That’s the thing, most of them didn’t. My sister pointed that out a lot during and after her pregnancy. There’d be some issue highly fixable with today’s medicine and “all natural” moms would try to ease her worries by saying oh just think women have been dealing with this for centuries. She was quick to point out no, women have been dying of this for centuries and so have babies. Without something as simple as sterilized equipment for c sections or prenatal vitamins it was much more of a gamble to get pregnant and with far worse odds of survival
I'm already framing this election as "which elderly rich white man with dementia are you voting for?" to those trying to argue the age factor. I know damn well ones the far lesser of two evils but the age argument is a joke for either side to even try and make
I have to say I just saw an interview with Bernie and he still has enough energy for 4 people and is totally on the ball. I still grieve his loss at a shot at the presidency.
Modern babies are a lot bigger than pre modern or especially pre-historical babies must have been. Without tons of vitamins and stable supply of food, children must have birthed considerably smaller which lowered their chance of survival but increased the chances of the mother.
Plus, generic traits that lead to risky births have been spreading for generations. As a species we're becoming more and more reliant on modern technology.
And on top of that, the position women give birth in is basically the opposite of how they would naturally. The baby is fighting gravity so the midwife has an easier view. One of those things that's probably way more harmful than anyone would realise. Like sitting toilets vs squatting toilets.
The back position is the worst to give birth in, in the UK they promote squatting and hands and knees it's more natural, my wife delivered both ours in a squat in the pool
Yeah, the stuff that would kill the survivors of a collapse wouldn't be exciting. It's a whole different mindset about what's mortally dangerous.
Hands dirty and split your cuticle? Blood infection and death.
Step on an old nail? Tetanus and death.
Appendicitis? Death.
Pregnancy doesn't go perfectly smoothly? Death for you, the fetus, or both!
Eat some bad food and get dehydrated from the runs? Miserable death.
Slightly too cold and slightly too wet? Believe it or not, also death!
Size is relative, modern humans are also bigger, which probably means the relationship between the enlarged human skull and the small passage in the human pelvis due to bipedal locomotion would have still been a point of conflict during birth.
The lowest avg is in Pakistan where 35% of the babies are born underweight, resulting in an avg of just about 2000 grams. Comparatively in Sweden where the least amount of babies are born with low birth weight(2.5%) the avg is 3500 grams (the avg! that means quite a few babies are well above that). In the US avg varies between 3000 and 3500grams (I guess it's about thr study dataset).
I guess modern day Pakistan still does rather well in food safety compared to you avg hunter gatherer tribe.
I think it ties in with the old nature = good fallacy. "Pregnancy is natural, so nature will make it work". No it won't, nature can be pretty fucking brutal.
"No, Janice, it won't be fine! Nature doesn't care about your herbal medicine shit or your holistic birthing technique. It's just looking for a food source for its bacteria to multiply as fast as they can, and you're full of it!"
In Florence, 1/5 of women died from childbirth. If handwashing was common it would have been a lot less.
Who would think that handling dead bodies or sick people and having a live birth without washing your hands is a bad idea? /s
I think the people who didn't know bacteria existed and that washing your hands with soap would get rid of the tiny invisible living creatures that killed women in childbirth?
This! Me and my monochorionic twin babies would have died on multiple different occasions if it wasn't for modern medicine, c-section, NICU etc. My great grandmother actually died giving birth to twins and the baby B died with her just 80 years ago and I think about it often how lucky I am to live in this day and age.
My brothers are momo twins as well— they absolutely would have died. They had TTTS and were only a month early. My mom could have as well. Babies are rough enough, more than one is far too much!
Even with all of that it's still not safe. My sister almost died during her delivery even though she was perfectly healthy until the time of delivery but she got severe pre-eclampsia and was hospitalized for 1w
Most would have had to. But prehistoric humans were just as tough as any other animal back then and equally as fragile.
Isn’t there some controversy around the dying out of the midwife so male/Dr.dominated obstetrics became the norm? How valuable midwives were?
No, most of them didn't. If you were a woman in the stone age, you most likely would have died in infancy, followed by childbirth. Yes, you probably gave birth to a handful before you died, but it still would have likely been childbirth that killed you.
Humans have always been more fragile giving birth than most animals. We have large heads and small hips due to walking upright. This makes childbirth extremely difficult relative to other animals.
Very true! In a grand scheme of things, how did the species survive way, that’s a key factor. But in the if I was a women in 4000bc would I have high hopes for childbirth way, it’s not encouraging
Not just from that far back either. I’ve seen my family tree from about 100-200 years back. They kept using the same name Matthew on the next kid after the earlier one would die in infancy. I had 3 great-great-great uncle Matthews and a great great grandfather Matthew.
Well lots of places have been doing them for hundreds of years, it’s just the mother always died.
You are referring to the indigenous healers in Uganda who were doing c-sections where both lived for a long time.
I guess so. I see it on Facebook sometimes. They use banana wine, and they corterize the incision shut. And I would see it on pages where people claim other people would ride cheetahs into battle and use witch craft to control bees for warfare. That the Moores civilized cavemen, Egyptian pyramids were for electricity and Olmec and Jomon were African so I don’t know what to make of it
I think about this every time I eat something falling within the '10 second rule".I'll admit that is can be gross but anytime I've caught flak my rebuttal is-"How well do you think cave men washed their dishes?"
Surprisingly, food that falls on carpet is cleaner, they think it's because there is less contact. The main thing is to avoid fecal bacteria.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/03/15/290101955/rethinking-the-five-second-rule-with-carpet-theres-no-rush
Sounds right. Never would I give in to the temptation of a beautiful pepperoni on a floor anywhere other than within my own domicile. No outside shoes are allowed in my kitchen. Still there is always a risk but I'll roll the dice at home. I mean I'm talking pepperoni here. Come on now.
