Women having their hair pulled by violent men who have returned from hunting, club in hand, and only venturing out of the cave to pick berries ... This is what the distribution of roles in prehistoric societies looks like. collective imagination. It is the famous “cave time” which is still used today to justify gender stereotypes, helping to shape behaviors considered innate. Our sexist prejudices would find their source in this very distant heritage. Nay! They come to us above all from a vision of prehistory written by men, from the end of the 19th century.
New technologies (as well as the feminization of the profession of archaeologist since the 1980s), or the work of Claudine Cohen, philosopher and science historian, specialist in the history of paleontology and representations of Prehistory, have pulverized these shots.
It is clear that the voices beating them in breach, especially coming from historians, nowadays find a more attentive listening.
The literary success of the new school year, "Prehistoric man is also a woman"
(Allary Editions)
by the Neanderthal specialist, Marylène Patou-Mathis, is one of the illustrations.
DNA makes archaeological remains speak
On certain points, the society of today could well be inspired by this "time of the caves". From the Paleolithic, a period covering the first witnesses of human activity more than three million years ago, until the invention of agriculture and breeding, we can already observe small nomadic human groups among which tasks are shared. New methods of investigation have indeed made it possible to make archaeological remains speak. For example, the DNA that we find in bones identifies with certainty the sex of individuals. Their study, paleoanthropology, also provided valuable information on the morphology of individuals, their illnesses and trauma related to certain activities.
We now know that women hunted.
In Neanderthals, female skeletons present lesions on the elbow, on one side, associated with the regular practice of throwing for hunting.
They could also hold high social positions, cut tools, paint ...
And as regards “cooking”, “we observe that, in certain Paleolithic communities, men used their teeth to soften animal skins or pre-chew raw meat.
The work of flexible materials and culinary preparations were therefore also a man's business, ”recounts Marylène Patou-Mathis.
Thanks to DNA verifications of the sex of prehistoric skeletons, it is proven that dead men with muscular bodies, powerful and honored by grave goods… were in fact women.
When "the man of Menton" became "the lady of Cavillon"
One of the most famous cases is the discovery in 1872 of a skeleton buried in one of the caves of Grimaldi - known as Cavillon -, called "the man of Menton".
The skeleton, with characteristics similar to those of the Cro-Magnon man, was robust and adorned with a headdress of shells, a collar of deer canines, two flint blades… All a pageantry associated with wealth and in power.
It did not take more for the archaeologists to deduce that this skeleton was male.
“Years later, a re-examination of the bones identified it as that of a woman, despite the robustness of the skeleton and the opulence of the burial. The man from Menton then became the lady from Cavillon! ", Ironically Lucile Peytavin, historian specializing in the work of women in crafts and commerce, in her recent book," The cost of virility "(Editions Anne Carrière).
It drives the point home, moreover.
“These misinterpretations were repeated until the 20th century.
In 1953 the tomb of Vix was discovered in Côte-d'Or, which houses a chariot burial from the 6th century BC.
AD Given the richness of the objects it contained, archaeologists first thought that the skeleton was that of a man.
In the early 2000s, DNA analyzes indicated that it was actually a woman, now called the Princess of Vix!
"
"Paleolithic women were very robust"
What are these examples revealing? "Due to the fact that we wrongly project onto populations who lived millions or thousands of years ago social organization patterns that are contemporary to us," says Lucile Peytavin. “Several paleoanthropological works show that Paleolithic women were very robust. Even if, on average, they were a few centimeters and kilos less than the men. The thesis according to which the women were less vigorous, because systematically deprived of meat food, is refuted by the analyzes of their skeletons, which do not present more pathologies due to nutritional deficiencies than those of the men ", poses the author of" Prehistoric man is also a woman ”.
This archaeological questioning fundamentally questions the idea of a timeless, even natural distinction between female and male activities from the cradle of humanity. So, we smile when we read historians such as Elie Faure (1873-1937) describing a prehistory in which “the woman with the limited horizon remains hidden at the bottom of the cave, dedicated to children, to the home, to reproduction and on repetition of the same. […] Man, on the contrary, rises above his animal condition, looks into the distance, goes towards the unknown, contemplates the sky, invents art and transcends human destiny: it is he that proceeds all evolution, all innovation. "