“We should actively foster a new type of marriage and childbearing culture,” it quotes Pres. Xi as saying. Do you think that getting Chinese women to become homemakers while their husbands remain in the status-seeking world of formal employment will succeed in raising the TFR?
I know very little about China and I'm probably heavily biased. That being said, I think that the homemaker ideal was a one-generation phenomenon in the Western world. My guess is that living one's life constrained within the four walls of a nuclear family is too much against human nature to be viable as an ideal once it has been tested.
Your posts have gotten better since I first found Wood From Eden last year, and this is one of your better ones even lately. I don't have time for a thorough response, but I'll just say quickly that my mother drank a gallon of milk and ran up nine flights of stairs every day up through her ninth month of pregnancy with me. She also had a natural, at-home birth assisted by midwives. So she was definitely able to be a mother in a tribe of foragers. Mrs. Apple Pie, on the other hand, not so much.
I wonder if modern pregnancy difficulties might have something to do with morning sickness, or if morning sickness itself is exacerbated by modern diet or lifestyles. There are all kinds of additives in food, and basically everyone is getting a microdose of jet fuel from all the airplanes, so while that may not have an impact on most people, pregnant mothers are notoriously sensitive to such things.
Thank you! On the theortetical level of life I have been doing nothing except writing blog posts for one and a half year, so I guess I should improve somewhat from practice.
A book called Tiwi Wives by Jane C Goodale claims that the aboriginal women of Melville Island say that a woman knows that she is pregnant when she starts disliking food that she liked before. So obviously they suffer from morning sickness there too.
Mm. That's disappointing. Morning sickness is quite miserable, and it put a serious strain on our marriage last time - Mrs. Apple Pie wasn't able to nurture her investments, and couldn't think clearly enough to articulate or understand that she needed help. Mostly she just argued so frequently, so stridently, that I made a resolution that if Mrs. Apple Pie told me black is white, my response would just be to agree. It's over now, but we may never make it to #7.
I guess one reason we have made it as far as 6 is that Anders tends to forget tough periods. When I was knocked out from early pregnancy last spring, he suggested that maybe we shouldn't have more children. I asked him if he didn't remember that I had been exactly equally ill two years ago. He said that he didn't remember that. Also a way to keep making new children.
Another book you might find interesting is "The Palaeolithic Prescription", co-authored by Majorie Shostak, whose other work you already reference above. It has a chapter on "Woman the Gatherer" which also covers childbirth.
Trust you haven't got too hot carrying around that little heater.
My wife would get bad obstetric cholestasis (pregnancy induced liver failure), which caused very uncomfortable itching (all over) and a high chance of the fetus dying in the last few weeks of pregnancy. Her first was induced at 36 weeks and the subsequent ones at 38 weeks. The kids seem unaffected by their somewhat early births.
The first was not recognised by her midwife and it was an unexpected hind water leak that sent her into hospital where the gynaecologist immediately induced her and took the midwife off for a 'little talk'. It was scary at the time.
Thorough and well-written, as always. I can contribute anecdote regarding primitive childbirth from the earlier literature, though in this case literature so early as to be pre-anthropological, properly speaking. I believe it was "A Thrilling Narrative of the Sufferings of Mrs. Jane Adeline Wilson During Her Captivity Among the Comanche Indians" (which the titular character herself wrote or had ghost-written for her in 1854, a year after her return to civilization). We read it in school, and I recall that she was pregnant at the time of her captivity (the word is a technical term, proper to the 'captivity narrative' genre that I believe began with "A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson" in 1682). In any, there's a scene where the Comanches are attempting to explain to her, largely through improvised sign language, that a pregnant Comanche woman will perform all of the normal tasks of their very active traditional lifestyle right up until she squats by the trail, births a child in that posture, scoops it up, and continues walking. One can only guess at how accurately Mrs. Wilson portrayed this autoethnographical disclosure, or how accurate the Comanches even meant it to be if they did indeed tell her this.
