|
This is a purely educational website. Nothing here is legal advice or creates or implies an attorney-client relationship. If you have a specific legal issue, PLEASE talk to a lawyer who practices where you live—laws vary from place to place, and how they're applied varies from courthouse to courthouse. Your local county bar association can probably refer someone who handles matters like yours.
By using this site, you agree that you are awesome. Use of this site also constitutes acceptance of its Terms of Service and Privacy Policies, which are known to medical science as a cure for insomnia.
It's best to keep all discussions in the comments. But if you really need to reach Nathan privately, go ahead and email him at n.e.burney@gmail.com. He won't mind.
THE ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO LAW and the PEEKING JUSTICE logo are pretty damn cool trademarks and should probably be registered one of these days.
© Nathaniel Burney. All rights reserved, though they really open up once you get to know them.
|
|
Hang on a sec, even if we take the assumptions in the comic as true, how does any of this naturally lead to patriarchy? The listed sole reason to be high priest is because, as “oldest male,” he’s been bonding with the ancestors the longest – but couldn’t this potentially be true of the oldest female? I feel like we’ve missed a step here.
“Why the eldest male?” has been explained here: https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=6039
which in turn refers to this: https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=5286 (band fluidity, just below that green “the bear went over the mountain” singing perfomance panel)
The girls moving out and the boys staying still seems to reflect in modern society, judging by the “mid-30 or mid-40 man still living with his parents” stereotype that’s floating around …
Because since before we were Homo sapiens, females had left their birth families to seek mates, while males stayed. In the tribal context, that meant women left their birth lineage when they married, joining the lineage of their husband. So they wouldn’t have been part of their husbands’ lineage for as long.
That’s one of the reasons I take such a deep dive sometimes, to make sure I’ve laid the basis for statements that might be surprising or counterintuitive. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t!
It’s been bugging me: Where did you find this information? Because the last time I read about that early band-level time period (Cartoon History of the Universe by Larry Gonick), they claimed (although with some disclaimers about the difficulty of knowing about the time period) both sexes got swapped, as marriageable children were the only meaningful gifts bands could give each other for diplomacy/alliances (they didn’t own much!), and sometimes the sons were the only ones of the right age! They also described a whole host of really different ideas about that time period. Sure it’s an older work, but if our ideas about the time have changed that radically in just 20 years, there is no way we’re actually as certain about them as you’re making this out to be.
Nothing has ever made me doubt you more than your refusal to provide ANY citations about those early time periods while providing no disclaimers about the certainty of your statements on matters outside the field you’re trained and practiced in. Just a few pages back you quietly cited an interesting study on virtue in lawmakers vs. influence, so it’s hard for me to believe it’s just a matter of making it more digestible. Even if it was, why won’t you share anything outside the pages with the commentators clearly asking for it? And if you really did a lot of research (which I believe), there is no way you can’t name a single source. So when you keep refusing to, even in the comments, I keep wondering why–are you worried that in hindsight they weren’t so credible? Or that we’d draw different conclusions from their vaguer evidence? Or something else? Either way, I would respect you much more if you admitted that!
I recently started going back to add links for further reading to the pages in this section. Also, in the comments, I’ve often provided sources and further tidbits. It was just the conceit of the comic from the beginning that it was going to be the opposite of an academic exercise. But like I said, I’ve started going back to provide breadcrumbs for those who want more. (One of the nice things is that there’s even more neat research that’s been published in the meantime.)
I love Gonick, but his early-human stuff was very speculative. We have a much better understanding now thanks to significant archaeological work, improvements in anthropology, and new multi-disciplinary advances in fields like genetics and neuroscience.