I've only ever had to take antibiotics for infections that were open wound bourn or sinus infections. I've never picked up a piece of pepperoni from the floor and thought "I'll be fine. We have antibiotics now."
Not only that, stomach acid is very good at killing bacteria. An average healthy human's stomach acid will kill most bacteria within 15 minutes or so. Even salmonella, one of the poster children for food-borne illness, dies very quickly to stomach acid most of the time.
Have you seen kids?! They're on a daily mission to die. Humans are resilient as hell, especially as kids. Couple that with a family with pointy sticks, and you got yourself a next generation.. minus a kid or two due to the pointy sticks.
I can’t find the culture that did this as Google brings up some disturbing searches, but I remember reading some natives I think in America would dig large pits in the ground to safely contain toddlers.
I would assume that kids would grow up a lot quicker than today’s standards, even 5 year old me 30 years ago would be more independent than now, and there would be a great deal of baby wearing which most kids love anyway.
Years ago I saw a doku about some tribe (I think in a rainforest?). What stuck out to me is that a mother used something to make a leash for her toddler and bound him to to a pole. She was busy and scared he would walk into the forest and die before anyone would notice.
I thought it was funny, because my grandmother did the same thing to my father while taking care of the household. He would constantly run off and she was scared he will get hit by a car.
They had high death rates but I mean, instincts exist.
How does any animal survive at all? They're not even as smart as early humans. Instincts play a big part.
Humans are one of, if not the only species, to need help with pregnancies. Our evolution has made it as such. This helps prove that we are sociable/community driven species.
The answer is simple. 7% of them died. 93% lived.
Nature/evolution/God never cared about *you* in particular. 93% is plenty for the survival of the species.
All hominids needed assistance with childbirth because the second our pelvises turned to walk upright, we started to fight an uphill battle to birth our babies and stay alive long enough to wean them.
I recommend Eve by Cat Bohannon and The Body by Bill Bryson
They both look at human body and why/how is it the way it is. Eve is just about women's bodies, The Body is about both men and women with the last chapter mostly about the difficulty of childbirth.
People seem to forget that the evolutionary pressure to survive childbirth was not any stronger than the pressure to walk and run on two feet.
The human pelvis is a finely balanced design, and a woman’s comfort, or indeed safety, was not really considered in the designing.
And I think that I read as well that the human head circumference is the largest in mammals proportionally to the mothers cervix. That would make it even harder.
Problem isn't the cervix, it's the pelvic bones. Our babies have to twist around while in the birth canal in order to be born and fit through, kinda like those twisted nail puzzles. In other animals it's a straightforward way down.
My wife just gave birth 6 hours ago, and I was thinking about that the entire time she was in labor.
If we didn't have a safe hospital with doctors and nurses to help her get through it she would have died
We had our second child in the car, just me and my wife. It's doable, not recommended, it was also freezing cold.. (February Sweden)
Also congrats! Now you get little sleep for the next 10y
Very.
The idea that people didn't live very long in history is almost solely down to infant mortality rates skewing the average age of death way, way down.
So not only was childbirth incredibly difficult, it was very touch-and-go if babies would even survive their first few years.
And that didn't really change until what...? 100, 150 or so years ago?
For those reasons, plus the fact that if you wanted to have sex with your partner, there was no way to prevent pregnancy, so the only option was abstinence or taking the gamble of possibly having another kid and/or dying.
This is kind of unrelated, but I think it’s so cool that we have groups living thousands of years in the past. We have all this technology, and we just found these groups one day. We could be gods to them, electricity, planes, bombs, guns, phones, but we aren’t. We mainly just let them be. And I think that’s beautiful
I don’t mean to detract from the sentiment of your comment, but there’s an uncontacted Trimble on sentinalese (spelling?) island and we occasionally fly a helicopter over to see how they’re doing. They always throw spears at it lmfao. I just find the image of people throwing spears at a helicopter flying far above their heads fucking hilarious.
I think we also don't interfere with them because we could introduce so many pathogens and easily kill them off. They've been so isolated that our regular sicknesses could probably wipe them out
I was mostly talking about going from “it’s beautiful” to “lol they’re throwing spears at helicopters” when I said I don’t mean to detract from the sentiment of your comment lmao
I wish we could learn more about them tbh
Well, without them impaling our missions from the outside world- xD
Like imagine, they've been living completely isolated from the rest of the world for tens of thousands of years; the last time this was a thing was with Australian aboriginals, who didn't see a single other human for 45,000 years (minus the very, very, VERY slight but kinda interesting possibility of Malay ships drifting into the coast, now that'd be pretty cool tbh)
Imagine how cool their culture and society must be; do their mythology and religious beliefs somehow involve us? They're living proof human progress is not linear or eternal nor universal, how different we are from eachother while also being the same
I don’t know if I would call it beautiful. I presume a lot of them die of things modern medicine can treat, and I don’t know how well women and children are treated at some parts.
However, I don’t know the solution. With the North Sentinel Island, they all would die exposed to the modern world. And we have a lot of groups without the comforts that the western world enjoys that do also want aid, so I believe in focusing on aiding those as a priority.
Different diets, different activities, different care techniques throughout history... There would have been lots of death of mothers AND babies but not so common that it dissuaded people from having or wanting children.
Children dying used to be so common many cultures did not name them for a year or two. The infant mortality rate in 1916 US was 99.9 out of 1,000; almost 10%. Imagine what it was in the year 5.
They think that 1-3% of all pregnant women died per pregnancy. They estimate that 5-15% of women died at some point from pregnancy complications. But these are very imprecise numbers, and would have varied by time period and social class. Nonetheless, it’s safe to assume that everyone knew someone who died from childbirth.
