this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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[–] samus12345@lemm.ee 12 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

25 is too old for most mothers the farther back you go.

[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 hour ago

Not even that far back, modern medicine is wonderful

[–] Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world 20 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Donkter@lemmy.world 14 points 3 hours 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.

[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 52 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

The lengths Americans will go to in order not to use the metric system is insane.

[–] prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works 19 points 6 hours ago (3 children)

I am interested in learning about this metric time.

[–] thespcicifcocean@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago

metric time actually was a thing, and it sucked so nobody used it.

[–] bluewing@lemm.ee 6 points 4 hours ago

The French tried to impose "metric" time way back in the day. Even they learned that was a bad idea and quietly dropped it. The solar system seems to prefer it's base12 time.

I think it maybe helped give rise the the saying: "The French follow no one. And no one follows the French."

[–] Dasus@lemmy.world 10 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

Oh?

"450 mothers ago" is roughly 363,500 megaseconds ago.

To be fair, measuring that in moms seems more intuitive.

[–] prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works 1 points 34 minutes ago (1 children)

I’d like mothers represented metric tbh, I’m in a meeting and not able to do the math rn but if anyone else can oblige …

[–] Dasus@lemmy.world 1 points 26 minutes ago (1 children)

You can probably propose a new SI-base unit of "a mother", but what does it measure?

"Metric" just essentially comes from "metering". People confuse "metric" with "decimal", which is sort of the point of the person I replied to. While metric time technically exists insofar as you just use seconds as the base unit, omit minutes and hours and just do SI-prefixes, the French did also try decimal time, but it was just horrible.

So if "mother" was the base unit and it measured something, in this instance time, the advent of agriculture was roughly four hectomothers ago. Or 0.4 kilomothers, if you will.

[–] prettybunnys@sh.itjust.works 1 points 21 minutes ago* (last edited 20 minutes ago) (1 children)

Mother as a unit of time.

Ty

Edit the mother epoch presumably is the same epoch as all time, just … related to the mothers as above.

Ty

[–] Dasus@lemmy.world 1 points 13 minutes ago

But see we already got the base unit of a second for time. But for generations, perhaps?

One kilomother would've been the early modern human, roughly. Ten kilomothers ago homo sapiens was just coming into being. A hundred kilomothers ago homo erectus would've just been coming into existence. A megamother ago we would've been diverging into great apes.

[–] letsgo@lemm.ee 3 points 4 hours ago

It's also about the speed of light in millifortnights (2.9e8), within a 4% error margin.

[–] Bearlydave@lemmy.world 6 points 6 hours ago

What is the conversion from imperial mother to metric mother? About 1:1.26?

[–] SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 12 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

And if everyone of your ancestors was unique (so no inbreeding) 80 mothers ago there would had to be 2^80^ = more than 1.2 septillion people on the planet

[–] Illecors@lemmy.cafe 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

This assumes a single child per set of parents, doesn't it?

[–] SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 3 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

No I’m talking about the amount of ancestors in the 80th generation back not the total amount of ancestors. It doesn’t matter how many children each set of parents had for that number.

[–] OhNoMoreLemmy@lemmy.ml 5 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

And if your grandmother had wheels she would be a bicycle.

[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 hour ago

Village bicycle*

[–] Sergio@slrpnk.net 82 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

Yeah only 2 generations ago, LGBT people were considered mentally ill. 4 generations ago women were considered unfit to vote. 8 generations ago about half the US though it was OK to own slaves. It takes a while for ideas to die out. That's why US elections turn out the way they do.

[–] flora_explora@beehaw.org 26 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Humanity isn't progressing uniformly forward like this. Lgbtqia+ people were considered normal part of society by various cultures. Also Magnus Hirschfeld was an advocate for lgbtqia+ people a hundred years ago. Slavery has been transformed into modern slavery because the western world has found other, more concealed ways to force people into labor. Ideas may die out, but they will pop into people's head again and again.

