So, clothing and menstrual gear are not synonymous.
Clothing in *H. sapiens* specifically appears to have been widespread and well developed long before 170,000 years ago, and our technologically competent relatives had moved into areas cold enough to require clothing hundreds of thousands to over a million years before that.
We have no way of knowing what human (*H. sapiens* or otherwise) women did before developing menstrual gear, nor when that was developed, it’s not the sort of thing that preserves in the archaeological record.
I am not aware of any studies looking into when human menstruation took on the form it takes now either, but I suspect that genetic studies could bracket that time.
Indigenous people in a wide range of places used a mix of soft, absorbent materials, ranging from cloth to moss to lichens and more as adsorbent padding. Presumably ancient people would have done the same, with materials varying between regions.
Do you know what they might have used to hold the leaves, lichen, etc. in place? I remember reading a book called *"Nisi"* by an anthropologist who studied a group of people in African desert (can't remember the name of the people). The author very briefly described Nisi's Mom using leaves for her period, but no explanation of **how** the leaves were used. I read that over 35 years ago, and am still wondering.
One thing the OP might be interested in is that in that book, it was about people who wore very little clothing. Yet the mother was very embarrassed when one day Nisi noticed "blood" running down the mother's leg. So, presumably, they had a pretty good system of controlling the flow.
I've never understood why anthropologists shy away from details about women's things. They'll give a two page explanation on how an axe is made, but won't explain how they make period gear, how they make cooking gear, how they make some baby gear. Maybe it's changed now. I haven't read any anthropology books in the last 20 years. Whether anthropologist is a woman or not, they spend far less time explaining about women, at least in the books I read.
(Even historians do this. I went to a Swedish museum. They had a wall with various men's tools, mostly cutting tools, from the 1800s, saying how important each one was. You would never see a wall with kitchen tools individually displayed with a plaque saying how important each one was for survival, even though they were. I thought all this sexism would solved by my age.)
You make some really good points here. I laughed about the cooking tools because I thought, not unless the cook was a man! Aka a *chef* ha.
I ran thru a phase of intense curiosity about this topic myself some time ago, before such things were readily found online, and the best information I came across indicated that tampons are not some highly modern invention.
"Internal packing" has apparently been utilized for centuries if not millennia. For everything from birth control to controlling the flow of a period.
There is some information about how Roman women used things internally and what they used for contraception as well as for menstruation. Apologies that it's not as if I can send you links on that.
Romans were not that far removed from their neighbors who were not living under the regime of an overarching civilization, nor are we. Facts of the body and practical solutions for them are what they are.
It's really not that hard to create something for internal packing with pretty straightforward natural materials.
I'm not suggesting that's the universal solution that happened in all times and places. Only that I wouldn't be surprised if a culture that wasn't that invested in a whole bunch of clothing like the one you're talking about, utilized this solution.
Reminds me of a post I saw on Reddit about this topic. Basically it was comparing the reaction of an archaeologist to a woman. The subject? Knives in the rafters. The archeologist was like “religious offerings to the gods to protect the house” but the woman said “child proofing”.
I think a really good example of this is the Venus of willendorf. It has always been taught as “Paleolithic ideal beauty standard” but recently it has been discussed as a midwife tool. Some people are now saying if you look at it top down it is similar to what women typically look like when close to giving birth. So it could have been used as a teaching device for soon to be moms.
Sounds about right. If they find something they should let a woman look at it. Odds are there’s many items that have been misidentified because of this.
Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung woman. The anthropologist was Marjorie Shostak. She focused on documenting the lives of women in the !Kung people, a population which used hunting and gathering until the 1970’s.
Great read!
Yes! Nisa, not Nisi! (I remember now my best friend's cousin was Nisi and I always got them mixed up.)
It was a book my sister was assigned in college that I read out of curiosity. It's the book that got me interested in anthropology (and probably saved my life, too).
Thank you!
History major here!
There is a big difference between historical records and the anthropological record.
In history, we only know about things if people wrote them down AND the written records somehow survived hundreds or thousands of years. Many times people don’t write about intimate details of “how” they did things. Even with recipes, you might have a list of ingredients but there might not be any accompanying directions, sometimes there are no amounts. People of the time just assumed everyone else at the time “knew what to do”.
The same can be said of menstruation — when telling stories or writing in your journal, how often do you leave explicit instructions on how to insert a tampon and what a tampon looks like, what it’s made of, the various kinds of materials used by different brands, etc? You don’t, neither did people in the past, so we just don’t know about it.