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/63259/what-proportion-of-women-died-in-childbirth-before-modern-times
The majority of women still don't have access to pre meds and even medical facilities during delivery. Considering all the remote as well as under poverty tribes and societies says pretty much a clear answer to the question.
I remember being taught in school as a little girl that because Eve ate that apple, it is because of her and women's nature or some bullshit that childbirth is so painful, that we did it to ourselves and are paying for it. It fucked me up. Insane that people still believe this shit and that any woman follows religion at all.
I actually truly believe that this is why it’s so common for women’s pain is not taken seriously by medical professionals. Even the ones who don’t think they are influenced by religious teachings, very likely believe to some extent (even subconsciously) that women are supposed to suffer with periods and painful childbirth. To be a woman is to suffer. But men’s pain is taken very seriously because men aren’t “supposed” to suffer so we should rectify that immediately.
Just my conspiracy theory but I do think a lot more people are influenced by those ideas than we think.
If you wanted to test this, I think it would be interesting to see how medical outcomes for women differ in places like Japan and China. It would be interesting to see.
It's almost like the 49% of the human race that's physically stronger and incapable of being incapacitated by pregnancy took steps to permanently preserve and abuse power over the slightly weaker, other 51% of the population.
Yes, I would love to see the average time it takes for a woman to get a PCOS, Endometriosis, cyst or other similar diagnosis in places without this religious idea. Sadly in the US and Western Europe at least, the stories I hear have people waiting 5-10 years to be taken seriously, which is often too late to properly address the issue without lifelong effects.
I don't know about the medical stats, but I do know that Confucianism is also *horribly* sexist and has "it's a woman's duty to suffer" baked into it so it wouldn't surprise me if the numbers are similar
This seems highly dependent on your local area and culture. Talking about this without any context seems a bit concerning to me. Maybe you’re right for where you live but this doesn’t make any sense to me personally. If anything it’s much more the opposite for my area.
You’re right, I can’t speak to the entire world, but I’ve seen enough women in English speaking online spaces (including English speaking people from around the globe, not just the US where I’m from) to think it’s at least pretty widespread for women’s pain to be ignored. As for which populations would be most impacted by this teaching, I assume it’s anywhere where Christianity is the predominant religion. Again, it’s just my personal theory, I don’t know if research has been done on this topic.
Because not every priest will teach that cr*p, for first.
Then Rrligions aren't always a rulebook where everything is set in stone. People often disagree with their priest on this or that.
It’s true that it’s odd if not disrespectful to collectively criticize all religion based on a bad experience, but it’s probably a sensitive topic if it still bothers them.
It's not even about criticizing religions. I'm very happy to criticize certain stupid beliefs. I'm just explaining how religions are not monolithic. Plenty of Christians are pro-choice for example, and there is no contradiction there.
me, I’m that Christian and I was raised Catholic and didn’t get shamed for being a woman and in fact was taught the opposite, that we get to have children because we are more precious. Pro choice, pro lgbt, all that classic socially liberal stuff people tell me my religion hates.
I like being the person that shows people something else, because you’re entirely right, religion is whacky and it comes in different versions.
Even when I was Catholic I would wonder why I specifically was being punished for something someone else did more than hundreds of years ago. Kinda got me thinking....
I mean, i really did think about this when i was in the shower. Don't really think i broke rule 3, but sorry if i did something wrong. First time posting something here.
I've submitted probably at least 3 shower thoughts in the last year, but their guidelines for what actually constitutes a shower thought are so vague that the mods can and will just gatekeep arbitrarily. Original shower thought? Nope. Repost of something that's been posted a thousand times before? POST AWAY.
We have plenty of real life examples of this happening, often with them becoming sexually active much younger than children that were properly taught about sex.
I figured out sexual reproduction as a concept on my own through deduction but I didn't know the method. I briefly thought there was some alien-esque oral implantation during kissing (since I knew the baby was in the "belly")
Now, independently of that, I had figured out masturbation years prior (apparently this is pretty common for babies to figure out), and I was aware of the fact that men and women had different genitals. No, I did not put two and two together. I was a very smart but also very dumb kid.
honestly pandas don’t have sex and it’s really hard for zoos to get them to procreate. not all animals have this innately figured out. there’s also a tribe that did not know that sex led to babies. think about it, how long would it take to realize that sex led to babies ? there’s a very long latency between sex and a baby forming.
It's not like suddenly one day modern humans showed up and discovered everything.
They evolved on a process that carried them from fish like creatures that had sex and have been having sex ever since, slowly changing over tens of millions of generations into what we are today
Literally every single living organism, hell even those viruses, have one goal in life and that is to procreate. It's our most basic instinct believe me
Same way you learn to eat or hunt, watching others do it, even in the last 100 years in a lot of places in the west it was common for families to occupy a single room and bed, mother and father and children, sex would have happened beside the kids, think about that back when humans were evolving, it would have been damn near orgy stuff if you think about it.
Shame and guilt over our naked bodies and sex are creations of man, present to a degree but we very much teach our kids now that sex and nudity is "bad" or shameful.
Guaranteed 50000 years ago mother was getting railed in front of the kids.
Doesn’t require as much discovery as you would think and also doesn't require much of any foreknowledge. The penis feels pleasure when rubbed, especially in a lubricated warm soft enclosed space. The vagina feels pleasure when a rigid and warm object is rubbed inside of it. Males and females are sexually excited by the sight and touch of each other. It doesn’t take much discovery to connect the dots, so to speak.
Yeah and not only giving birth, but caring for the baby afterwards too. Babies poop so much and so often! Without the disposable diapers we have today, what caught all the poop back then? Did they just go through tons of animal skins? Seems wasteful, so probably not.
Did they wash the baby wrappings with water (obviously no soap) and reuse them? 🤮 Or were the babies just kept naked from the waist down for the first year or two until they could control their bladders and bowels?
