Desde a era das cavernas

Revilo, «Cagle Cartoons»

No Echidne of The Snakes, um blog escrito no feminino, este artigo da National Geographic, no qual se sugere que muitas pinturas rupestres encontradas em cavernas podem ter sido feitas por mulheres e não apenas por homens como sempre se supôs, irritou algumas senhoras, e com alguma razão:

I’m not sure if it’s possible to prove which hands belonged to men and which belonged to women, because anything one might use (size of hands, length of fingers, finger length ratios) will allow considerable overlap between the genders. Still, I’m astonished with the assertion that most scientists simply assumed those handprints were male. How could they assume that?

The problem with studying something that ancient is that many of the working assumptions will by necessity come from something else than the actual physical evidence. Our current values, for instance, and the odd way women become invisible to some people if we are not talking about reproduction.

Somehow all this reminds me of those old cartoons about the caveman coming home to the cave after a long day of hunting for mammoths and there sits the cavewoman, cooking the dinner (of mammoth, of course). That whole scenario was based on the social myths of the era of those cartoons, not of the era of the «cavemen».