First homosexual caveman found

[White Eagle]

Sorry, Actually it is the Montrose Mining Company!!!!

 

[Kulindahr]

Since at least the sexual revolution in the 60s we have become desensitized to the breakdown of gender role delineation. Five-thousand years ago it would have been a big deal. At that, it would be as much a big deal to find a man buried in a dress 100 years ago.

In the Bronze Age, however, gender roles were defined for survival, the rhyme and reason for almost every aspect and rule of human life at the time. This man was given a female burial, something not taken lightly by archaeologists and anthropologists. He might have fulfilled the role of a woman, by gender identity not in tandem with that of his birth, and accepted as such by his society, proving that all three concepts are not modern.

That's why this find is very significant.

Best post in the thread.

Dismissing any hypothesis out of hand, as some here are doing, is silly -- we don't know enough.

Need input.

 

[kallipolis]

^The guessing game is significant when we recognise that each of us is able to contribute our own understandings. Fact will just have to remain in the distant mist of the past as testimony to the puzzle.

 

[kallipolis]

I should imagine that just as there are heterosexual men who remain at home to feed their children, clean the house and carry out regular household chores, while their wife goes out to work there is a reasonable suspicion that earlier civilisations might well have created the precedent for such an unoriginal concept.

Should we then assume that the burial of a male, some 5000 years ago with kitchenware is evidence of the sexual orientation of that male?

Are all homosexual males sufficiently domesticated to be easily identified for their prowess in the kitchen?

Should we assume that a male is homosexual as a result of his clearly demonstrated aptitude, and zeal for cooking, and cleaning?

 

[kallipolis]

^The matter is also one of how contemporary society defines the make up, so to speak of the homosexual man.

Clearly the so called experts who have made this pronouncement are deducing that because kitchen utensils were buried alongside a male then that male was transparently homosexual.

Stereotyping the homosexual man is as real among gay men, as it is among those who determine that the homosexual men must fit the theatrical gay stereotype to be authentically homosexual.

The heterosexual male with an aptitude for cooking, cleaning and other domestic duties might well pose a dilemma for these so called experts in anthropological detective work.

Greek society during the Hellenic period - say 2500 years ago - would never have associated a man's aptitude in the kitchen with his sexual orientation. Nor would we do so, today.

 

[Stardreamer]

I should imagine that just as there are heterosexual men who remain at home to feed their children, clean the house and carry out regular household chores, while their wife goes out to work there is a reasonable suspicion that earlier civilisations might well have created the precedent for such an unoriginal concept.

Should we then assume that the burial of a male, some 5000 years ago with kitchenware is evidence of the sexual orientation of that male?

Are all homosexual males sufficiently domesticated to be easily identified for their prowess in the kitchen?

Should we assume that a male is homosexual as a result of his clearly demonstrated aptitude, and zeal for cooking, and cleaning?

However the article relates it not just what was in the grave, it was everything about how he was buried including the orientation of the body was in a manner that was only used for women. I gathered from the article that men would be buried facing one direction of the compass and women another. And they note that this society was very serious about their burial rituals so this was not something casually done.

 

[T-Rexx]

^ Well, until the sex of the person is better determined, I'm holding judgment. Most of the other articles on this I've seen have been skeptical due to inconclusive details.

It doesn't surprise me that any society, regardless of how ancient, would take burials seriously. Our mortality has driven us as a species for most of history, so not surprising it goes back further into prehistory. I'm curious if anyone knows of any societies that didn't take this seriously.

Judaism is ancient, and it did not accept homosexuality as normal. Zoroastrianism is possibly older, and neither did it. Taoism, which is even older than both, frowned upon it.

I think it is either wishful thinking or pure foolishness to make broad claims about ancient humanity en masse.

I'd not confuse lack of idle time as "enlightened". If it is more important to feed one's self/family/tribe than to persecute people who prefer sodomy, that has to do with priorities, not philosophical conclusions based on reason.