[–] araneae@beehaw.org 10 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

And yet discussing progress in this manner can be a confort. All that you said was true... But what the person you replied said was also true. Two generations since fertilizer or two generations since we locked in Malthusian anarchy[please note I do not espouse Malthusianism]. Three generations since the worst war known to man and three generations that did not experience that kind of war. Glass half full, glass half empty. It's correct to question the myth of unstoppable progress thru which you can just kick your feet up and relax. But equally is it important to keep perspective remember that, yeah, eight generations ago chattel slavery was a bonafide institution and four generations women were unfranchised. Things get better and they get worse. We make progress and it is wiped away. We still keep trying.

[–] Shawdow194@fedia.io 17 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

Two steps forward. One step back

[–] thespcicifcocean@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

two steps forward, random.randint(1,4) steps back.

[–] Comment105@lemm.ee 19 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (5 children)

Wonder how long it'll take before we get to step forward again. As far as I'm seeing, we're in for a long ride back. Not just for 4 years.

[–] VoterFrog@lemmy.world 7 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

The American people are pretty fickle. It won't take long for them to become unhappy with the Republican party. Of course once that happens and you and I are celebrating "Yay! We got rid of the fascists!" they'll be going "Hmm... These other guys are pretty uninspiring. Maybe we should try fascism again."

* There's a big asterisk here that this is all predicted on elections continuing unabated. Which is not a given.

[–] meowMix2525@lemm.ee 1 points 3 hours ago

And when the Democrats put up the same fascist policies in continuation of the status quo and refuse to defend those who find themselves targeted by Republicans, you will "hold your nose" to vote for them and cry at anyone who refuses to fall in line and do the same; in fact you will actively work against their efforts to build up power in resistance of both parties just because it won't immediately pay off and you're too brainwashed to believe in any power but the two-party system's power. And then your party will lose anyways and take another step rightward in response. I know you people, we've done this whole song and dance before.

[–] Sergio@slrpnk.net 8 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

This has happened before. Even after Abu Ghraib Bush Jr won re-election. Even after Iran-Contra the Republicans won re-election.

But the fact is that they do not have the answers. They can only take things for themselves, and hope that people give up.

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[–] TheWolfOfSouthEnd@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 8 hours ago

They were institutionalising out of wedlock mothers aswell, at least in the UK and Ireland.

Philomena…very good film.

[–] BudgetBandit@sh.itjust.works 25 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Depending on the religion, yes. Otherwise it‘s 12 years per mother, 14 if you’re late.

That's also assuming you're the first born of the first born of the first born, and so on. And the further back you go, the more individual kids the average mother is likely to have. After all, you had to have like 12 kids just so 3 of them would make it past 9.

So your greatx12 grandmother might've started having kids at 15, but she still might not have had your ancestor till years later.

[–] fibojoly@sh.itjust.works 9 points 13 hours ago

You would have a lot more death during pregnancy / childbirth though.

[–] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 65 points 17 hours ago (5 children)

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.

[–] Acamon@lemmy.world 26 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Fritee@lemmy.world 9 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Huh, that’s interesting. Do we know why the menarche age has receded?

[–] shneancy@lemmy.world 5 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

if you click that second study link it's exactly about that

[–] Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 48 points 16 hours ago (11 children)

In Western Europe at least back to the early medieval period it was common for anyone who wasn’t nobility to have their first child around 22. The younger you are the more likely you’re going to have serious (fatal, back then) complications. It was the nobility that was marrying off barely pubescent kids.

[–] bobs_monkey@lemm.ee 29 points 16 hours ago

It was the nobility that was marrying off barely pubescent kids.

Same as it ever was.

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[–] HonoraryMancunian@lemmy.world 8 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

First births yes, but what about average age? Our ancestors may have been second born, third born, eighth born etc

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[–] TheWolfOfSouthEnd@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 8 hours ago

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?

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[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 21 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] Ulvain@sh.itjust.works 10 points 15 hours ago

Let's push it one step further and frame history since agriculture, 9500 years ago, against the upper limit of a human lifetime now, about 100 years. This would mean recorded times started only less than 100 human lifespans ago. Bleh

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