80 as some evidence that some people even 3000 years ago made it into old age. ---- Interestingly, (at least to me) in my youth, the 1950's, (sigh!) I can remember sermons on that verse. I've not heard or read one in all my career as a Parson 1981 on.

How Has Longevity Changed Throughout History?

This kind of confuses life expectancy and the maximum age anyone lived to. Infant mortality is part of the reason the life expectancy was around 40 in the 19th century, but individual aboriginal people who survived childhood almost never made it past 40, meaning the life expectancy was probably 25 years or less. The article alludes to this without nailing down a life expectancy, but the workload and infection rates of hunter gatherer life simply ages and kills people before they reach what we think of as middle age. That only changed with the advent of farming and food surpluses.

There were likely exceptions - places where food was abundant and risks lower, like Hawaii. And those relatively rare places probably had different gender distributions for the same reasons mentioned earlier.

 

[Lew Rockwell Fan]

I didn't expect such a big response. Thanks. Y'all absolutely confirmed my suspicion that this is the kind of question that a lot of SF fans might have given thought to. Unfortunately, you are also supporting at least, if not confirming, my suspicion that there's no evidence.

To touch on a few points made:
Yes, a reasonable person would assume birth ratios would be reasonably close to 1, in the absence of evidence to the contrary. That, after all, derives mostly from the biology of spermatogenesis. Good of you to make that point explicitly though. I was taking it as axiomatic, but one can imagine environmental factors that might differently effect prenatal survival of males and females. Different survival curves by gender could start pretty early though - gender-selective infanticide could be a huge influence for example.

Survival curves for both genders would almost certainly be of the Gompertz type reflecting a daily roll of the dice - that's almost always the case with any animals in a state of nature. Certainly it means the age distribution would be far more weighted toward the young, but that's as far as I can go on the basis of theory. As y'all pointed out, that still leaves quite a range of possibilities.

Sure it would be affected by circumstance. But would it differ much? Did guys really go out hunting dangerous game often? I kind of doubt it personally. Any environment with big dangerous animals to hunt probably had plenty of smaller game that was a lot easier to get. Why borrow trouble? I'd think N-great grandpa probably brought home a lot more rabbits and turtles and deer, than lions and tigers and bears.

If risky behavior benefited the kinfolks, sure it would be the men that would do most of it, but I wonder if there was much of it to do before people got crowded enough to start engaging in warfare. Enough to offset men's lower risk of dying in child birth? But that's just guessing. I was hoping somebody might have run across actual evidence or convincing theoretical constraints.

Olive, you've obviously given it some thought, wondered at some of the same sociobiological implications I have, and formed a few similar suspicions (I'm particularly doubtful about extreme assumptions of male scarcity being the general rule). But

Please correct anything if wrong.

Since you asked, I'll point to one questionable item:

Men on average, die earlier than women. They are larger and larger species tend to die younger overall.

Actually, while I don't have a reference to hand, I'm pretty sure size is very strongly correlated with longer life span across species, not shorter. Think whales, elephants, horses, dogs, mice and may flies. (It's also independently correlated with brain size.) It's only within certain species, or maybe some genera, and then only some of them and under some circumstances that the opposite prevails. The best example is dogs.

I think you're more on track here:

Men also take bigger risks.

And "risks" needs to include the subtle, frequent and small, not just the dramatic, rare, and large. Almost every time a new study is done on male & female longevity that corrects for additional behavioral factors not previously considered, the reported gap narrows. Women are more likely to eat better, and make choices (not just in food) based on their health merits and that alone may account for most of the differences that people think are purely biological. Of the bio factors you mentioned, while several may be influence directly by gender, the only ones that clearly are, are the risks of child bearing. All the rest are influenced by diet for example, and different dietary choices could explain the difference.

To expand a little on Star-child's response to Parson: Yes, talking about mean life span and particularly ignoring the huge effect of the incidence of childhood mortality on it, creates a great deal of confusion about historical changes in longevity. Age at death has probably always had a bi-modal distribution with the first peak very young and the second peak is what most of us intuitively think of as "typical" life span. That really hasn't changed very much through historic time and probably not since we became recognizably the species we are. That peak is a lot higher now because we don't have as many deaths from infected wounds, dysentery, childbirth, highwaymen, or being eaten by lions and tigers and bears. So a lot more people get to that station that used to drop off the train prematurely. But the actual location of the peak has only moved to the right a fairly small amount. Witness, as mentioned the 3 score and 10.

 

[Star-child]

Sure it would be affected by circumstance. But would it differ much? Did guys really go out hunting dangerous game often?

Think mastadon hunters.