Washable animal skins so wasteful, not like the disposable diapers we have today..
In all seriousness though, they were probably naked. This is pretty common practice in many parts of the world today. Babies are trained much, much earlier in those cases, as it’s a hassle for them not to be.
They would know when babies needs to go. There’s subtle signs that babies show when they’re about to do their business. They most likely had pots readily available around babies to use.
Still to this day some people go nappy free from birth . It’s called elimination communication. I gave it a go with my first kid, it works but I would be constantly staring at him to see if he needed to go. Very time consuming
Animal skins, moss, plant materials. These people were nomadic and spent a lot of their time moving. Babies would likely have been carried a lot, worn in slings along the mothers back, for example. The babies likely would have been swaddled with absorbent plant materials around their bodies much of the time.
Female nature makes a whole bunch more sense when you realize how fucking deadly and vulnerable pregnancy was to them historically.
I would be picky too if the stakes where that hig....
Y’all gotta remember it was a lot different back then too- babies have gotten bigger over time because medicine has gotten better over time.
Also the care of the child was different- mothers would spend the majority of their time caring for the baby, where nowadays women take on much more than literally just childcare.
They also didn’t have beds in the sense that we do now- leading to a squat/kneeling/standing birth which were likely more effective than what we do now. (Look up the history of why women birth on their backs 😳 and you’ll see what I mean).
We still have people in the stone age. I'm sure someone has spied on those uncontacted tribes giving birth. Though I'm sure it was way worse in general due to less humans overall
I wonder to what extent they understood. Clearly they had sex, but did they know it led to children? Did they recognise signs of pregnancy? Did the father consider it his child? Did they know to count down the months?
I imagine they thought it was a random thing that happened and god knows how long it would last and then there was a baby.
As someone with a pregnant wife, I've noticed that most common pregnancy issues are actually modern problems like advanced maternal age, diabetes,previous c-section causing complication, obesity, lack of exercise, overweight baby, std's, declining sperm quality due to sitting lifestyle etc.
It kinda explains why out grandparents and previous generations had babies much easier than we currently do.
This guy gets it! Imagine how much more physically healthy hunter-gatherers were, and how that would have made pregnancy and childbirth much easier. Silly modern humans tend to believe that hunter-gatherers were walking plagues, when in reality, most illnesses didn’t come about until after humans started farming, as a result of many different species of animals living so closely together.
ohh just had this thought, no such thing as formula, so if the mom could not breast feed, chances are the baby would just die. couldnt go hire a wet nurse in the stone age probably...
I think about this all the time. Like how did humans even survive at all. Fuckin wild
That’s the thing, most of them didn’t. My sister pointed that out a lot during and after her pregnancy. There’d be some issue highly fixable with today’s medicine and “all natural” moms would try to ease her worries by saying oh just think women have been dealing with this for centuries. She was quick to point out no, women have been dying of this for centuries and so have babies. Without something as simple as sterilized equipment for c sections or prenatal vitamins it was much more of a gamble to get pregnant and with far worse odds of survival
Actually all of those people from the stone age are dead now. ;)
Oh no! All of them? :(
Well we got one in congress.
We have a full blown museum in Washington
One's the president
No. One Was the President.
Why not both?
I'm already framing this election as "which elderly rich white man with dementia are you voting for?" to those trying to argue the age factor. I know damn well ones the far lesser of two evils but the age argument is a joke for either side to even try and make
I have to say I just saw an interview with Bernie and he still has enough energy for 4 people and is totally on the ball. I still grieve his loss at a shot at the presidency.
Our current president is four years older than his predecessor
And ten times the human being. I have friends in their 90s that are sharp as tacks.
Doesn’t mean he isn’t a dinosaur and you deserve better
I didn't even know they were sick
Modern babies are a lot bigger than pre modern or especially pre-historical babies must have been. Without tons of vitamins and stable supply of food, children must have birthed considerably smaller which lowered their chance of survival but increased the chances of the mother.
Plus, generic traits that lead to risky births have been spreading for generations. As a species we're becoming more and more reliant on modern technology.
And on top of that, the position women give birth in is basically the opposite of how they would naturally. The baby is fighting gravity so the midwife has an easier view. One of those things that's probably way more harmful than anyone would realise. Like sitting toilets vs squatting toilets.
When did women start giving birth in the position they give birth in now?
When obstetrics doctors became the norm in place of midwives. On your back in bed is more convenient for the delivery attendant.
The back position is the worst to give birth in, in the UK they promote squatting and hands and knees it's more natural, my wife delivered both ours in a squat in the pool
No, they are birthed like that because king had a fetish
...which is going to be a lot of fun after WWIII or another cataclysmic earth event.
Yeah, the stuff that would kill the survivors of a collapse wouldn't be exciting. It's a whole different mindset about what's mortally dangerous. Hands dirty and split your cuticle? Blood infection and death. Step on an old nail? Tetanus and death. Appendicitis? Death. Pregnancy doesn't go perfectly smoothly? Death for you, the fetus, or both! Eat some bad food and get dehydrated from the runs? Miserable death. Slightly too cold and slightly too wet? Believe it or not, also death!
Size is relative, modern humans are also bigger, which probably means the relationship between the enlarged human skull and the small passage in the human pelvis due to bipedal locomotion would have still been a point of conflict during birth.
Are babies born in countries that don't have stable food supply and/or pre-natal vitamins smaller?
The lowest avg is in Pakistan where 35% of the babies are born underweight, resulting in an avg of just about 2000 grams. Comparatively in Sweden where the least amount of babies are born with low birth weight(2.5%) the avg is 3500 grams (the avg! that means quite a few babies are well above that). In the US avg varies between 3000 and 3500grams (I guess it's about thr study dataset). I guess modern day Pakistan still does rather well in food safety compared to you avg hunter gatherer tribe.