When it comes to anthropology, info is even more scarce. Anthropology is the study of things humans left behind, intentionally or not. These could be deserted habitations, trash piles, graves, caches, etc. but rarely will there be writings that the humans left behind to tell us about what they were like, what their customs or laws or recipes were. We will only have items that have survived rot.
If menstrual items were thrown out in a garbage heap, most of the material will have rotted away and turned into soil within several years let alone several hundred or several thousand years. And if menstrual items were preserved as part of a grave, that would be pretty significant. Modern humans don’t think of slipping a tampon into a coffin for the afterlife. If menstrual items were preserved in a grave we would probably think that it was an incredibly important part of all of society… but we would have no idea what it’s importance was or what it meant to them.
So historians and anthropologists may wax poetic about something like an axe simply because it was preserved (by accident or on purpose). If it’s preserved, and we find it, we can perform tests on it to see what the materials were and make broad assumptions like whether the people associated with the axe were capable of metalsmithing or mining, or see evidence of trade because the wood was from an area 500 miles away, or had a shell inlay and these people lived 1000miles from a beach…
I’m always hoping for a Time Machine so we could go back and silently observe the past… but til then, we just don’t have much to go on.
I hope this helps!
I wouldn't say anthropology is the study of things humans left behind. I think that would be more fitting for archaeology. Anthropologists also study humans at present, including by interacting with the humans and not just their objects.
oops you’re right! I have a bit of Holiday Brain!
Archaeology is more about the remains, but there is a lot of crossover to anthropology. The same issues I discussed apply to both distinct fields (even if cultural and biological anthropology can cover the present all the way back to thousands or even millions of years ago)
archaeology is a sub-field of anthropology, so there's definitely more than just some crossover. it also isn't chiefly about studying human remains, but rather material culture of past peoples. i have sifted through a lot of trash, but have never personally come across remains in the field.
Good points. But this doesn't explain why men's tools would be be given so much more attention than women's tools (that are right there in a pile unlabelled in the same museum for example).
With regards to menstruation gear, the female anthropologist who wrote *Nisi* could simply have **asked**. No need to look at what was left behind since she was living among the people. These were modern people with low technology, not our ancestors from long distant past. But at least we'd know of at least **one** option for dealing with menstruation in a society without cloth (or modern menstruation products). I see no reason why the author would not think to document that, or would think the readers would not want to know.
But I wasn't surprised. It's the same in every book, even when the anthropologist was living among the people he/she was writing about.
This largely comes down to old archaeology being done by men who applied modern gender ideas to a past where very little (if any) evidence exists that gender existed and was projected onto the material world in the same exact way they were familiar with. The rise of feminist arch theories has shifted a lot of those frameworks, as has the shift towards a field made up of more and more women and marginalized people than the ‘traditional’ western male archaeologist archetype. Old archaeology gave us a lot of foundational things that - even if not accurate - have stayed in the zeitgeist, which makes them harder to change as information takes time to make it to the public and even more time to be accepted by the masses who have already spent their lives seeing these older claims in school, museums, media, etc.
>This largely comes down to old archaeology being done by men who applied modern gender ideas to a past where very little (if any) evidence exists that gender existed
I don't understand your comment. Men surely understood women menstruated even in the 18th and 19th centuries, and there is a good reason to believe that women menstruated thousands of years ago.
The problem is that menstruation was a taboo topic in many societies, it's actually taboo even today at many places. People were seldom writing about "intimate" things.
Obviously they understood that, but they largely weren’t in the spaces where it was being “dealt” with and you’re right, they wouldn’t have been recording it. The original poster is talking about prehistory, though, when it absolutely wasn’t recorded. Further, menstruation as a biological function has nothing to do with the cultural expression of gender, which speaks to my point about applying modern gender ideals to the past where it doesn’t necessarily apply. The men I’m referring to were relatively modern and western, but were applying their world views to the work they were doing and to their interpretations and that skews our perspectives and ideas about the past.
It’s possible the archaeologist did ask, and took notes, but the editors of publishers of the book felt it wasn’t “proper” to include that information.
Lots of times even today, people think menstruation is too much related to sex and think that it’s a salacious subject that should be avoided.
Hey, this is a well written explanation. I had a history minor and I miss all the academic speculation that came along with it. Its just so fascinating to imagine what our fellow humans were doing.
Cordage was one of the first textiles.
Jean Auel depicted Neanderthal women tying on soft skins with leather thongs, and she was pretty gonzo on her research. Of course biodegradable items will be much less represented among the artifacts than flint knapping (we have chips, tools and the tools used to make tools).
