this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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Some of my ancestors came to the United States on the Mayflower and that was only like 8 or 9 mothers ago.
Do we have a community for genealogy?
When numbers divide
25 is too old for most mothers the farther back you go.
https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/average-age-of-conception-throughout-human-history/151423/ nah it's pretty much been the average age of mothers for a very very long time indeed
So from your article, it seems to say the opposite
The female average age of conception is 23.2, AND this includes a recent rise, so it would be even lower than that when considering older times
Also, it's unclear if the average also accounts for the fact that there is are significantly more child being given birth to in the very recent past, which would skew the number way up
Every time I see people argue this I always wanna ask, are you considering that people don't stop having kids after 1 or 2? I'd wager that most women had the majority of their kids around that 23ish mark when you include that lady who had 10 kids from 15 to 35
I don't think 23 is wildly off from 25, and honestly this is just the first one I found that mentions it, I've seen various different sources for different reasons in the past. But the average is based on genetic mutations, and obviously in any given human it's irrelevant how large a generation is as to how much genetic mutation is contributed by the generation. Like even if there are 8 billion people today, that doesn't imply that you somehow got more generic inheritance from your parents than they did from theirs back when there were 6 billion people or whatever. Judging average to be the average per generation (a reasonable inference given the methodology) the last few years won't make much of a difference in a timescale of 250k years
I can't find the article I vaguely remember from a while ago, here's another random one that has mothers in the bronze age ranging from 16-40ish https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314262257_Bronze_Age_Beginnings_The_Conceptualization_of_Motherhood_in_Prehistoric_Europe although you can't really infer much about averages from that.
Anyway yeah there have been periods in time when average age of mothers was younger, but generally if you look back on a long timescale it's been older than people seem to assume. Seems to be quite common to have the notion that women all had children at 16 or whatever back in the day but not much to really bear that out that I can find.
Not even that far back, modern medicine is wonderful
Enjoy it while it lasts.
This is framed like 80 generations is a small number, but that's huge. Culture and civilization moves so quickly that even 3 generations ago life is barely recognisable. I can't even imagine what life was like 40 generations ago.
Many people don't realize that the amount of change our culture goes through in a lifetime is unfathomable historically. Before the 1800s it took a good decade for news to truly travel around to everyone in a region, and that was considered timely if it happened at all. Farming, hunting, homemaking, war, stayed exactly the same for dozens of years at a time and changes were usually made abruptly due to conflict before stagnating again.
But after enough stagnation, at least we’ll get the great scattering.
The lengths Americans will go to in order not to use the metric system is insane.
They were discussing converting the AU to 1 'your mom' as a better frame of reference, but France wouldn't sign on
What is the conversion from imperial mother to metric mother? About 1:1.26?
I am interested in learning about this metric time.
metric time actually was a thing, and it sucked so nobody used it.
It didn't suck exactly, time is just so much more prevalent than other units that switching to a new system was even more contentious. Current time is just as arbitrary (although maximizing for maximum number of prime factors is pretty nice, even if it doesn't mesh nicely with other metric units)
Metric really missed out by not being dozenal. SMH
The French tried to impose "metric" time way back in the day. Even they learned that was a bad idea and quietly dropped it. The solar system seems to prefer it's base12 time.
I think it maybe helped give rise the the saying: "The French follow no one. And no one follows the French."
Oh?
"450 mothers ago" is roughly 363,500 megaseconds ago.
To be fair, measuring that in moms seems more intuitive.
I’d like mothers represented metric tbh, I’m in a meeting and not able to do the math rn but if anyone else can oblige …
You can probably propose a new SI-base unit of "a mother", but what does it measure?
"Metric" just essentially comes from "metering". People confuse "metric" with "decimal", which is sort of the point of the person I replied to. While metric time technically exists insofar as you just use seconds as the base unit, omit minutes and hours and just do SI-prefixes, the French did also try decimal time, but it was just horrible.
So if "mother" was the base unit and it measured something, in this instance time, the advent of agriculture was roughly four hectomothers ago. Or 0.4 kilomothers, if you will.
Mother as a unit of time.
Ty
Edit the mother epoch presumably is the same epoch as all time, just … related to the mothers as above.
Ty
But see we already got the base unit of a second for time. But for generations, perhaps?
One kilomother would've been the early modern human, roughly. Ten kilomothers ago homo sapiens was just coming into being. A hundred kilomothers ago homo erectus would've just been coming into existence. A megamother ago we would've been diverging into great apes.
It's also about the speed of light in millifortnights (2.9e8), within a 4% error margin.
And if everyone of your ancestors was unique (so no inbreeding) 80 mothers ago there would had to be 2^80^ = more than 1.2 septillion people on the planet
This assumes a single child per set of parents, doesn't it?
No I’m talking about the amount of ancestors in the 80th generation back not the total amount of ancestors. It doesn’t matter how many children each set of parents had for that number.
And if your grandmother had wheels she would be a bicycle.
Village bicycle*
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