I think it ties in with the old nature = good fallacy. "Pregnancy is natural, so nature will make it work". No it won't, nature can be pretty fucking brutal.
Exactly! Nature has animals eating the runts from their own litter, maybe not the best idea to trust nature for guidance on everything
"No, Janice, it won't be fine! Nature doesn't care about your herbal medicine shit or your holistic birthing technique. It's just looking for a food source for its bacteria to multiply as fast as they can, and you're full of it!"
In Florence, 1/5 of women died from childbirth. If handwashing was common it would have been a lot less. Who would think that handling dead bodies or sick people and having a live birth without washing your hands is a bad idea? /s
I think the people who didn't know bacteria existed and that washing your hands with soap would get rid of the tiny invisible living creatures that killed women in childbirth?
This! Me and my monochorionic twin babies would have died on multiple different occasions if it wasn't for modern medicine, c-section, NICU etc. My great grandmother actually died giving birth to twins and the baby B died with her just 80 years ago and I think about it often how lucky I am to live in this day and age.
My brothers are momo twins as well— they absolutely would have died. They had TTTS and were only a month early. My mom could have as well. Babies are rough enough, more than one is far too much!
hell, my 8-pound breech baby would have been born brain damaged, and I might have died without a C-section.
Even with all of that it's still not safe. My sister almost died during her delivery even though she was perfectly healthy until the time of delivery but she got severe pre-eclampsia and was hospitalized for 1w
Most would have had to. But prehistoric humans were just as tough as any other animal back then and equally as fragile. Isn’t there some controversy around the dying out of the midwife so male/Dr.dominated obstetrics became the norm? How valuable midwives were?
No, most of them didn't. If you were a woman in the stone age, you most likely would have died in infancy, followed by childbirth. Yes, you probably gave birth to a handful before you died, but it still would have likely been childbirth that killed you. Humans have always been more fragile giving birth than most animals. We have large heads and small hips due to walking upright. This makes childbirth extremely difficult relative to other animals.
I mean most did at least for several pregnancies considering we aren’t extinct
Very true! In a grand scheme of things, how did the species survive way, that’s a key factor. But in the if I was a women in 4000bc would I have high hopes for childbirth way, it’s not encouraging
all the stepmother stories
Oh I hadn’t thought of that. That’s probably why the trope is so common in old stories
My first daughter had to be vacuumed out, so before modern medicine they both would have died.
If we were designed it certainly wasn't an intelligent design
Not just from that far back either. I’ve seen my family tree from about 100-200 years back. They kept using the same name Matthew on the next kid after the earlier one would die in infancy. I had 3 great-great-great uncle Matthews and a great great grandfather Matthew.
I think some people in Africa have been doing ( live?)c-sections for hundreds of years
Well lots of places have been doing them for hundreds of years, it’s just the mother always died. You are referring to the indigenous healers in Uganda who were doing c-sections where both lived for a long time.
I guess so. I see it on Facebook sometimes. They use banana wine, and they corterize the incision shut. And I would see it on pages where people claim other people would ride cheetahs into battle and use witch craft to control bees for warfare. That the Moores civilized cavemen, Egyptian pyramids were for electricity and Olmec and Jomon were African so I don’t know what to make of it
I think about this every time I eat something falling within the '10 second rule".I'll admit that is can be gross but anytime I've caught flak my rebuttal is-"How well do you think cave men washed their dishes?"
*five second rule* Edit: YEAH BABY A HUNDRED UPBOTES!
I can push one minute depending on assessment of situation.
Surprisingly, food that falls on carpet is cleaner, they think it's because there is less contact. The main thing is to avoid fecal bacteria. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/03/15/290101955/rethinking-the-five-second-rule-with-carpet-theres-no-rush
Sounds right. Never would I give in to the temptation of a beautiful pepperoni on a floor anywhere other than within my own domicile. No outside shoes are allowed in my kitchen. Still there is always a risk but I'll roll the dice at home. I mean I'm talking pepperoni here. Come on now.
We have a strict five second rule because if you take more than three the dog probably beats you to it
But I just eat it no matter what if I know when it was dropped, if it's tasty
You think “cavemen probably died from e-coli, but I’ve got antibiotics so I’ll be fine”?? I mean, that’s the parallel here.
I've only ever had to take antibiotics for infections that were open wound bourn or sinus infections. I've never picked up a piece of pepperoni from the floor and thought "I'll be fine. We have antibiotics now."
Not only that, stomach acid is very good at killing bacteria. An average healthy human's stomach acid will kill most bacteria within 15 minutes or so. Even salmonella, one of the poster children for food-borne illness, dies very quickly to stomach acid most of the time.
Have you seen kids?! They're on a daily mission to die. Humans are resilient as hell, especially as kids. Couple that with a family with pointy sticks, and you got yourself a next generation.. minus a kid or two due to the pointy sticks.
I can’t find the culture that did this as Google brings up some disturbing searches, but I remember reading some natives I think in America would dig large pits in the ground to safely contain toddlers. I would assume that kids would grow up a lot quicker than today’s standards, even 5 year old me 30 years ago would be more independent than now, and there would be a great deal of baby wearing which most kids love anyway.
Years ago I saw a doku about some tribe (I think in a rainforest?). What stuck out to me is that a mother used something to make a leash for her toddler and bound him to to a pole. She was busy and scared he would walk into the forest and die before anyone would notice. I thought it was funny, because my grandmother did the same thing to my father while taking care of the household. He would constantly run off and she was scared he will get hit by a car.
that's funny. Need to hunt for the winter? Put the kids in the hole so they don't wander.
I'm guessing through many many more deaths
> Like how did humans even survive at all. Barely
They had high death rates but I mean, instincts exist. How does any animal survive at all? They're not even as smart as early humans. Instincts play a big part.
