Talk:Human history

Patriarchy

Recent edits by Cerebellum [1] and Iskandar323 [2] adds content to § Ancient history (c. 3000 BCE – c. 500 CE) which states that Most societies were also patriarchal, with men controlling more political and economic power than women. Here's what the cited source says:

Twentieth-century Russia provides a good example: whether under the czars or the Communists or the post-Soviet government, women still did the shopping and the housekeeping and most of the child care, adding an unpaid “second shift” to their jobs in the paid workforce; these tasks were necessary to keep society functioning, but left women no time for the things that were valued and rewarded, such as further education or political activities. This gender hierarchy has interlocked with other hierarchies based on qualities such as age, physical strength, wealth, family origin, and spiritual authority to create the most common form of human society: patriarchy, in which men have more power and access to resources than women, and some men have more power and access to resources than others.
— Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

This doesn't seem to justify that most ancient societies were patriarchal, which is implied by the placement of this content. This seems like a somewhat controversial claim to state in wikivoice. Freoh (talk) 14:18, 5 January 2023 (UTC)

You are right! I will find a source more specific to antiquity. --Cerebellum (talk) 15:10, 5 January 2023 (UTC)

Looks like my claim was too simplistic, here's what another source says:

This includes rejecting grand narratives that ascribe public political and economic agency in this period primarily (or exclusively) to men, with women confined to the household. The economic, social, religious, and political forms whose emergence and interaction characterise this period are of too great a variety to allow for simple conclusions about how these developments changed gender relations in the domestic, political, and spiritual arenas.
— Scott Wells and Ping Yao

Thank you for catching that Freoh, I have removed the sentence I added yesterday. I still think our article is lacking in coverage of women's history but I'm not sure how to fix it. --Cerebellum (talk) 10:41, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I totally agree about the gender imbalance, I just think that text was a bit oversimplified. This content might be worth mentioning in § Rise of agriculture:

Seen this way, the 'origins of farming' start to look less like an economic transition and more like a media revolution, which was also a social revolution, encompassing everything from horticulture to architecture, mathematics to thermodynamics, and from religion to the remodelling of gender roles. And while we can’t know exactly who was doing what in this brave new world, it's abundantly clear that women's work and knowledge were central to its creation; that the whole process was a fairly leisurely, even playful one, not forced by any environmental catastrophe or demographic tipping point and unmarked by major violent conflict. What’s more, it was all carried out in ways that made radical inequality an extremely unlikely outcome.

Freoh (talk) 13:12, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

As above, I don't think Graeber & Wengrow are a great source for this article. We don't have space to cover all but the most mainstream of mainstream views, and their book is explicitly a reinterpretation of the mainstream narrative. Also worth noting that in that section they, like the Marler paper you linked above, are talking about gender in prehistory, which is typically doesn't include ancient history/classical antiquity. – Joe (talk) 13:58, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

I was pointing to § Rise of agriculture, which is in § Prehistory (c. 3.3 million years ago – c. 3000 BCE), not § Ancient history (c. 3000 BCE – c. 500 CE). I thought that the earlier controversy was over their presentation of the Enlightenment. Is the role of women in the prehistoric rise of agriculture also controversial? Freoh (talk) 14:44, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

Not so much controversial as novel. – Joe (talk) 15:06, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

That doesn't seem like a bad thing to me, and others were making similar arguments in 2007. Freoh (talk) 15:54, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

References

Social

Collect pictures of ancient people and prepar on album 223.187.62.7 (talk) 01:02, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

You need to be more specific.      — Freoh 01:06, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

Theory of Evolution

I noticed the article treats the concept of human evolution as fact instead of theory. For example, the very first statement of the Prehistory section is "Humans evolved in Africa from other primates." Full stop. No if's and's or buts. With how controversial the concept of human evolution has been, I recommend changing the wording to something along the lines of "In theory, humans evolved in Africa from other primates". It is neither wrong nor dogmatic and doesn't step on as many toes. My 2 cents. --Artimaeus Creed (talk) 15:03, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

 Not done: please provide reliable sources that support the change you want to be made. M.Bitton (talk) 15:12, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

The view that humans evolved in Africa is widely accepted by the scientific consensus, so there is no need to treat the claim as controversial. Helioz9 (talk) 22:53, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

It’s also important to note that theory, in the realm of science, is evidence-based fact, as opposed to in the literary sense, which is how you’re using the word here. 96.86.71.225 (talk) 19:26, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

Lacking citations

What's with the lack of citations in the article's introduction? Is there an intentional reason for having so many claims go unsourced? If the answer is that the sources for these claims come when the claims are repeated later in the article, my question then becomes, why not move the citations to the first instances of claims like is typically done? 128.54.68.243 (talk) 22:16, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

This is a Wikipedia-wide style so it is not really a topic for this talk page, but yes, in WP articles the introduction works a bit like an abstract and is supposed to summarize the body, which is where the sourcing should be. You will often see footnotes in articles where the opening remarks are likely to cause a lot of controversy but this is not considered ideal.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:27, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Start ancient history at 3500 BCE

Is anyone here strongly attached to 3000 BCE as the start date for ancient history? Here are three sources that start at 3500 BCE: [3], [4], [5]. I'm honestly not sure what is so special about 3500 since the earliest cuneiform is from 3300. I'm guessing historians just picked 3500 because it is a nice round number. Thoughts? Cerebellum (talk) 11:42, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

Probably because it is the rough start of the Early Dynastic Period in Egypt. I can only see the 2nd of those. I'm not inclined to change it. In an article at this scale it hardly matters. Johnbod (talk) 16:06, 7 October 2023 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn’t actually explain why I want the change: to me history begins with writing, and writing was in use in both Egypt and Mesopotamia before 3000 BCE. Here are quotes for the sources you cannot see:

• The overall river valley civilization period, from 3500 to about 800 or 600 BCE, can be broken down into much more precise statements about changes and continuities in particular societies such as Mesopotamia and Egypt, where internal periodization schemes are quite elaborate, but at the same time this level of detail may not be necessary. [6]
• In this chapter we trace the rise of complex societies in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus River Valley from approximately 3500 to 1500 BCE....Our starting point roughly coincides with the origins of writing, allowing us to observe aspects of human experience not revealed by archaeological evidence alone.[7] Cerebellum (talk) 10:45, 8 October 2023 (UTC)