Microblog Memes

I'm not talking about child marriage. Traditionally women were considered to be of marrying age at around 15 or 16 (note that this doesn't mean they got married at exactly this age -- it means the lower bound). The blog you link seems to be intentionally or unintentionally conflating child marriage (prepubescent girls) with marrying between 15 and 20. And indeed the sources it cites seem to largely support an average marrying age of around 20 for women until the 17th century.

This is also of course only for the medieval period, which is relatively recent all things considered. That still leaves 8500 years unaccounted for until the advent of agriculture, and during those 8500 years it's far more likely for women to have given birth to their first child younger rather than older than in the medieval period.

Always remember: these people were DNA-identical to us. All this life-saving, life-extending, life-improving technology... is always just 2-3 generations from poof

i think it's also worth noting that a whole lot of children basically died due to malnutrition ... think about it. contraception was not existent, so if a woman gets pregnant 8 times, but the family can only feed 2 children, that effectively means that 6 would essentially starve (or die due to other "preventable" diseases, but actually the better prevention than modern medicine is just food, since enough food strengthenes the immune system).

even if you had modern medicine at the time, children would still starve; the thing that really drives down child mortality is just a lower birth-rate altogether, since the family can still feed 2 children, regardless of whether they actually make 2 or 8 babies.

Between what the people 12k years ago knew and what just about any person today knows, you could start agriculture, building houses, at least the idea of digging wells, hygiene, the wheel, writing, and probably some others. A decently educated person in history, technology, or science (and I don't mean university-level) could add metalworking, astronomy, and animal domestication. The biggest limits to what you could do up to the industrial age would be megafauna and dieing before you accomplished it. If you passed on education, scientific theory, and the knowledge you had, there's a fair chance those things could be continued after you died.

As far as society goes, there is good evidence chimps have society, as well as early homonids. I'm pretty sure we had that 12k years ago, too.

I'm not who you were responding to, but first borns certainly aren't necessary. High fertility, low marriage age places like West Africa (Niger in particular has an average of 7 births per woman) meet the 15-20 range pretty spot on. A woman can easily have a child every year or so from 15 to 20, then they sort of coast to a stop by their late 20s. The majority of births are early because their so close together.

Average reported marriage age of women in Niger is 19... I've lived there, and in the village, it's 15 or 16. I have seen 9 year olds get "married" but it was really more like a reservation to get real married when she's 15 or so. Even using official stats, 1 kid before 20 and 3 or 4 kids before age 25 is very achievable.

I have personally met 30-year old grandmothers there who didn't think anything of it. They're 75% of the way to average life expectancy anyways.

I would say an average of 5 mothers per century up to 1850 or 1900 sounds about right, and is still a fairly conservative figure.

You know how the Mormons keep genealogy records for, like, everyone they possibly can? I am American so we may be more mixed than some places but those records went back pretty far and out in a lot of directions geographically. No overlap, lots and lots of people. I mean at some point mathematically it's more people than the population of the world so you have to be right but they had 20 or more generations in some directions, it was thousands of people on that chart going back hundreds of years, it was crazy.

I also did notice that most of my ancestresses did marry between 25-28, not 14 as Little House on the Prairie had me believing before.