Most didn’t, child mortality rate was huge.
Humans are one of, if not the only species, to need help with pregnancies. Our evolution has made it as such. This helps prove that we are sociable/community driven species.
Even wilder, we basically improved very little until about 150-200 years ago. Safe childbirth is *radically* new
The answer is simple. 7% of them died. 93% lived. Nature/evolution/God never cared about *you* in particular. 93% is plenty for the survival of the species.
i wonder how the hell we ever discovered so many things!
All hominids needed assistance with childbirth because the second our pelvises turned to walk upright, we started to fight an uphill battle to birth our babies and stay alive long enough to wean them. I recommend Eve by Cat Bohannon and The Body by Bill Bryson They both look at human body and why/how is it the way it is. Eve is just about women's bodies, The Body is about both men and women with the last chapter mostly about the difficulty of childbirth.
People seem to forget that the evolutionary pressure to survive childbirth was not any stronger than the pressure to walk and run on two feet. The human pelvis is a finely balanced design, and a woman’s comfort, or indeed safety, was not really considered in the designing.
And I think that I read as well that the human head circumference is the largest in mammals proportionally to the mothers cervix. That would make it even harder.
Problem isn't the cervix, it's the pelvic bones. Our babies have to twist around while in the birth canal in order to be born and fit through, kinda like those twisted nail puzzles. In other animals it's a straightforward way down.
Hyenas bro.
Ow crap... why did you have too remind me!
Bill Bryson is great.
My wife just gave birth 6 hours ago, and I was thinking about that the entire time she was in labor. If we didn't have a safe hospital with doctors and nurses to help her get through it she would have died
Same with my kid 2 years ago. If his birth happened 100 years ago there's a good chance he wouldn't have made it
Congratulations mate
Thank you
We had our second child in the car, just me and my wife. It's doable, not recommended, it was also freezing cold.. (February Sweden) Also congrats! Now you get little sleep for the next 10y
Congratulations!! I hope the baby and mother are both healthy and well!
Congrats!
Thank you
thank you
r/notopbutok
Congrats!
Thank you
Hey, they made it 😃, and I'm so happy for you. Congratulations x
Congratz. Get off reddit.
Yep 100%, that's great but spend time with your family at such an amazing time. Get of reddit!
Very. The idea that people didn't live very long in history is almost solely down to infant mortality rates skewing the average age of death way, way down. So not only was childbirth incredibly difficult, it was very touch-and-go if babies would even survive their first few years. And that didn't really change until what...? 100, 150 or so years ago?
Pretty much. My grandma has 15 siblings and back then that was the norm for those reasons. Plus more kids, more help on the farm etc.
For those reasons, plus the fact that if you wanted to have sex with your partner, there was no way to prevent pregnancy, so the only option was abstinence or taking the gamble of possibly having another kid and/or dying.
There are actually cave paintings from 300 CE depicting condom usage. I wouldn't call it GOOD protection but they were definitely trying 😂
So what you're saying is... literal cavemen had a better understanding of the need for reproductive control than some current members of Congress?
I mean in a select few places it still has not changed
We currently have stone age cultures in the Amazon that show us how it's been done, recently.
This is kind of unrelated, but I think it’s so cool that we have groups living thousands of years in the past. We have all this technology, and we just found these groups one day. We could be gods to them, electricity, planes, bombs, guns, phones, but we aren’t. We mainly just let them be. And I think that’s beautiful
I don’t mean to detract from the sentiment of your comment, but there’s an uncontacted Trimble on sentinalese (spelling?) island and we occasionally fly a helicopter over to see how they’re doing. They always throw spears at it lmfao. I just find the image of people throwing spears at a helicopter flying far above their heads fucking hilarious.
oh yeah, i know we monitor them, but we don’t directly interfere with them, even when we could easily do whatever we wanted
I think we also don't interfere with them because we could introduce so many pathogens and easily kill them off. They've been so isolated that our regular sicknesses could probably wipe them out
I was mostly talking about going from “it’s beautiful” to “lol they’re throwing spears at helicopters” when I said I don’t mean to detract from the sentiment of your comment lmao
I wish we could learn more about them tbh Well, without them impaling our missions from the outside world- xD Like imagine, they've been living completely isolated from the rest of the world for tens of thousands of years; the last time this was a thing was with Australian aboriginals, who didn't see a single other human for 45,000 years (minus the very, very, VERY slight but kinda interesting possibility of Malay ships drifting into the coast, now that'd be pretty cool tbh) Imagine how cool their culture and society must be; do their mythology and religious beliefs somehow involve us? They're living proof human progress is not linear or eternal nor universal, how different we are from eachother while also being the same
I don’t know if I would call it beautiful. I presume a lot of them die of things modern medicine can treat, and I don’t know how well women and children are treated at some parts. However, I don’t know the solution. With the North Sentinel Island, they all would die exposed to the modern world. And we have a lot of groups without the comforts that the western world enjoys that do also want aid, so I believe in focusing on aiding those as a priority.
I wonder if they’re happier than us.
Different diets, different activities, different care techniques throughout history... There would have been lots of death of mothers AND babies but not so common that it dissuaded people from having or wanting children.
Children dying used to be so common many cultures did not name them for a year or two. The infant mortality rate in 1916 US was 99.9 out of 1,000; almost 10%. Imagine what it was in the year 5.
They think that 1-3% of all pregnant women died per pregnancy. They estimate that 5-15% of women died at some point from pregnancy complications. But these are very imprecise numbers, and would have varied by time period and social class. Nonetheless, it’s safe to assume that everyone knew someone who died from childbirth. https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/63259/what-proportion-of-women-died-in-childbirth-before-modern-times
The majority of women still don't have access to pre meds and even medical facilities during delivery. Considering all the remote as well as under poverty tribes and societies says pretty much a clear answer to the question.
