Half of What You Call "Ancient Wisdom" Was Invented by Women

When we picture the great leaps of early human history, we tend to picture men, the hunter with his spear, the chief and the warrior, the maker of stone blades. It is a vivid image, and it quietly writes women out of a whole set of inventions that may have mattered far more to daily survival than any hunt ever did. The more closely archaeologists look, the more they suspect that a surprising share of the technologies we built civilisation on came from women's hands.

The first farmers

In most hunter-gatherer societies that survived into modern times, the gathering of plants, along with the deep knowledge of which ones to pick, when to pick them, and how to prepare them so they would not poison you, fell largely to women. Many archaeologists think this is exactly the expertise that made farming possible. The leap from collecting wild grain to deliberately planting it is an enormous one, and it required someone who understood seeds and soil and seasons with real intimacy. One widely discussed theory holds that women, as the primary gatherers and preparers of plant food, were the likely inventors of agriculture itself. If that is right, then the single most transformative shift in all of human history, the one that gave us villages and cities and everything that followed, may well have begun with women's accumulated botanical knowledge.

The first brewers

Beer is older than you might think, and far more female than you would guess. The earliest evidence of brewing comes from ancient Mesopotamia, where it was largely women's work, brewed in the home and recorded on clay tablets, and there were beer goddesses long before there were ever beer companies. In ancient Egypt women brewed for temples and households alike, and across much of medieval Europe the brewer of the household was, by simple default, the wife. For thousands of years, if you wanted a drink, you went to a woman. Brewing only became a male-dominated and highly profitable industry once it left the home and moved into the marketplace, at which point the women who had perfected it were gradually edged out of it.

The string revolution

Here is the one that quietly rearranges your whole sense of the past. The archaeologist Elizabeth Wayland Barber has argued that the invention of string, the twisting of plant fibre into cord some twenty to thirty thousand years ago, was a turning point as significant in its way as the harnessing of steam, and she calls it the String Revolution. Consider for a moment everything string makes possible: nets and snares and fishing lines, carrying bags and slings, woven cloth, the means to bind, haul, trap and tie almost anything you please. It multiplied, many times over, what human beings were able to do. And the spinning of fibre and the making of cloth were, across cultures and across millennia, overwhelmingly women's work. Barber points out that textiles are older than pottery, and very possibly older than agriculture itself, an entire foundational technology that history barely credits, largely because women were the ones who made it.

Why we forgot

The forgetting is not always deliberate. Sometimes it is built into what survives in the ground, and into what we then choose to study. A spear point can last for tens of thousands of years buried in the earth, while cloth, baskets, brewing vessels and wooden tools rot away to nothing. We even named entire eras of prehistory, the Stone Age and the Bronze Age, after the hard and durable materials bound up with men's tools and weapons, while the perishable revolutions in fibre and food left far fewer traces for any archaeologist to find. So the record tilts toward the things men made, and our story of the past tilts faithfully along with it.

Reading history with both eyes

None of this is about swapping one lopsided story for another, or pretending men invented nothing of importance. It is about noticing that the history we inherited was quietly missing half of its cast. The farm, the loom, the brewing crock and the woven net carried civilisation forward just as surely as any blade ever did. So the next time you hear the phrase ancient wisdom, let it call to mind the women as well as the men, the hands in the soil and at the spindle and over the fermenting pot. A great deal of that wisdom was theirs, and it is long past time we said so out loud.