In any case, I suspect the whole culprit behind the apparent misalignment regarding when to have a healthy birth is due to equivocations embedded in the word 'stress'. Chronic stress processes appear to be something one's brain/body does with the excess energy a sedentary lifestyle leaves available, and psychological stress has more to do with one's personal/social adaptations than with absolute quantity of physical labor performed or unsafe events experienced. Thus, a woman walking all day foraging will look 'stressed' to us, but will be experiencing fewer stress processes. Psychological stress and the absence of a truly compelling (on the group level) necessity for physical activity would be sufficient to explain why modern women can't make themselves function as well as their ancestresses.
>>Psychological stress and the absence of a truly compelling (on the group level) necessity for physical activity would be sufficient to explain why modern women can't make themselves function as well as their ancestresses.
It's largely a matter of taste. But I prefer to imagine people under primitive conditions much like us. Since they experience situations that we would find psychologically stressful, I imagine that they feel about the same way. I imagine my own moods a bit like that of a person living under primitive conditions: I'm preoccupied with immediate material issues around me, but not so much about those reputational and work-place relational issues that make many modern people hyper stressed.
No, precisely my point is that because we're not compelled to get that level of physical activity, we have no visceral insight into what stressful situations would feel like when getting that much physical activity (especially not what it would feel like if we were genuinely psychologically healthy). Here I obliquely cite Herman Pontzer's "Burn" again.
I just read halfway through "Burn", and found that Herman Pontzer thinks about the same thing as me about pregnancy. At 51 percent of the book he writes that too much food might make modern pregnancies last too long. Now I'm just waiting for Swedish obstetricians to take up that line of thought too.
Toward the beginning of the article, I was thinking that consistently high levels of nutrition might be one culprit, as lower birth weight seems like it would reduce problems in birth. Another aspect is that these studies seem to be carefully selecting for the unnatural case of first births.
In regard to maternal mortality, I remember seeing a book sometime in the 80s or 90s of anthropological articles. One had a table of the causes of deaths of some certain area of the Yanamamo, over 20 years or so, compiled from their oral histories. Warfare was a big cause, of course, but two causes were *absolutely* absent: women killed by their menfolk, and women dying in birth. The first I could explain by the fact that wives were essentially commodities, and scarce at that, so if one was dissatisfied by one's wife, one (or one's male lineage) could bargain her away to some young man who had no other choice, in return for another woman from his lineage.
I thought about the nutrition question over the years, but eventually came to mostly abandon it. The world is crowded with overweight pregnant women, but that doesn't seem to affect birthweight very much. For example, the average American newborn is smaller than the average Swedish newborn. But the average American woman is heavier than the average Swedish woman.
I'm surprised at the difficulty of finding any data on deaths in childbirth in primitive societies. I know it should be there, but it is buried deep down somewhere. I have heard the information that no Yanomamö women in a study population died in childbirth, but I can't find that data. However, I find it implausible that Yanomamö women would never be killed by men. Napoleon Chagnon gathered a number of anecdotes of how things went wrong when Yanomamö men tried to terrorize their wives: They intended to shoot them with an arrow in a non-vital body part, but weren't competent enough in the situation and shot them in the belly instead, which killed them. Chagnon also reported that he and someone else intervened when a man was seemingly killing his wife by kicking her in the head time after time. Killing women in raids was considered bad form, so the about ten percent of all women who died from violence in his estimates probably mostly died at the hands of their own menfolk.
In regard to first births, I remember from the past that the "typical" length of pregnancy was quoted separately for first pregnancies and later pregnancies, with first pregnancies being longer. So if a study normalizes the data by selecting only first pregnancies, it would automatically select for longer than pre-industrial average pregnancies.
In regard to domestic violence, reading your comment, I suspect that the anomaly is that the authors I read classified "accidentally killed his wife during domestic violence" as an accidental death rather than a domestic violence death. That would make your information and my memory consistent. It does not eliminate the peculiarity, though, that while American men are a lot less violent than Yanamamo men, their rate of deliberate killing of their wives is higher. Which I still think has a largely economic explanation.