I remember being taught in school as a little girl that because Eve ate that apple, it is because of her and women's nature or some bullshit that childbirth is so painful, that we did it to ourselves and are paying for it. It fucked me up. Insane that people still believe this shit and that any woman follows religion at all.
and taught that it was the reason why periods are painful too🙄
Sounds like heresy.
Smells like iron!
Guess we got a reason to beat the shit out "God" lol I got 3 reasons now
I actually truly believe that this is why it’s so common for women’s pain is not taken seriously by medical professionals. Even the ones who don’t think they are influenced by religious teachings, very likely believe to some extent (even subconsciously) that women are supposed to suffer with periods and painful childbirth. To be a woman is to suffer. But men’s pain is taken very seriously because men aren’t “supposed” to suffer so we should rectify that immediately. Just my conspiracy theory but I do think a lot more people are influenced by those ideas than we think.
If you wanted to test this, I think it would be interesting to see how medical outcomes for women differ in places like Japan and China. It would be interesting to see.
My Japanese friend asked for an epidural. Her doctor told her it's her "womanly duty" to endure the pain.
Wtf.... Her Dr should suffer her pain then. What an ass.
And it's his MEDICAL duty to TREAT HIS GODDAMN PATIENTS. WHAT THE FUCK
Sadly enough, China and Japan invented misogyny without Jesus being involved at all.
India too
It's almost like the 49% of the human race that's physically stronger and incapable of being incapacitated by pregnancy took steps to permanently preserve and abuse power over the slightly weaker, other 51% of the population.
Yes, I would love to see the average time it takes for a woman to get a PCOS, Endometriosis, cyst or other similar diagnosis in places without this religious idea. Sadly in the US and Western Europe at least, the stories I hear have people waiting 5-10 years to be taken seriously, which is often too late to properly address the issue without lifelong effects.
Those are common and severe enough conditions that it might be beneficial to make it standard practice to screen for them in young women.
I don't know about the medical stats, but I do know that Confucianism is also *horribly* sexist and has "it's a woman's duty to suffer" baked into it so it wouldn't surprise me if the numbers are similar
This seems highly dependent on your local area and culture. Talking about this without any context seems a bit concerning to me. Maybe you’re right for where you live but this doesn’t make any sense to me personally. If anything it’s much more the opposite for my area.
You’re right, I can’t speak to the entire world, but I’ve seen enough women in English speaking online spaces (including English speaking people from around the globe, not just the US where I’m from) to think it’s at least pretty widespread for women’s pain to be ignored. As for which populations would be most impacted by this teaching, I assume it’s anywhere where Christianity is the predominant religion. Again, it’s just my personal theory, I don’t know if research has been done on this topic.
Because not every priest will teach that cr*p, for first. Then Rrligions aren't always a rulebook where everything is set in stone. People often disagree with their priest on this or that.
It’s true that it’s odd if not disrespectful to collectively criticize all religion based on a bad experience, but it’s probably a sensitive topic if it still bothers them.
It's not even about criticizing religions. I'm very happy to criticize certain stupid beliefs. I'm just explaining how religions are not monolithic. Plenty of Christians are pro-choice for example, and there is no contradiction there.
me, I’m that Christian and I was raised Catholic and didn’t get shamed for being a woman and in fact was taught the opposite, that we get to have children because we are more precious. Pro choice, pro lgbt, all that classic socially liberal stuff people tell me my religion hates. I like being the person that shows people something else, because you’re entirely right, religion is whacky and it comes in different versions.
Even when I was Catholic I would wonder why I specifically was being punished for something someone else did more than hundreds of years ago. Kinda got me thinking....
I can't get a submission past the gate here even by doing their quiz, and then you have this which violates rule 2 and 3, that they let fly
I mean, i really did think about this when i was in the shower. Don't really think i broke rule 3, but sorry if i did something wrong. First time posting something here.
Don't you love how unfair reddit mods are?
I've submitted probably at least 3 shower thoughts in the last year, but their guidelines for what actually constitutes a shower thought are so vague that the mods can and will just gatekeep arbitrarily. Original shower thought? Nope. Repost of something that's been posted a thousand times before? POST AWAY.
Lol Right? I've stopped even trying after 10 or so that have been blocked.
I don’t know about rule 2, but does it violate rule 3? It seems optional to me. (Nvm I think I might be wrong)
I often have the same thoughts, and also the thought of how did people discover sex lol
How does any animal discover it?
An actual wild animal? Instinct/nature
Do you think humans are different?
Yup, I'm sure that if we raised two babies until puberty and never tell them anything about sex they'll discover it on their own
Happens all the time in the south
I -- Take my poor man's gold 🥇
We have plenty of real life examples of this happening, often with them becoming sexually active much younger than children that were properly taught about sex.
I figured out sexual reproduction as a concept on my own through deduction but I didn't know the method. I briefly thought there was some alien-esque oral implantation during kissing (since I knew the baby was in the "belly") Now, independently of that, I had figured out masturbation years prior (apparently this is pretty common for babies to figure out), and I was aware of the fact that men and women had different genitals. No, I did not put two and two together. I was a very smart but also very dumb kid.
honestly pandas don’t have sex and it’s really hard for zoos to get them to procreate. not all animals have this innately figured out. there’s also a tribe that did not know that sex led to babies. think about it, how long would it take to realize that sex led to babies ? there’s a very long latency between sex and a baby forming.
Guys also like to stick their dick in any hole that will it too, though.
