Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years

What Hacker News says

1. nabilhatMar 2021
   I recently read and can recommend Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years as a deep perspective on the practices and participants in the making of textiles, and their societal and practical reasons. It's fascinating that historically, the practice of hand spinning thread and yarn absolutely dominated available time, and today we know so little about it.
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2. 082349872349872May 2024
   In Elizabeth Barber's Women's Work: the First 20,000 Years (1994) there's a passage where, on the basis of reconstructed PIE roots, she posits what we're fairly sure the proto-indo europeans were getting up to in the evenings around their campfires, and many of the activities are very familiar indeed. (literally so: some of the reconstructed verbs being activities which may lead to family formation)
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3. 082349872349872Jun 2023
   Elizabeth Barber's Women's Work points out that for centuries (millennia even), textile work was both economically valuable and fit the criteria for caregiving: interruptible and capable of being done at home.

   Then the industrial revolution happened, and textiles became cheap...

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4. 082349872349872Dec 2022
   In Barber's Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years she mentions that proto-Indo-European language reconstructors are pretty sure that besides the usual set of animals and weather conditions, there was a PIE word root for "getting high". I'm guessing literacy (~3'400 BCE), not existence of drinking games (~4'000 BCE?), will be the major driver behind "earliest documented".
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5. 082349872349872Jun 2020
   cf Barber, "Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years"

   Part of her thesis is that weaving and textiles have been stereotypical occupations for the distaff gender because they can be done in a single location and are interruptible, making them very suitable for child-rearing.

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6. 082349872349872Jun 2020
   There was an interlude in Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years about reconstruction of early societies by their vocabulary, using reconstructed root words from Uralic:

   "So we can imagine them sitting around the campfire of an evening in larger groups, making and mending tools and wraps while they swapped interesting stories of their adventures, of their friends or comrades and of the women's suitors. Sometimes people would wrangle, admonish, or curse and sometimes get high. But they also knew how to give presents and distribute goods."

   I'm pretty sure female dolphins have suitors, and these friends or comrades are said to get high. Do dolphins give presents?

   https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/10/dolphins-sex...

   Do you even shell, pod-mate?

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