>>So if a study normalizes the data by selecting only first pregnancies, it would automatically select for longer than pre-industrial average pregnancies.
Yes. In the study I referred to above, the median first-time mother gave birth at 40 plus 5 weeks and the median multipara gave birth at 40 weeks plus 3. So a difference of two days. Since more mothers are first-time mothers today than in history, that fact alone should prolong the average pregnancy a bit compared to in history. But not enough to explain why week 39 is so great.
In general, I have though a bit about why 39 week labor induction seems to be much more advantageous for primiparas than for multiparas. The best explanation I can find is that in a system that performs many C-sections, multiparas is a heavily selected population. Primiparas are kind of untested cards: No one knows who will give birth successfully and not. Those who do not will in most cases not give birth a second time. They will have a planned c-section instead. That makes the multiparas population skew towards people who tend to give birth successfully. And for that reason, any intervention will have a much smaller effect.
Different anthropologists definiteky had different ideas why Yanomamö men were so violent towards women. Kenneth Good maintained that they were just being impulsive - they just got angry and caused their wives third degree burns or big velts and then their regretted it terribly, he wrote. But in another place he wrote how an old woman gave him detailed instruction to hit his wife on her legs with a piece of firewood when he found her (she had run away under complicated circumstances). Meanwhile, Napoleon Chagnon interpreted the violence as strategic terror to keep the women as sexually faithful as possible.
In many species who live in groups, the females tend to give birth all at the same time. For herbivores, it is believed that this improves survival of the infants because a hungry predator can only eat so much. If the births were spread out over time, they could munch on the vulnerable and pick off mother and offspring one by one. For others, including the mongoose, the problem is that the females will kill the offspring of other females left in the burrow while they are out foraging. If everybody is out foraging at the same time, there is less time for murder. https://www.science.org/content/article/scienceshot-why-mongoose-moms-synchronize-births?cookieSet=1
So a relatively wide range of birth times may be related to an attempt to give birth 'when everybody else is'. In the gazelles, it is definitely hormones which are being used to synchronise the births. I don't know about the mongooses (and of course the humans).
Interesting! What a potential that could have in humans: If it was enough to let people sniff the right hormones, no more post-term birth.
Unfortunately, it seems humans are not like this. The widespread idea that women who live in close proximity synchronize menstrual cycles seems to be a myth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menstrual_synchrony
These may not have anything to do with each other. Nobody has claimed that the gazelles and the mongooses achieve synchronised birthtimes by having synchronised egg-production times. It might contribute to this result, but there really is a different thing that happens when a different hormone (the same one with a larger concentration?) says 'if you are pregnant and near term, give birth now!!
At any rate, the wikipedia article which says that menstrual synchronicity is likely a myth is finding it for out close cousins the Chimpanzees. So maybe it is a matter of hygene? Or perfume/costmetics? Further research is indicated!
Definitely. As long as the riddle of birth is not solved, every stone should be turned. Especially since the induction methods there are do not work in some cases and are dangerous in other cases (especially for women who have had previous C-sections).
Great post! Highly interesting and sounds all very sound. A pleasure to be remembered of the Good's books and the Daniel Everett (the later book on my reading table now, from our library). Also remembered of my wife's induced childbirth at week 37. No fun, but Tom is one year now and fine. - Wishing you and your baby all the very very best!
Wonderful article! Good luck and all the best, sincerely!
From today’s NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/02/world/asia/china-communist-party-xi-women.html?smid=url-share
“We should actively foster a new type of marriage and childbearing culture,” it quotes Pres. Xi as saying. Do you think that getting Chinese women to become homemakers while their husbands remain in the status-seeking world of formal employment will succeed in raising the TFR?