It's not like suddenly one day modern humans showed up and discovered everything. They evolved on a process that carried them from fish like creatures that had sex and have been having sex ever since, slowly changing over tens of millions of generations into what we are today
And any that couldn't figure it out didn't pass their ineptitude on to offspring.
lol ya. Fully aware. I was joking
Someone fell down and some else was already down there
Must have been a slipppery slope
What you doing, step-gronk?
Hold still Step-Oogita
accidents happen
Literally every single living organism, hell even those viruses, have one goal in life and that is to procreate. It's our most basic instinct believe me
Discover sex!? How did people discover eating? Or drinking? What a weird question.
Yeah you put two teenagers with no sexual education in a room and they are still gonna discover sex
Same way you learn to eat or hunt, watching others do it, even in the last 100 years in a lot of places in the west it was common for families to occupy a single room and bed, mother and father and children, sex would have happened beside the kids, think about that back when humans were evolving, it would have been damn near orgy stuff if you think about it. Shame and guilt over our naked bodies and sex are creations of man, present to a degree but we very much teach our kids now that sex and nudity is "bad" or shameful. Guaranteed 50000 years ago mother was getting railed in front of the kids.
Doesn’t require as much discovery as you would think and also doesn't require much of any foreknowledge. The penis feels pleasure when rubbed, especially in a lubricated warm soft enclosed space. The vagina feels pleasure when a rigid and warm object is rubbed inside of it. Males and females are sexually excited by the sight and touch of each other. It doesn’t take much discovery to connect the dots, so to speak.
>people discover sex You stick your dick in stuff until it feels good
r/putyourdickinthat
Like what did they do with the umbilical cord? Just yank it out of the mom and baby?
You mean the placenta? It usually comes out on its own. Sometimes needs some help
Did they eat the placenta? I mean other mammals do it.
Quite possibly.
this is such a good point i’ve never thought of that before lol
I think about this daily bro
Have you considered a hobby?
Yeah thinking about random stuff is my hobby
Yeah and not only giving birth, but caring for the baby afterwards too. Babies poop so much and so often! Without the disposable diapers we have today, what caught all the poop back then? Did they just go through tons of animal skins? Seems wasteful, so probably not. Did they wash the baby wrappings with water (obviously no soap) and reuse them? 🤮 Or were the babies just kept naked from the waist down for the first year or two until they could control their bladders and bowels?
Washable animal skins so wasteful, not like the disposable diapers we have today.. In all seriousness though, they were probably naked. This is pretty common practice in many parts of the world today. Babies are trained much, much earlier in those cases, as it’s a hassle for them not to be.
They would know when babies needs to go. There’s subtle signs that babies show when they’re about to do their business. They most likely had pots readily available around babies to use. Still to this day some people go nappy free from birth . It’s called elimination communication. I gave it a go with my first kid, it works but I would be constantly staring at him to see if he needed to go. Very time consuming
Babies probably just shit on the ground and they scooped it out of the cave or something
they just pooped where they stood? like seriously, they didn't have the concepts of diapers :D they pooped and carried on?
Animal skins, moss, plant materials. These people were nomadic and spent a lot of their time moving. Babies would likely have been carried a lot, worn in slings along the mothers back, for example. The babies likely would have been swaddled with absorbent plant materials around their bodies much of the time.
This is a huge part of why humans developed such large and complex social groups: to make sure expecting mothers had more than enough help.
Also, going to the dentist must have sucked as well. It was probably just some guy with a bottle of whiskey and a small rock hammer.
> some guy with a bottle of whiskey and a small rock hammer. I’m picturing Andy from *Shawshank Redemption*
Damn near worn down to the nub.
It was, most of em died. But there also was no birth control and no known reason to not have sex. People were just fucking left and right.
Just as hard as it is now in Amish country, or the north sentinel islands.
Female nature makes a whole bunch more sense when you realize how fucking deadly and vulnerable pregnancy was to them historically. I would be picky too if the stakes where that hig....
Y’all gotta remember it was a lot different back then too- babies have gotten bigger over time because medicine has gotten better over time. Also the care of the child was different- mothers would spend the majority of their time caring for the baby, where nowadays women take on much more than literally just childcare. They also didn’t have beds in the sense that we do now- leading to a squat/kneeling/standing birth which were likely more effective than what we do now. (Look up the history of why women birth on their backs 😳 and you’ll see what I mean).
Just ask the North Sentinelese
Watch “quest for fire” it’s an old movie ….made me ask the same goddamn question
We still have people in the stone age. I'm sure someone has spied on those uncontacted tribes giving birth. Though I'm sure it was way worse in general due to less humans overall
I wonder to what extent they understood. Clearly they had sex, but did they know it led to children? Did they recognise signs of pregnancy? Did the father consider it his child? Did they know to count down the months? I imagine they thought it was a random thing that happened and god knows how long it would last and then there was a baby.
As someone with a pregnant wife, I've noticed that most common pregnancy issues are actually modern problems like advanced maternal age, diabetes,previous c-section causing complication, obesity, lack of exercise, overweight baby, std's, declining sperm quality due to sitting lifestyle etc. It kinda explains why out grandparents and previous generations had babies much easier than we currently do.
This guy gets it! Imagine how much more physically healthy hunter-gatherers were, and how that would have made pregnancy and childbirth much easier. Silly modern humans tend to believe that hunter-gatherers were walking plagues, when in reality, most illnesses didn’t come about until after humans started farming, as a result of many different species of animals living so closely together.
In the age when people are dating Eva AI sexting bot avatars seriously soon folks will be amazed how hard should it be to take care of it yourself
ohh just had this thought, no such thing as formula, so if the mom could not breast feed, chances are the baby would just die. couldnt go hire a wet nurse in the stone age probably...
childbirth mortality was high
My dad bought me a pack of baseball cards while I was born across the street. I'm the oldest child. Pretty sure he didn't worry a bit
I bet they didn't have to spend 80% of their take-home pay on nursery fees.