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.
The lengths Americans will go to in order not to use the metric system is insane.
I am interested in learning about this metric time.
Oh?
"450 mothers ago" is roughly 363,500 megaseconds ago.
To be fair, measuring that in moms seems more intuitive.
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."
They were discussing converting the AU to 1 'your mom' as a better frame of reference, but France wouldn't sign on
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.
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.
It was the nobility that was marrying off barely pubescent kids.
Same as it ever was.
Could we say (for no other reason than I'm stoned and it sounds good) the rough average mother-age is 18-ish? Then there would be roughly ~110 mothers since Jesus cheated and respawned for our sins.
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.
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.
Maybe 23 would be a better average, but even if wvery women in your line gave birth at 12.5 that only doubles the other. And its fair to say not every mother would have been a first child. Also many still would have been born later than 25, so it probably evens out pretty well.
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.
25 is too old for most mothers the farther back you go.
https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/average-age-of-conception-throughout-human-history/151423/ nah it's pretty much been the average age of mothers for a very very long time indeed
So from your article, it seems to say the opposite
The female average age of conception is 23.2, AND this includes a recent rise, so it would be even lower than that when considering older times
Also, it's unclear if the average also accounts for the fact that there is are significantly more child being given birth to in the very recent past, which would skew the number way up
Not even that far back, modern medicine is wonderful
Enjoy it while it lasts.
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.
You would have a lot more death during pregnancy / childbirth though.
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.
A wild Danzig approaches
Whoops, I'm suddenly bleeding
I was thinking that it's now 81 mothers ago, but then I got distracted by the fact that there was no year 0AD and now I'm thinking that roughly 80 is good enough.
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.
Village bicycle*
This assumes a single child per set of parents, doesn't it?
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.
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
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.
Yes also this diagram:
Gives you a clear sense of how quickly things are turning.
In a geological sense, all of humanity isn't even a heartbeat.
So that's about 13,000 homo sapiens mothers?