I know very little about China and I'm probably heavily biased. That being said, I think that the homemaker ideal was a one-generation phenomenon in the Western world. My guess is that living one's life constrained within the four walls of a nuclear family is too much against human nature to be viable as an ideal once it has been tested.
Good luck! We'll be rooting for you. I hope everything goes well and you get to hold your little one soon.
Thank you. I'm in the delivery room misusing a TENS device right now.
My goodness. Not long now. You are very lucky to have so many lovely children. Good luck!
Your posts have gotten better since I first found Wood From Eden last year, and this is one of your better ones even lately. I don't have time for a thorough response, but I'll just say quickly that my mother drank a gallon of milk and ran up nine flights of stairs every day up through her ninth month of pregnancy with me. She also had a natural, at-home birth assisted by midwives. So she was definitely able to be a mother in a tribe of foragers. Mrs. Apple Pie, on the other hand, not so much.
I wonder if modern pregnancy difficulties might have something to do with morning sickness, or if morning sickness itself is exacerbated by modern diet or lifestyles. There are all kinds of additives in food, and basically everyone is getting a microdose of jet fuel from all the airplanes, so while that may not have an impact on most people, pregnant mothers are notoriously sensitive to such things.
Thank you! On the theortetical level of life I have been doing nothing except writing blog posts for one and a half year, so I guess I should improve somewhat from practice.
A book called Tiwi Wives by Jane C Goodale claims that the aboriginal women of Melville Island say that a woman knows that she is pregnant when she starts disliking food that she liked before. So obviously they suffer from morning sickness there too.
Mm. That's disappointing. Morning sickness is quite miserable, and it put a serious strain on our marriage last time - Mrs. Apple Pie wasn't able to nurture her investments, and couldn't think clearly enough to articulate or understand that she needed help. Mostly she just argued so frequently, so stridently, that I made a resolution that if Mrs. Apple Pie told me black is white, my response would just be to agree. It's over now, but we may never make it to #7.
I guess one reason we have made it as far as 6 is that Anders tends to forget tough periods. When I was knocked out from early pregnancy last spring, he suggested that maybe we shouldn't have more children. I asked him if he didn't remember that I had been exactly equally ill two years ago. He said that he didn't remember that. Also a way to keep making new children.
Another book you might find interesting is "The Palaeolithic Prescription", co-authored by Majorie Shostak, whose other work you already reference above. It has a chapter on "Woman the Gatherer" which also covers childbirth.
Thank you for the tip! Anthropolical knowledge really is buried in strange, difficult-to-find places.
Trust you haven't got too hot carrying around that little heater.
My wife would get bad obstetric cholestasis (pregnancy induced liver failure), which caused very uncomfortable itching (all over) and a high chance of the fetus dying in the last few weeks of pregnancy. Her first was induced at 36 weeks and the subsequent ones at 38 weeks. The kids seem unaffected by their somewhat early births.
The first was not recognised by her midwife and it was an unexpected hind water leak that sent her into hospital where the gynaecologist immediately induced her and took the midwife off for a 'little talk'. It was scary at the time.
Childbirth is indeed scary. And the variety without what they call medical complications is scary enough. Great that it went well in the end.
Thorough and well-written, as always. I can contribute anecdote regarding primitive childbirth from the earlier literature, though in this case literature so early as to be pre-anthropological, properly speaking. I believe it was "A Thrilling Narrative of the Sufferings of Mrs. Jane Adeline Wilson During Her Captivity Among the Comanche Indians" (which the titular character herself wrote or had ghost-written for her in 1854, a year after her return to civilization). We read it in school, and I recall that she was pregnant at the time of her captivity (the word is a technical term, proper to the 'captivity narrative' genre that I believe began with "A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson" in 1682). In any, there's a scene where the Comanches are attempting to explain to her, largely through improvised sign language, that a pregnant Comanche woman will perform all of the normal tasks of their very active traditional lifestyle right up until she squats by the trail, births a child in that posture, scoops it up, and continues walking. One can only guess at how accurately Mrs. Wilson portrayed this autoethnographical disclosure, or how accurate the Comanches even meant it to be if they did indeed tell her this.