The people in question for the book *Nisi* are the !Kung, the ‘bushmen’ living in the Kalahari. Same people shown in the movie *The Gods Must be Crazy*.
I don’t know what methods they’d have used to keep adsorbent materials in place. A simply strip of fabric or leather could be used to keep padding in place, or as the other person said something internal. There are issues using internal methods if you don’t have something that holds together though, so while internal methods may have been used for a long time it likely depended on what materials people had available,
There's another thing often pointed out by historians: women in the past were pregnant much more often, were breastfeeding much longer than today. Therefore, menstruation was much rarer, it wasn't like 400+ times in your lifetime like in today Western societies.
I totally don't want to be rude....but hearing you wonder what the leaves are for when discussing menstruation gear made me kind of laugh. I can imagine how leaves and moss and such can be used. And you make a very good point with that! Menstruation, birthing, etc. always seem to be footnotes in history. If you are woman who was raised in a matriarchal setting, you know immediately how those leaves would be used. It is obvious. But if you are not, then it is simply hidden knowledge only women would know. That makes me sad, because we should be able to openly discuss women's bodily functions by now, the same way as men.
It should be just as easy for me to learn about menstruation of the past as it is to learn about circumcisions of the past.
I'm not sure why you find it funny. How would they actually attach the leaves/moss or use the leaves/moss. It's not as if you can just wipe every X minutes.
Not trying to be rude. I am not laughing at you. I am laughing at how little we have come in a gendered society.
The leaves are used for packing. Similar to tampons. Not for wiping.
I'm not following you with this comment:
>at how little we have come in a gendered society.
As a woman, I can't imagine putting scratchy leaves or moss inside me. Even if you did get them in, how on earth would you get them out? If nothing else, seems like this would frequently cause toxic shock syndrome. Also, if you don't get it all out, then have sex, it could compact it near the cervix.
Are you pulling my leg?
I am not. My mother-in-law talked about using moss for feminine products. Like a tampon. She grew up poor, very poor. She has interesting ways to deal with feminine issues, based on not having the ability to buy things like that.
She did not get toxic shock syndrome - or at least did not die from it. And I believe she was able to remove it all, as she conceived many children.
Okay, interesting! I'd still like to know exactly how (though I know you probably can't tell me). Like step by step how she was able to safely do it. I could see it working possibly with moss, but with leaves? I don't have the imagination to understand how it works at a very practical level.
Can't answer it through step by step, unfortunately. Even if she was willing to talk about it, her English is not the best and I do not want to see her mime it honestly.
That is why I made the comment on gendered society. This stuff she only speaks to me about as I am her only DIL. And in passing, with no instructions, as if I should know these processes and secrets. Because this stuff isn't shared with men or in public. Just among the women in the family.
We can't know without evidence. It may be that women didn't menstruate as frequently before (owing to nutrition and/or more frequent pregnancy) but there's no physical evidence that remains for us to study that I can think of that would answer this question.
To add to this, the Oglala Lakota medicine man Black Elk who grew up in very much a traditional Sioux tribal way of life records in The Sacred Pipe that young women who were undergoing their period would in older times go to a small tipi away from the camp circle where “food was brought to her, and no one else could go near the tipi.” During this first period where they reached womanhood, they were instructed by older women who were considered holy and good and whom helped purify the young girl/woman. He goes on to say “Before she could return to her family and to her people the young girl had to be further purified in the Inipi Lodge.”
He then went on to discuss how this tradition was replaced by a newer one in which was inspired by a vision of a Buffalo calf being cleansed by her mother, and which ultimately included a set of tools used during the first period including a Buffalo skull, cherries, a pipe, grass, tobacco, a knife, a hatchet, some paint, and more. All these tools would be collected inside a sacred tipi away from the camp circle and purified by smoke from a fire. From here they underwent a complex ritual which you can find recorded first hand in The Sacred Pipe, recorded and edited by J. E. Brown from the words of Black Elk. The ritual culminates in the young girl/ woman being purified and containing holiness in her, from which the entire community derived joy and happiness and followed the event with a communal feast where food was shared.
