The lengths Americans will go to in order not to use the metric system is insane.
What is the conversion from imperial mother to metric mother? About 1:1.26?
That’s not a well-founded assumption. The average age of first birth was only 21 as recently as 1970. Go back a few hundred years and it’s way younger than that. Many women throughout history became mothers as soon as they were able (right after the onset of puberty). Many cultures had rites of passage into adulthood for boys and girls of that age. There was no such thing as adolescence.
As the other commentator says, medieval Europe was mostly early twenties. Studies of stone age remains suggest a first birth age average of 19.5 and contemporary hunter gather societies have a comparable average. Sexual activity generally begins earlier, during adolescence, but the most “reproductively successful” age for beginning childbearing has been shown to be around 18-19. Also, this age at first birth isnt “Average age of a child’s mother” as many women would have multiple kids over their life, so the average sibling would have a much older mother at birth than the firstborn.
Its important to remember that puberty has shifted massively since industrialisation, "menarche age has receded from 16.5 years in 1880 to the current 12.5 years in western societies". So the post-puberty fecundity peak, that use to happen 17-19, when women are fully grown enough to minimise birth complications, now happens at a disressingly young 13-15. Not only is this a big social yuck for most western societies, but it’s reproductively unideal, because of the complications linked to childbirth at that age.
Huh, that’s interesting. Do we know why the menarche age has receded?
if you click that second study link it’s exactly about that
First births yes, but what about average age? Our ancestors may have been second born, third born, eighth born etc
High maternal mortality meant that having more than about 7 children per woman was rare. Total fertility rate was about 4.5 to 7 in the pre modern era. Population growth was low due to infant and early childhood mortality though.
If you start having children at age 12, you can have a child every year and reach 7 children by age 20. Without contraceptives, people weren’t having such large multi-year gaps between children like we do now.
Don’t they say teenagers/adolescence were invented in the 50s as that was the first time people were able to afford to allow their kids to carry on education?
This is framed like 80 generations is a small number, but that’s huge. Culture and civilization moves so quickly that even 3 generations ago life is barely recognisable. I can’t even imagine what life was like 40 generations ago.
Many people don’t realize that the amount of change our culture goes through in a lifetime is unfathomable historically. Before the 1800s it took a good decade for news to truly travel around to everyone in a region, and that was considered timely if it happened at all. Farming, hunting, homemaking, war, stayed exactly the same for dozens of years at a time and changes were usually made abruptly due to conflict before stagnating again.
But after enough stagnation, at least we’ll get the great scattering.
I knew my great-grandmother, few people do. My great-great-grandmother is an ancient picture on the wall of my dead grandmother’s house, from a time when photography was new, a scant few years past daguerreotypes.
4 mothers back is all I can summon, only remember 3.
4 mothers back is all I can summon,
What’s the spell?
“I’m feeling hungry and mildly pregnant”
I knew two of my great grandmothers (yay for really young parents!). I know I met two others but didn’t really know them.
I was told that I met my great great grandmother once when I was a toddler but I don’t remember it. She died at age 99.
And if everyone of your ancestors was unique (so no inbreeding) 80 mothers ago there would had to be 280 = more than 1.2 septillion people on the planet
And if your grandmother had wheels she would be a bicycle.
A wild Danzig approaches
Do we have a community for genealogy?
Some of my ancestors came to the United States on the Mayflower and that was only like 8 or 9 mothers ago.
So that’s about 13,000 homo sapiens mothers?
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