In any case, I suspect the whole culprit behind the apparent misalignment regarding when to have a healthy birth is due to equivocations embedded in the word 'stress'. Chronic stress processes appear to be something one's brain/body does with the excess energy a sedentary lifestyle leaves available, and psychological stress has more to do with one's personal/social adaptations than with absolute quantity of physical labor performed or unsafe events experienced. Thus, a woman walking all day foraging will look 'stressed' to us, but will be experiencing fewer stress processes. Psychological stress and the absence of a truly compelling (on the group level) necessity for physical activity would be sufficient to explain why modern women can't make themselves function as well as their ancestresses.
I will try to get hold of that book.
>>Psychological stress and the absence of a truly compelling (on the group level) necessity for physical activity would be sufficient to explain why modern women can't make themselves function as well as their ancestresses.
It's largely a matter of taste. But I prefer to imagine people under primitive conditions much like us. Since they experience situations that we would find psychologically stressful, I imagine that they feel about the same way. I imagine my own moods a bit like that of a person living under primitive conditions: I'm preoccupied with immediate material issues around me, but not so much about those reputational and work-place relational issues that make many modern people hyper stressed.
No, precisely my point is that because we're not compelled to get that level of physical activity, we have no visceral insight into what stressful situations would feel like when getting that much physical activity (especially not what it would feel like if we were genuinely psychologically healthy). Here I obliquely cite Herman Pontzer's "Burn" again.
I just read halfway through "Burn", and found that Herman Pontzer thinks about the same thing as me about pregnancy. At 51 percent of the book he writes that too much food might make modern pregnancies last too long. Now I'm just waiting for Swedish obstetricians to take up that line of thought too.
Toward the beginning of the article, I was thinking that consistently high levels of nutrition might be one culprit, as lower birth weight seems like it would reduce problems in birth. Another aspect is that these studies seem to be carefully selecting for the unnatural case of first births.
In regard to maternal mortality, I remember seeing a book sometime in the 80s or 90s of anthropological articles. One had a table of the causes of deaths of some certain area of the Yanamamo, over 20 years or so, compiled from their oral histories. Warfare was a big cause, of course, but two causes were *absolutely* absent: women killed by their menfolk, and women dying in birth. The first I could explain by the fact that wives were essentially commodities, and scarce at that, so if one was dissatisfied by one's wife, one (or one's male lineage) could bargain her away to some young man who had no other choice, in return for another woman from his lineage.
I thought about the nutrition question over the years, but eventually came to mostly abandon it. The world is crowded with overweight pregnant women, but that doesn't seem to affect birthweight very much. For example, the average American newborn is smaller than the average Swedish newborn. But the average American woman is heavier than the average Swedish woman.
I'm surprised at the difficulty of finding any data on deaths in childbirth in primitive societies. I know it should be there, but it is buried deep down somewhere. I have heard the information that no Yanomamö women in a study population died in childbirth, but I can't find that data. However, I find it implausible that Yanomamö women would never be killed by men. Napoleon Chagnon gathered a number of anecdotes of how things went wrong when Yanomamö men tried to terrorize their wives: They intended to shoot them with an arrow in a non-vital body part, but weren't competent enough in the situation and shot them in the belly instead, which killed them. Chagnon also reported that he and someone else intervened when a man was seemingly killing his wife by kicking her in the head time after time. Killing women in raids was considered bad form, so the about ten percent of all women who died from violence in his estimates probably mostly died at the hands of their own menfolk.
In regard to first births, I remember from the past that the "typical" length of pregnancy was quoted separately for first pregnancies and later pregnancies, with first pregnancies being longer. So if a study normalizes the data by selecting only first pregnancies, it would automatically select for longer than pre-industrial average pregnancies.