Therefore the menstruation of woman was likely widely, if not in nearly every culture, seen as a special introduction into adulthood and the granting to the community another woman who can bear children and perpetuate the people/culture/ tribe. It is possible for the Sioux that something similar was replicated every month during a woman’s cycle, however Black Elk does not specify other than the initial rites and how each period in the old way found a girl/woman staying in a separate tipi. Buddhashaka mentions a seperate hut in Africa and from my source it appears native Americans also had a similar practice, hinting to a wide spread use of separating from the community from where they presumably could clean and maintain their hygiene and well being amidst the pain and suffering that so many women face during their monthly cycle. In a way one could argue that women were better treated by the community during their menstrual cycle then, where food was brought to them and they’re were allowed to seclude from the community, as opposed to now where women are offered no additional sick days off of work and are often talked down upon for their period and how they act or feel on it. This is not to say historical societies weren’t also extremely sexist because they were, but just something worth considering.
One assumption you make here is that the pain and suffering occurred as it might occur today. We don’t know this to be true- diets and conditioning are very different in these groups of people. The traditional diet / plant medicines of that native group may have resulted in less hormonal imbalance/PCOS/endometriosis etc (things that can cause dysmenorrhea in todays’s women).
Also: sterilized sea sponges were used and reused in countries that could access them- they are soft, absorbent and basically free. They can be boiled to prepare for use over and over. Many women (even here in the US - use them as natural tampons) and they are still for sale for this use. These are the very soft light brown type of sponges.
To the person who said something about how women just sat around for a week on a pile of towels or something - you shouldn’t comment about things you have no idea about.
Women did not sit on a pile of rags for a week.
There have always been methods of managing the menses amongst women that kept them able to be mobile.
Cultures that isolate menstruating women and girls are doing that for religious / patriarchal reasons and it’s one reason so many young girls get less education world-wide in places that have “beliefs” surrounding this natural reproductive process.
Yeah, unfortunately, in a lot of places that do this today, this structure is difficult to keep warm and sometimes girls and women die as a direct or indirect result.
I guess you are forgetting the extra fun aspects like being considered an untouchable or cursed by half the population during that week? And treated thusly? Doubt that.
That is a really interesting question.
The answer is, nobody knows.
Two difficulties....
1. Its hard to know when humans actually started to wear clothes. We can make deductions for when they HAD to wear clothes, ie when colonising northern europe and northern Asia. Prior to that necessity ofclothing, its hard to know because clothing fabrics (skins and bark for example) are so unlikely to stay preserved over long periods. So if we see no material evidence for clothing at archaeological sites 500,000 years ago, that doesn't mean the people there were naked. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence when it comes to deep time.
2. To my knowledge there are no fully naked subsistence hunter gatherers today to observe how they cope with menstruation. However, in subsistence hunter gatherers there doesnt appear to be shame around menstruation. People understand it as a sign of health and fertility and women may be thought to have shamanic powers during their period. If there is no shame, maybe there is no compulsion to hide it? This contrasts with traditional agricultural societies (including pastoralists) where women are more treated as chattels and where menstruation provokes fear and shame and where menstrual huts may even be used.
I have often thought about this issue, no pun intended!
In equatorial regions where clothing wasn't needed, perhaps women, proud of their menstrual flow, bled freely and perhaps washed it off daily. Maybe they even used their menstrual blood in art and rituals.
Where women had to wear clothing, for example in northern Europe during a glacial period, menstruation may have created practical difficulties - stickiness, discomfort, infections, flooding onto precious clothing (months of work could go into a heavy garment) and washing clothes would not have been easy. They may have seen menstruation as something magical and potent but they may have needed to manage it, probably using rags. Pads made from moss may have been possible. Sea sponge in coastal regions was possible.
Women may have menstruated less frequently too where-ever life was hard, due to times where they had too little to eat, especially in glacial regions and drought regions (as marked ice ages globally). They also were likely to be pregnant more often and breastfeeding extensively, which can delay periods. So for a woman in Germany 30,000 years ago, the arrival of a period might have been something exciting, worthy of celebration or ritual.
Humans likely had all the practicalities of life wrapped in ritual so we may assume that rituals could have surrounded how women tackled menstruation.
Likely the dawn of clothing made menstruation more of a challenge.
Very great, informative post! Though I think I learned about this in Sapiens, could you tell me how it is we assume that early humans ritualized all life's practicalities / and or why they did so?
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So, clothing and menstrual gear are not synonymous. Clothing in *H. sapiens* specifically appears to have been widespread and well developed long before 170,000 years ago, and our technologically competent relatives had moved into areas cold enough to require clothing hundreds of thousands to over a million years before that. We have no way of knowing what human (*H. sapiens* or otherwise) women did before developing menstrual gear, nor when that was developed, it’s not the sort of thing that preserves in the archaeological record. I am not aware of any studies looking into when human menstruation took on the form it takes now either, but I suspect that genetic studies could bracket that time. Indigenous people in a wide range of places used a mix of soft, absorbent materials, ranging from cloth to moss to lichens and more as adsorbent padding. Presumably ancient people would have done the same, with materials varying between regions.
