this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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(page 2) 38 comments
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[–] [email protected] 11 points 21 hours ago (4 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Depending on the religion, yes. Otherwise it‘s 12 years per mother, 14 if you’re late.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

You would have a lot more death during pregnancy / childbirth though.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

Let's push it one step further and frame history since agriculture, 9500 years ago, against the upper limit of a human lifetime now, about 100 years. This would mean recorded times started only less than 100 human lifespans ago. Bleh

[–] [email protected] 100 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Yeah only 2 generations ago, LGBT people were considered mentally ill. 4 generations ago women were considered unfit to vote. 8 generations ago about half the US though it was OK to own slaves. It takes a while for ideas to die out. That's why US elections turn out the way they do.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Humanity isn't progressing uniformly forward like this. Lgbtqia+ people were considered normal part of society by various cultures. Also Magnus Hirschfeld was an advocate for lgbtqia+ people a hundred years ago. Slavery has been transformed into modern slavery because the western world has found other, more concealed ways to force people into labor. Ideas may die out, but they will pop into people's head again and again.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

And yet discussing progress in this manner can be a confort. All that you said was true... But what the person you replied said was also true. Two generations since fertilizer or two generations since we locked in Malthusian anarchy[please note I do not espouse Malthusianism]. Three generations since the worst war known to man and three generations that did not experience that kind of war. Glass half full, glass half empty. It's correct to question the myth of unstoppable progress thru which you can just kick your feet up and relax. But equally is it important to keep perspective remember that, yeah, eight generations ago chattel slavery was a bonafide institution and four generations women were unfranchised. Things get better and they get worse. We make progress and it is wiped away. We still keep trying.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Two steps forward. One step back

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (7 children)

Wonder how long it'll take before we get to step forward again. As far as I'm seeing, we're in for a long ride back. Not just for 4 years.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This has happened before. Even after Abu Ghraib Bush Jr won re-election. Even after Iran-Contra the Republicans won re-election.

But the fact is that they do not have the answers. They can only take things for themselves, and hope that people give up.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Civilian Drone Strike Obama and Palestinian Genocide Joe aren't better

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It wouldn't surprise me if Trump made it President for life.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 22 hours ago

No way that would last long, it's just not how Americans tick

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I pray america doesn't last his lifetime or that it dies with him

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 day ago (5 children)

That’s not a well-founded assumption. The average age of first birth was only 21 as recently as 1970. Go back a few hundred years and it’s way younger than that. Many women throughout history became mothers as soon as they were able (right after the onset of puberty). Many cultures had rites of passage into adulthood for boys and girls of that age. There was no such thing as adolescence.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago

Don’t they say teenagers/adolescence were invented in the 50s as that was the first time people were able to afford to allow their kids to carry on education?

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 day ago (1 children)

As the other commentator says, medieval Europe was mostly early twenties. Studies of stone age remains suggest a first birth age average of 19.5 and contemporary hunter gather societies have a comparable average. Sexual activity generally begins earlier, during adolescence, but the most "reproductively successful" age for beginning childbearing has been shown to be around 18-19. Also, this age at first birth isnt "Average age of a child's mother" as many women would have multiple kids over their life, so the average sibling would have a much older mother at birth than the firstborn.

Its important to remember that puberty has shifted massively since industrialisation, "menarche age has receded from 16.5 years in 1880 to the current 12.5 years in western societies". So the post-puberty fecundity peak, that use to happen 17-19, when women are fully grown enough to minimise birth complications, now happens at a disressingly young 13-15. Not only is this a big social yuck for most western societies, but it's reproductively unideal, because of the complications linked to childbirth at that age.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Huh, that’s interesting. Do we know why the menarche age has receded?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Maybe 23 would be a better average, but even if wvery women in your line gave birth at 12.5 that only doubles the other. And its fair to say not every mother would have been a first child. Also many still would have been born later than 25, so it probably evens out pretty well.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

First births yes, but what about average age? Our ancestors may have been second born, third born, eighth born etc

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

High maternal mortality meant that having more than about 7 children per woman was rare. Total fertility rate was about 4.5 to 7 in the pre modern era. Population growth was low due to infant and early childhood mortality though.

If you start having children at age 12, you can have a child every year and reach 7 children by age 20. Without contraceptives, people weren’t having such large multi-year gaps between children like we do now.

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 day ago (3 children)

In Western Europe at least back to the early medieval period it was common for anyone who wasn’t nobility to have their first child around 22. The younger you are the more likely you’re going to have serious (fatal, back then) complications. It was the nobility that was marrying off barely pubescent kids.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What was it like outside of Western Europe?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

No idea, I'm not as read up on that. It would shock me if it was significantly different just because risk of death from complications is a hard biological line the younger you get, pre-modern medicine.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There are definitely cultures who have practiced polygyny to get around this issue. Some still do today, for example in many different countries in Africa where people still practice a pastoral life.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I don't see how polygyny gets around the issue of risk of death from pregnancy.

Polygyny would get around the issue of men getting killed.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago (7 children)

Polygyny is where one man has many wives.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

Could we say (for no other reason than I'm stoned and it sounds good) the rough average mother-age is 18-ish? Then there would be roughly ~110 mothers since Jesus cheated and respawned for our sins.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 day ago

It was the nobility that was marrying off barely pubescent kids.

Same as it ever was.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I knew my great-grandmother, few people do. My great-great-grandmother is an ancient picture on the wall of my dead grandmother's house, from a time when photography was new, a scant few years past daguerreotypes.

4 mothers back is all I can summon, only remember 3.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

I knew two of my great grandmothers (yay for really young parents!). I know I met two others but didn't really know them.

I was told that I met my great great grandmother once when I was a toddler but I don't remember it. She died at age 99.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

4 mothers back is all I can summon,

What's the spell?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago

"I'm feeling hungry and mildly pregnant"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

So that's about 13,000 homo sapiens mothers?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago

I was thinking that it's now 81 mothers ago, but then I got distracted by the fact that there was no year 0AD and now I'm thinking that roughly 80 is good enough.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Whoops, I'm suddenly bleeding

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