In regard to domestic violence, reading your comment, I suspect that the anomaly is that the authors I read classified "accidentally killed his wife during domestic violence" as an accidental death rather than a domestic violence death. That would make your information and my memory consistent. It does not eliminate the peculiarity, though, that while American men are a lot less violent than Yanamamo men, their rate of deliberate killing of their wives is higher. Which I still think has a largely economic explanation.
>>So if a study normalizes the data by selecting only first pregnancies, it would automatically select for longer than pre-industrial average pregnancies.
Yes. In the study I referred to above, the median first-time mother gave birth at 40 plus 5 weeks and the median multipara gave birth at 40 weeks plus 3. So a difference of two days. Since more mothers are first-time mothers today than in history, that fact alone should prolong the average pregnancy a bit compared to in history. But not enough to explain why week 39 is so great.
In general, I have though a bit about why 39 week labor induction seems to be much more advantageous for primiparas than for multiparas. The best explanation I can find is that in a system that performs many C-sections, multiparas is a heavily selected population. Primiparas are kind of untested cards: No one knows who will give birth successfully and not. Those who do not will in most cases not give birth a second time. They will have a planned c-section instead. That makes the multiparas population skew towards people who tend to give birth successfully. And for that reason, any intervention will have a much smaller effect.
Different anthropologists definiteky had different ideas why Yanomamö men were so violent towards women. Kenneth Good maintained that they were just being impulsive - they just got angry and caused their wives third degree burns or big velts and then their regretted it terribly, he wrote. But in another place he wrote how an old woman gave him detailed instruction to hit his wife on her legs with a piece of firewood when he found her (she had run away under complicated circumstances). Meanwhile, Napoleon Chagnon interpreted the violence as strategic terror to keep the women as sexually faithful as possible.
In many species who live in groups, the females tend to give birth all at the same time. For herbivores, it is believed that this improves survival of the infants because a hungry predator can only eat so much. If the births were spread out over time, they could munch on the vulnerable and pick off mother and offspring one by one. For others, including the mongoose, the problem is that the females will kill the offspring of other females left in the burrow while they are out foraging. If everybody is out foraging at the same time, there is less time for murder. https://www.science.org/content/article/scienceshot-why-mongoose-moms-synchronize-births?cookieSet=1
So a relatively wide range of birth times may be related to an attempt to give birth 'when everybody else is'. In the gazelles, it is definitely hormones which are being used to synchronise the births. I don't know about the mongooses (and of course the humans).
Interesting! What a potential that could have in humans: If it was enough to let people sniff the right hormones, no more post-term birth.
Unfortunately, it seems humans are not like this. The widespread idea that women who live in close proximity synchronize menstrual cycles seems to be a myth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menstrual_synchrony
Anecdotal, but when my middle school took us on a camping trip, we 14 year old girls discovered that almost all of us were on our periods that week.
These may not have anything to do with each other. Nobody has claimed that the gazelles and the mongooses achieve synchronised birthtimes by having synchronised egg-production times. It might contribute to this result, but there really is a different thing that happens when a different hormone (the same one with a larger concentration?) says 'if you are pregnant and near term, give birth now!!
At any rate, the wikipedia article which says that menstrual synchronicity is likely a myth is finding it for out close cousins the Chimpanzees. So maybe it is a matter of hygene? Or perfume/costmetics? Further research is indicated!
>>Further research is indicated!
Definitely. As long as the riddle of birth is not solved, every stone should be turned. Especially since the induction methods there are do not work in some cases and are dangerous in other cases (especially for women who have had previous C-sections).
Great post! Highly interesting and sounds all very sound. A pleasure to be remembered of the Good's books and the Daniel Everett (the later book on my reading table now, from our library). Also remembered of my wife's induced childbirth at week 37. No fun, but Tom is one year now and fine. - Wishing you and your baby all the very very best!
Thank you! I think it was you who alerted me about Kenneth Good's book half a year ago is so.