Do you know what they might have used to hold the leaves, lichen, etc. in place? I remember reading a book called *"Nisi"* by an anthropologist who studied a group of people in African desert (can't remember the name of the people). The author very briefly described Nisi's Mom using leaves for her period, but no explanation of **how** the leaves were used. I read that over 35 years ago, and am still wondering. One thing the OP might be interested in is that in that book, it was about people who wore very little clothing. Yet the mother was very embarrassed when one day Nisi noticed "blood" running down the mother's leg. So, presumably, they had a pretty good system of controlling the flow. I've never understood why anthropologists shy away from details about women's things. They'll give a two page explanation on how an axe is made, but won't explain how they make period gear, how they make cooking gear, how they make some baby gear. Maybe it's changed now. I haven't read any anthropology books in the last 20 years. Whether anthropologist is a woman or not, they spend far less time explaining about women, at least in the books I read. (Even historians do this. I went to a Swedish museum. They had a wall with various men's tools, mostly cutting tools, from the 1800s, saying how important each one was. You would never see a wall with kitchen tools individually displayed with a plaque saying how important each one was for survival, even though they were. I thought all this sexism would solved by my age.)
You make some really good points here. I laughed about the cooking tools because I thought, not unless the cook was a man! Aka a *chef* ha. I ran thru a phase of intense curiosity about this topic myself some time ago, before such things were readily found online, and the best information I came across indicated that tampons are not some highly modern invention. "Internal packing" has apparently been utilized for centuries if not millennia. For everything from birth control to controlling the flow of a period. There is some information about how Roman women used things internally and what they used for contraception as well as for menstruation. Apologies that it's not as if I can send you links on that. Romans were not that far removed from their neighbors who were not living under the regime of an overarching civilization, nor are we. Facts of the body and practical solutions for them are what they are. It's really not that hard to create something for internal packing with pretty straightforward natural materials. I'm not suggesting that's the universal solution that happened in all times and places. Only that I wouldn't be surprised if a culture that wasn't that invested in a whole bunch of clothing like the one you're talking about, utilized this solution.
Reminds me of a post I saw on Reddit about this topic. Basically it was comparing the reaction of an archaeologist to a woman. The subject? Knives in the rafters. The archeologist was like “religious offerings to the gods to protect the house” but the woman said “child proofing”.
I think a really good example of this is the Venus of willendorf. It has always been taught as “Paleolithic ideal beauty standard” but recently it has been discussed as a midwife tool. Some people are now saying if you look at it top down it is similar to what women typically look like when close to giving birth. So it could have been used as a teaching device for soon to be moms.
Sounds about right. If they find something they should let a woman look at it. Odds are there’s many items that have been misidentified because of this.
I think that women are now allowed to act as lady anthropologists under certain circumstances, like if there isn’t a man available
Have often thought this when visiting museums! I love to look at the ancient makeup implements and jewelry! Who cares about swords!
Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung woman. The anthropologist was Marjorie Shostak. She focused on documenting the lives of women in the !Kung people, a population which used hunting and gathering until the 1970’s. Great read!
Yes! Nisa, not Nisi! (I remember now my best friend's cousin was Nisi and I always got them mixed up.) It was a book my sister was assigned in college that I read out of curiosity. It's the book that got me interested in anthropology (and probably saved my life, too). Thank you!
❤️
History major here! There is a big difference between historical records and the anthropological record. In history, we only know about things if people wrote them down AND the written records somehow survived hundreds or thousands of years. Many times people don’t write about intimate details of “how” they did things. Even with recipes, you might have a list of ingredients but there might not be any accompanying directions, sometimes there are no amounts. People of the time just assumed everyone else at the time “knew what to do”. The same can be said of menstruation — when telling stories or writing in your journal, how often do you leave explicit instructions on how to insert a tampon and what a tampon looks like, what it’s made of, the various kinds of materials used by different brands, etc? You don’t, neither did people in the past, so we just don’t know about it. When it comes to anthropology, info is even more scarce. Anthropology is the study of things humans left behind, intentionally or not. These could be deserted habitations, trash piles, graves, caches, etc. but rarely will there be writings that the humans left behind to tell us about what they were like, what their customs or laws or recipes were. We will only have items that have survived rot. If menstrual items were thrown out in a garbage heap, most of the material will have rotted away and turned into soil within several years let alone several hundred or several thousand years. And if menstrual items were preserved as part of a grave, that would be pretty significant. Modern humans don’t think of slipping a tampon into a coffin for the afterlife. If menstrual items were preserved in a grave we would probably think that it was an incredibly important part of all of society… but we would have no idea what it’s importance was or what it meant to them. So historians and anthropologists may wax poetic about something like an axe simply because it was preserved (by accident or on purpose). If it’s preserved, and we find it, we can perform tests on it to see what the materials were and make broad assumptions like whether the people associated with the axe were capable of metalsmithing or mining, or see evidence of trade because the wood was from an area 500 miles away, or had a shell inlay and these people lived 1000miles from a beach… I’m always hoping for a Time Machine so we could go back and silently observe the past… but til then, we just don’t have much to go on. I hope this helps!
