The Caveman, we too often forget, was also a woman.
Misunderstanding goes beyond language more than once to attach itself, sometimes for years, to the very bones of our distant ancestors.
The error is human.
The Man from Menton, for example?
This
Homo sapiens
from the Upper Palaeolithic, who died around 24,000 years ago and was discovered in 1872 in the Alpes-Maritimes, was actually a woman.
She is now called the Lady of Cavillon, from the name of the cave where her skeleton lay.
Other discoveries have multiplied in recent years, in the light of a major reversal of perspective: the mere presence of robust bones or hunting objects is no longer sufficient to characterize a male individual.
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A bundle of these reinterpretations is presented in the documentary
Prehistoric Women
, broadcast Sunday on the National Geographic channel.
In the footsteps of the videographer and popularizer in archeology Clothilde Chamussy, the difficulty of identifying Paleolithic bones is emerging: a large proportion of these individuals are simply not well enough preserved.
Other indices must come into play.
“Even when we have complete skeletons, it is difficult to know if it is a man or a woman”
, underlines the prehistorian Marylène Patou Mathis, who indicates that nearly
“60% of the skeletons are asexual”
.
As for the other human remains, the scholars of the past did not always give them the
Clothilde Chamussy and Marie-Antoinette de Lumley, in front of the skeleton of the Lady of Cavillon.
Discovered in 1872, these fossilized human remains remained known for more than a century under the name of Man of Menton.
National Geographic France
“The skeleton of the Man of Menton was in the Museum of Man where I worked
, remembers for
Le Figaro
Marie-Antoinette de Lumley, paleoanthropologist at the Institute of Human Paleontology and director of research emeritus at the CNRS.
I walked past it every day, until one fine morning my eye was caught by the shape of the pool.
It still seemed large enough for a man!”
.
In the 19th century, a glance in the opposite direction was enough for Emile Rivière to identify the skeleton he had just discovered as a man.
Who else, indeed, could possess such robust bones and be buried with a headdress decorated with sea shells?
This pageantry was very distinguished for its time.
And too prestigious for a woman, we thought.
Thirty years of research on the Cavillon cave and its archaeological material, carried out with Henry de Lumley between 1988 and 2014, will contradict the too hasty judgment of Emile Rivière.
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This work of reassessment of the place and activities of women in prehistory also affects the artistic field.
At the bottom of the Pech Merle cave, in the Lot, the marvels of parietal art cannot, for example, be attributed to one or the other sex.
With one exception.
Thumbprints would provide an illuminating lead.
"
These thumbs are folded in a way that is quite difficult to reproduce
," says archaeologist and prehistorian Jacques Jaubert, professor at the University of Bordeaux, for National Geographic.
It is not impossible that these difficulties are linked to ligament flexibility, which is more evident in women or adolescents than in men.
Archeology versus Ethnology
The questioning of the role of women during prehistory - approached by many other angles of attack in the National Geographic film - has particularly been on the rise for two or three years.
Last year, the investigative book and the documentary
Lady Sapiens
, by Thomas Cirotteau, Jennifer Kerner and Éric Pincas played a large part in the media coverage of this aspect of research.
Prehistoric Women
partly takes up the approach and the sources, like the work of the American archaeologist Randall Haas on the existence of female game hunters in the Paleolithic.
Ethnology is sometimes abused.
However, this approach was criticized in October 2021 by a column signed by nine scientists and published in the scientific blog Sciences2, hosted by the newspaper
Le Monde
.
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Contrary to the
"most attractive theories"
, the sexual division of activities and male domination must probably have prevailed, the researchers then underlined, in their opinion piece, recalling the need to resort to ethnological observations to shed light
on "the immense gaps in the archaeological documentation”
.
A criticism that Marylène Patou Mathis rejects.
“It is necessary to pay attention to comparativism
, she warns in the documentary.
The last hunter-gatherer peoples are not fossilized humans from prehistoric times.
It is a methodological and scientific bias to absolutely want to model their way of life on that of prehistoric men.
Beyond the quarrels of the chapel, Marie-Antoinette de Lumley is happy to have fun with this welcome interest in prehistoric women.
“We hardly see passing, for the moment, of subjects which would be interested only in the women of the Prehistory.
By definition it is more like a research field in ethnology.
On the other hand, subjects relating to gender are fashionable and thus enter into our general reflections”
, underlines the emeritus paleoanthropologist, without failing to specify with mischief:
“Researchers, even prehistorians, are inspired by their scientific and social environment;
we are not isolated in our caves!”
.
