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.
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
I am interested in learning about this metric time.
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.
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)
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
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.
4 mothers back is all I can summon,
What’s the spell?
“I’m feeling hungry and mildly pregnant”
Yes also this diagram:
Gives you a clear sense of how quickly things are turning.
In a geological sense, all of humanity isn’t even a heartbeat.
Yeah, I might not remember it exactly, but I’ve heard that about 9 out of 10 people of all our history haven’t died yet. Which can be neatly misinterpreted as a surprisingly optimistic chance of not dying.
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.
Two steps forward. One step back
two steps forward, random.randint(1,4) steps back.
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.
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.
The American people are pretty fickle. It won’t take long for them to become unhappy with the Republican party. Of course once that happens and you and I are celebrating “Yay! We got rid of the fascists!” they’ll be going “Hmm… These other guys are pretty uninspiring. Maybe we should try fascism again.”
* There’s a big asterisk here that this is all predicted on elections continuing unabated. Which is not a given.
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.
Depending on the religion, yes. Otherwise it‘s 12 years per mother, 14 if you’re late.
That’s also assuming you’re the first born of the first born of the first born, and so on. And the further back you go, the more individual kids the average mother is likely to have. After all, you had to have like 12 kids just so 3 of them would make it past 9.
So your greatx12 grandmother might’ve started having kids at 15, but she still might not have had your ancestor till years later.
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.
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.
It was the nobility that was marrying off barely pubescent kids.
Same as it ever was.
First births yes, but what about average age? Our ancestors may have been second born, third born, eighth born etc
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.
Based on my own genealogical research, the trend I typically saw was 6-8 kids, between 18 and early 30s, about 20% of which died. Plus consider that some of those will be sons, and some daughters never become mothers, 25 is pretty spot on for the average age for a mother-to-mother generational gap.
And if everyone of your ancestors was unique (so no inbreeding) 80 mothers ago there would had to be 280 = more than 1.2 septillion people on the planet
And if your grandmother had wheels she would be a bicycle.
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
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.
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