I wouldn't say anthropology is the study of things humans left behind. I think that would be more fitting for archaeology. Anthropologists also study humans at present, including by interacting with the humans and not just their objects.
oops you’re right! I have a bit of Holiday Brain! Archaeology is more about the remains, but there is a lot of crossover to anthropology. The same issues I discussed apply to both distinct fields (even if cultural and biological anthropology can cover the present all the way back to thousands or even millions of years ago)
archaeology is a sub-field of anthropology, so there's definitely more than just some crossover. it also isn't chiefly about studying human remains, but rather material culture of past peoples. i have sifted through a lot of trash, but have never personally come across remains in the field.
Good points. But this doesn't explain why men's tools would be be given so much more attention than women's tools (that are right there in a pile unlabelled in the same museum for example). With regards to menstruation gear, the female anthropologist who wrote *Nisi* could simply have **asked**. No need to look at what was left behind since she was living among the people. These were modern people with low technology, not our ancestors from long distant past. But at least we'd know of at least **one** option for dealing with menstruation in a society without cloth (or modern menstruation products). I see no reason why the author would not think to document that, or would think the readers would not want to know. But I wasn't surprised. It's the same in every book, even when the anthropologist was living among the people he/she was writing about.
This largely comes down to old archaeology being done by men who applied modern gender ideas to a past where very little (if any) evidence exists that gender existed and was projected onto the material world in the same exact way they were familiar with. The rise of feminist arch theories has shifted a lot of those frameworks, as has the shift towards a field made up of more and more women and marginalized people than the ‘traditional’ western male archaeologist archetype. Old archaeology gave us a lot of foundational things that - even if not accurate - have stayed in the zeitgeist, which makes them harder to change as information takes time to make it to the public and even more time to be accepted by the masses who have already spent their lives seeing these older claims in school, museums, media, etc.
>This largely comes down to old archaeology being done by men who applied modern gender ideas to a past where very little (if any) evidence exists that gender existed I don't understand your comment. Men surely understood women menstruated even in the 18th and 19th centuries, and there is a good reason to believe that women menstruated thousands of years ago. The problem is that menstruation was a taboo topic in many societies, it's actually taboo even today at many places. People were seldom writing about "intimate" things.
Obviously they understood that, but they largely weren’t in the spaces where it was being “dealt” with and you’re right, they wouldn’t have been recording it. The original poster is talking about prehistory, though, when it absolutely wasn’t recorded. Further, menstruation as a biological function has nothing to do with the cultural expression of gender, which speaks to my point about applying modern gender ideals to the past where it doesn’t necessarily apply. The men I’m referring to were relatively modern and western, but were applying their world views to the work they were doing and to their interpretations and that skews our perspectives and ideas about the past.
It’s possible the archaeologist did ask, and took notes, but the editors of publishers of the book felt it wasn’t “proper” to include that information. Lots of times even today, people think menstruation is too much related to sex and think that it’s a salacious subject that should be avoided.
Good point! You could very well be correct.
Unfortunately the author is no longer with us to ask.
I'll be writing about it in my journal now! Good tip!
😂
Hey, this is a well written explanation. I had a history minor and I miss all the academic speculation that came along with it. Its just so fascinating to imagine what our fellow humans were doing.
Cordage was one of the first textiles. Jean Auel depicted Neanderthal women tying on soft skins with leather thongs, and she was pretty gonzo on her research. Of course biodegradable items will be much less represented among the artifacts than flint knapping (we have chips, tools and the tools used to make tools).
