In movies and on dating apps, men tend to look for women younger than them. But what about the distant past? A study recently published in the journal Science Advances sheds a light on the history of gender relations from the end of the Paleolithic to the present day. According to this work – the first of its kind – the age of couples at the time of conception of a child has averaged 26.9 years over the past 250,000 years. However, the fathers seem systematically older than their companions. The gap is even significant: 30.7 years for men against 23.2 years for women.
How did the researchers manage to obtain such precise data over such a long period of time? Using recent knowledge of DNA mutations passed on to children by their parents. These modifications, which depend a lot on the age of dads and moms, accumulate with each generation, which has enabled scientists to establish a model and apply it to our ancestors.
Thus, the age difference within couples would have remained favorable to men over the last 250 millennia. It would have increased steadily, reaching a peak about ten thousand years ago (at that time in history, the age difference reached eight and a half years on average within couples), before experiencing a trough, followed by a rise over the recent period. Why did the balance between (older) men and (younger) women break down around the beginning of the Neolithic? This undoubtedly has a link with the sedentary lifestyle and the beginnings of agriculture, even if we cannot yet explain it clearly.
A 250,000 year old patriarchy?
However, the interest of the study is elsewhere since it suggests the existence of a form of patriarchy very early in the history of humanity. “Many historians, anthropologists and sociologists have noted that women married at a younger age than men. And that this gap was one of the instruments of male domination, since in this context, with a man older than her, a woman can be maintained in a relationship of subordination and infantilization”, reacts Anne Augereau, French prehistorian specialist in the Neolithic. , and gender relations over this period.
“I’m not saying that in Neanderthals or in Upper Palaeolithic humans, women were infantilized or dominated. For the moment, we don’t know much about it”, continues the scientist. However, the study of the end of the prehistory made it possible to highlight a rather strict form of patriarchal relation between the sexes with dominant men who go to fight, hunt, and are better nourished than the women. “There is a form of male dominance from the Neolithic that is very likely. Before, it was much more difficult to highlight it even if we see among the last Mesolithic hunter-gatherers that a certain number of clues (on food, division of labor or origins) plead in favor a somewhat unbalanced situation between men and women”, explains Anne Augereau. The debate over the age of couples is far from over.