The feminists of prehistory

Phillip Adams

From: The Australian December 08, 2010

THE history of man. Of mankind. The masculine nomenclature you’d expect from a cultural continuum that begins with a male God and, as His first human, an Adam.

With Eve, the troublesome afterthought who saddled us with death and sin. Phrases appropriate to a religious tradition with a male Messiah and no room for women in the priesthood.

Even when the subject is entirely secular there’s still a steep tilt towards testosterone. Take the Ages of Man, as measured by the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age and, more recently, the Ages of Steam and Silicon. From the caveman to the geek, all blokes. Stone, bronze, iron, steam are all so butch.

Yet at least one of the Ages of Man was an Age of Woman. The Age of String. No joke. It’s a moment in our prehistory when a technology at least as significant as the smelting of metal arrived – almost certainly the invention of women. Trouble is, the stuff doesn’t last.

We have stone tools dating back 3 million years. Bronze from 3000BCE. They were making iron in India around 1800BCE. We keep digging this stuff up because it lasts for millennia. Whereas the women’s great breakthrough, string, was frail and destined to rot.

About the earliest evidence for the technology is in the form of imprints in clay pots – themselves first created in the image of baskets. Long before the potter’s wheel, people made pots by looping “strings” of clay.

Fragments of dyed flax fibres have been found in Georgia. They’re 34,000 years old. Logic suggests the idea of grasses being used for basket-weaving is far older, and would have quickly evolved into rope. Furs were no longer the only way of keeping warm. And baskets would have been a marvellous way for hunters to gather, or as shapes to protect babies as they slept. Strings and threads made fishing nets possible – and fishing lines. Which led to ropes that allowed the making of rafts, or as ways of tethering animals, or other humans. Then on to methods of hauling loads, erecting buildings, waging wars, hanging people.

From simple clothing to today’s haute couture. From tying logs together to sailing ships to tying modern ocean liners to wharves. All because women started turning vegetable material into an endless variety of threads, cords, clothing, rugs, tassles, decorations. And an infinite variety of baskets.

Yet where is the Age of String celebrated or acknowledged? The women of prehistory are, like their more modern sisters, omitted from the record.

And it may be they’ve been denied a role in the Stone Age. There are millions of stone tools in museum collections, from every part of the ancient world. And only recently someone noticed a very curious thing. That a great many are in mint condition. One blow would chip the edge yet countless examples have never been struck in anger or any other emotion.

Were they kept “for best”, like the good silver cutlery? A theory is emerging that they were made for courtship rituals, not use. Look how good my stone axe is! Choose me for your mate!

I’ve got a few on my desk. All pristine and perfect after tens of thousands of years. My oldest piece, found in Egypt, is 250,000 years old yet the cutting edge is still sharp. The new theory posits the possibility that they were made, with infinite patience, by women. The same women who wove the baskets.