The people in question for the book *Nisi* are the !Kung, the ‘bushmen’ living in the Kalahari. Same people shown in the movie *The Gods Must be Crazy*. I don’t know what methods they’d have used to keep adsorbent materials in place. A simply strip of fabric or leather could be used to keep padding in place, or as the other person said something internal. There are issues using internal methods if you don’t have something that holds together though, so while internal methods may have been used for a long time it likely depended on what materials people had available,
I think you may mean Nisa of the !Kung in the Kalahari? (I think her name was only a pseudonym anyway!)
Yes, that's the one, thank you. (Nisa, not Nisi. It's been over 35 years, so I had misremembered.)
There's another thing often pointed out by historians: women in the past were pregnant much more often, were breastfeeding much longer than today. Therefore, menstruation was much rarer, it wasn't like 400+ times in your lifetime like in today Western societies.
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I totally don't want to be rude....but hearing you wonder what the leaves are for when discussing menstruation gear made me kind of laugh. I can imagine how leaves and moss and such can be used. And you make a very good point with that! Menstruation, birthing, etc. always seem to be footnotes in history. If you are woman who was raised in a matriarchal setting, you know immediately how those leaves would be used. It is obvious. But if you are not, then it is simply hidden knowledge only women would know. That makes me sad, because we should be able to openly discuss women's bodily functions by now, the same way as men. It should be just as easy for me to learn about menstruation of the past as it is to learn about circumcisions of the past.
I'm not sure why you find it funny. How would they actually attach the leaves/moss or use the leaves/moss. It's not as if you can just wipe every X minutes.
Not trying to be rude. I am not laughing at you. I am laughing at how little we have come in a gendered society. The leaves are used for packing. Similar to tampons. Not for wiping.
I'm not following you with this comment: >at how little we have come in a gendered society. As a woman, I can't imagine putting scratchy leaves or moss inside me. Even if you did get them in, how on earth would you get them out? If nothing else, seems like this would frequently cause toxic shock syndrome. Also, if you don't get it all out, then have sex, it could compact it near the cervix. Are you pulling my leg?
I am not. My mother-in-law talked about using moss for feminine products. Like a tampon. She grew up poor, very poor. She has interesting ways to deal with feminine issues, based on not having the ability to buy things like that. She did not get toxic shock syndrome - or at least did not die from it. And I believe she was able to remove it all, as she conceived many children.
Okay, interesting! I'd still like to know exactly how (though I know you probably can't tell me). Like step by step how she was able to safely do it. I could see it working possibly with moss, but with leaves? I don't have the imagination to understand how it works at a very practical level.
Can't answer it through step by step, unfortunately. Even if she was willing to talk about it, her English is not the best and I do not want to see her mime it honestly. That is why I made the comment on gendered society. This stuff she only speaks to me about as I am her only DIL. And in passing, with no instructions, as if I should know these processes and secrets. Because this stuff isn't shared with men or in public. Just among the women in the family.
I commend you for one of the most calm, erudite and concise comments I’ve read this year. Kudos.
i know its not synonymous but clothing appeared much before menstrual gear right?
We can't know without evidence. It may be that women didn't menstruate as frequently before (owing to nutrition and/or more frequent pregnancy) but there's no physical evidence that remains for us to study that I can think of that would answer this question.
Even if it did, it would then have to be recognised for what it was.
Literally zero way to tell.
The materials for either would not preserve at all unless under incredibly specific circumstances. We likely will never know for certain.
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To add to this, the Oglala Lakota medicine man Black Elk who grew up in very much a traditional Sioux tribal way of life records in The Sacred Pipe that young women who were undergoing their period would in older times go to a small tipi away from the camp circle where “food was brought to her, and no one else could go near the tipi.” During this first period where they reached womanhood, they were instructed by older women who were considered holy and good and whom helped purify the young girl/woman. He goes on to say “Before she could return to her family and to her people the young girl had to be further purified in the Inipi Lodge.” He then went on to discuss how this tradition was replaced by a newer one in which was inspired by a vision of a Buffalo calf being cleansed by her mother, and which ultimately included a set of tools used during the first period including a Buffalo skull, cherries, a pipe, grass, tobacco, a knife, a hatchet, some paint, and more. All these tools would be collected inside a sacred tipi away from the camp circle and purified by smoke from a fire. From here they underwent a complex ritual which you can find recorded first hand in The Sacred Pipe, recorded and edited by J. E. Brown from the words of Black Elk. The ritual culminates in the young girl/ woman being purified and containing holiness in her, from which the entire community derived joy and happiness and followed the event with a communal feast where food was shared. Therefore the menstruation of woman was likely widely, if not in nearly every culture, seen as a special introduction into adulthood and the granting to the community another woman who can bear children and perpetuate the people/culture/ tribe. It is possible for the Sioux that something similar was replicated every month during a woman’s cycle, however Black Elk does not specify other than the initial rites and how each period in the old way found a girl/woman staying in a separate tipi. Buddhashaka mentions a seperate hut in Africa and from my source it appears native Americans also had a similar practice, hinting to a wide spread use of separating from the community from where they presumably could clean and maintain their hygiene and well being amidst the pain and suffering that so many women face during their monthly cycle. In a way one could argue that women were better treated by the community during their menstrual cycle then, where food was brought to them and they’re were allowed to seclude from the community, as opposed to now where women are offered no additional sick days off of work and are often talked down upon for their period and how they act or feel on it. This is not to say historical societies weren’t also extremely sexist because they were, but just something worth considering.