Judaism did not reject homosexuality until historical times. Who knows about your other examples? There is no ancient language that even has a word for homosexuality because they did not understand the concept. They could not have buried a man as a woman because he was gay if they if they had no conception of what gay was. They could not have rejected homosexuality since they didn't know it existed.

And enlightenment is not leisure time. It is accepting people for who they are. The ancients appear to have been much better at this than us.

 

[Kulindahr]

Judaism did not reject homosexuality until historical times. Who knows about your other examples? There is no ancient language that even has a word for homosexuality because they did not understand the concept. They could not have buried a man as a woman because he was gay if they if they had no conception of what gay was. They could not have rejected homosexuality since they didn't know it existed.

And enlightenment is not leisure time. It is accepting people for who they are. The ancients appear to have been much better at this than us.

A thought which first occurred to me when I was looking at Polynesian history fits here: when you have fewer people, you're more accepting of the ones you have. I remember seeing a theme that everyone was useful to the tribe, the only question was how. So in many cases men who preferred other men were given places of honor, being considered gifts to the tribe -- fathers to all, since they would not be fathers themselves, or warriors who didn't have to worry about leaving wife and children behind.

Why some ancients reacted that way when others were condemning, I don't know and won't venture to guess.

 

[Kulindahr]

Based on what? I'm guessing that recorded Judaism has some basis to the past, especially since the religion has a rather worrisome concern for 'cleanliness'.

I blame that on Ezra and Nehemiah, who were anal regulation-worshippers of the first order. When I look at the Psalms from the Exile, they're starting to figure out that faithfulness is about mercy and all, not piddly little rules, but then those two legal geeks come along and stuff legalism down the throats of the Returned as a precondition for even being allowed to think of themselves as human. They paint the us/them -ness of it all in such stark terms it makes me heave when I read the two accounts.

I'm pretty sure they had an idea of what putting a dick in a man's asshole was. That such an act wasn't procreation. This semantic argument really is trifling.

I think his argument is conceptual, not semantic. To them, the act was that of a heterosexual behaving like some messed-up-in-the-hormones barnyard animal. Why they didn't see it the way other ancients did (see prior) I'm clueless, and for that matter, why God didn't take the opportunity to change it, I don't either, unless He saw that all the people would do would be to flip over into using it for worship, which is a good argument. Though I don't know why stoning was prescribed; I'd think "Take thou them, and scourge them with six strikes (but hold the seventh, for on the seventh day God rested), and bid them father children" would have sufficed.

 

[Kulindahr]

Well, the exile brought them into "Babylon", until Zoroastrian Persia came to the rescue (second time I brought them up, but it was for this purpose). In my Judaism course, I recall the claim that it was the post-exile Judaism that pretty much solidified the Jewish identity.

Yes, and I look at post-exilic Judaism and mostly think, "You were warned". It's a good position, and Ezra and Nehemiah are definitely the turning point: in an intertestamental studies course, we traced EVERY force of rigidity, arrogance, superiority, "purity", legalism -- i.e. every malign influence in Judaism by the time of Christ -- from the goings-on of those two books.

Note of interest: that course was co-taught by a Rabbi and a Jesuit, both of whom had begun devoted to the Ezra/Nehemiah sort of religion, and came to despise them, considering them as part of the canon as God's way of giving an example to avoid.

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure how the argument stands regarding the conceptual level. It seems to be cognitive dissonance to say that they are too stupid to understand the concept of male-male penetration while also building greater societies and cultural/technological advances, not to mention the rather complex thinking put into such broad abstractions like the various religions.

Well, it's not the penetration, it's the failure to conceive that it might not be some sort of horrid aberration.

Why did the Polynesians get it? cultural isolation?

I laughed at your use of "heterosexual" when you were speaking from their perspective.

Yes. But they wouldn't have had the concept only because what it describes was the only concept they had. Something which has nothing from which it needs to be differentiated need not be defined (culturally).

 

[bike10]

This will piss off the GOP and Religious Right. Wonder if he cut or uncut, top or bottom?