Product Description
Shaped by cartoons and museum dioramas, our vision of Paleolithic times tends to feature fur-clad male hunters fearlessly attacking mammoths while timid women hover fearfully behind a boulder. Recent archaeological resea… More >>
The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory
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J. M. Adavasio is an archeologist with the firm belief — and research to prove it — that people were on the American Continent far earlier than the 10,000 years that is “Gospel.”
Jake Page writes of Indian lore, flora and fauna, and mystery novels centered in the American West with equal verve.
Here they discuss women’s roles in developing tribes marvelously. Read this, and note the bibliography, and then seek out each’s other works. You’ll be richer for it.
Rating: 5 / 5
Why can’t these pop science writers at least try to avoid inserting egregious errors? Towards the end of this book the authors actually say that “linguists and geneticists are coming to the conclusion that the Anatolian hypothesis is correct,” and that a 6500 B.C. date for Proto-Indo-European “accords better with the linguistic dating”! That is precisely the opposite of the case. The Anatolian hypothesis is, as Mallory put it, the wrong place at the wrong time. On linguistic grounds it doesn’t even begin to stand up, and never has.
Of course the book isn’t about Indo-European, and the authors would have done well to stay out of a topic with which they are clearly unfamiliar. Foolish errors like this undermine the book’s credibility.
Rating: 3 / 5
I am impressed by the work of J.M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, and Jake Page in their innovative investigation of the work of pre-historic women. While they don’t always agree with one another, the authors are always cordial and witty. The result is a book that tells a lot about women in prehistoric times, and a bit about the collaborative process of writing THE INVISIBLE SEX: UNCOVERING THE TRUE ROLES OF WOMEN IN PREHISTORY. The study is published by Smithsonian Books, under the aegis of Harper Collins, 2007.
Growing and preparing food, working with fibers to create cord, birthing babies, honoring higher powers by carving goddess figures, fashioning tools: all these important aspects of communal life, as it was lived by women in collaboration with men, have been scientifically investigated and cleverly written, sometimes in story form, always in an engaging narrative style.
Two of the authors are scientists, and one a journalist. It is a dynamic combination, and their book a fascinating read.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book provides a good overview of women’s role in human prehistory, while appropriately acknowledging that there is much that scientists still do not know about the social culture of our species and its predecessors. For example, the book proposes that men (and some women and adolescents) hunted small game rather than large game, and that the famous “Venus” figures of prehistory represent something other (it’s still not clear what) than fertility or “Goddess” worship.
On the negative side, some readers may be put off by the authors’ more personal remarks, coming from a feminist perspective, that too-frequently interrupt the book’s presentation of scientific theory and evidence. Also, the absence of footnotes is regrettable in a book of this kind.
Overall, though, there is a lot of good information here, that will be of interest to the many readers who want to learn more about the biological and cultural origins of humanity. That makes it a positive recommendation, as far as this reviewer is concerned, in spite of its one-sided perspective and sometimes distracting rhetoric.
Rating: 4 / 5
The authors have assembled a lot of data for their quick survey of both primate evolution and the prehistory of our own primate species. In such a short book, they can do no more than pass lightly over their sources, but the book does contain a good bibliography for further research. Reading it left this reviewer with the unavoidable conclusion that our current social system of interlocking patriarchies is a historical aberration. For most of our species’ evolution, we have lived not with patriarchy, nor with matriarchy, nor with gender “equality” — though the authors use this rather abstract term — but in a state that I’d term “gender parity.” In the dangerous conditions of the Paleolithic and early Neolithic, when human populations were so small and existence was so fragile, the contribution of every member of a group, whether male or female, was too valuable to ignore or denigrate. The book’s only real flaw is the prose style — breezy, bubbly, and filled with bits of slang like “more bang for the buck.”
Rating: 4 / 5