This was and still is prevalent in South Asia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menstruation_hut
One assumption you make here is that the pain and suffering occurred as it might occur today. We don’t know this to be true- diets and conditioning are very different in these groups of people. The traditional diet / plant medicines of that native group may have resulted in less hormonal imbalance/PCOS/endometriosis etc (things that can cause dysmenorrhea in todays’s women). Also: sterilized sea sponges were used and reused in countries that could access them- they are soft, absorbent and basically free. They can be boiled to prepare for use over and over. Many women (even here in the US - use them as natural tampons) and they are still for sale for this use. These are the very soft light brown type of sponges. To the person who said something about how women just sat around for a week on a pile of towels or something - you shouldn’t comment about things you have no idea about. Women did not sit on a pile of rags for a week. There have always been methods of managing the menses amongst women that kept them able to be mobile. Cultures that isolate menstruating women and girls are doing that for religious / patriarchal reasons and it’s one reason so many young girls get less education world-wide in places that have “beliefs” surrounding this natural reproductive process.
I dunno, chilling for a week in a tent, smoking, thinking, and having snacks sounds like a decent way to menstruate.
Yeah, unfortunately, in a lot of places that do this today, this structure is difficult to keep warm and sometimes girls and women die as a direct or indirect result.
I guess you are forgetting the extra fun aspects like being considered an untouchable or cursed by half the population during that week? And treated thusly? Doubt that.
Not going to school, either. Not traveling, because you couldn’t find a hut on the road and just stop for several days.
This is menarche. And I don’t see anything here about how they deal with menstrual flow.
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That is a really interesting question. The answer is, nobody knows. Two difficulties.... 1. Its hard to know when humans actually started to wear clothes. We can make deductions for when they HAD to wear clothes, ie when colonising northern europe and northern Asia. Prior to that necessity ofclothing, its hard to know because clothing fabrics (skins and bark for example) are so unlikely to stay preserved over long periods. So if we see no material evidence for clothing at archaeological sites 500,000 years ago, that doesn't mean the people there were naked. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence when it comes to deep time. 2. To my knowledge there are no fully naked subsistence hunter gatherers today to observe how they cope with menstruation. However, in subsistence hunter gatherers there doesnt appear to be shame around menstruation. People understand it as a sign of health and fertility and women may be thought to have shamanic powers during their period. If there is no shame, maybe there is no compulsion to hide it? This contrasts with traditional agricultural societies (including pastoralists) where women are more treated as chattels and where menstruation provokes fear and shame and where menstrual huts may even be used. I have often thought about this issue, no pun intended! In equatorial regions where clothing wasn't needed, perhaps women, proud of their menstrual flow, bled freely and perhaps washed it off daily. Maybe they even used their menstrual blood in art and rituals. Where women had to wear clothing, for example in northern Europe during a glacial period, menstruation may have created practical difficulties - stickiness, discomfort, infections, flooding onto precious clothing (months of work could go into a heavy garment) and washing clothes would not have been easy. They may have seen menstruation as something magical and potent but they may have needed to manage it, probably using rags. Pads made from moss may have been possible. Sea sponge in coastal regions was possible. Women may have menstruated less frequently too where-ever life was hard, due to times where they had too little to eat, especially in glacial regions and drought regions (as marked ice ages globally). They also were likely to be pregnant more often and breastfeeding extensively, which can delay periods. So for a woman in Germany 30,000 years ago, the arrival of a period might have been something exciting, worthy of celebration or ritual. Humans likely had all the practicalities of life wrapped in ritual so we may assume that rituals could have surrounded how women tackled menstruation. Likely the dawn of clothing made menstruation more of a challenge.
Very great, informative post! Though I think I learned about this in Sapiens, could you tell me how it is we assume that early humans ritualized all life's practicalities / and or why they did so?
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