As for gender, well, I’d better not go into that topic. I’ll just point out that people have been writing about these matters since the dawn of history, and it’s very naive (though sadly common nowadays) to believe that only our modern age has managed to achieve accurate insight and non-evil attitudes about them.
Dawn of history? Now I’m imagining uncovering writing on the wall of caves: “Why women make better hunters” and expressing indignation at under-representation of females in cave paintings of battles.
No I’m not. The counterfactual referred to writing, writing which incidentally happened to be a commentary on the quality of the historical record keeping. (It is not my position that the counterfactual is particularly likely—if anything the reverse.)
Dawn of history? Now I’m imagining uncovering writing on the wall of caves: “Why women make better hunters” and expressing indignation at under-representation of females in cave paintings of battles.
What Constant said. I meant “history” in the narrow technical sense of the word, i.e. the period since the invention of writing.
You’re mixing up history with prehistory.
No I’m not. The counterfactual referred to writing, writing which incidentally happened to be a commentary on the quality of the historical record keeping. (It is not my position that the counterfactual is particularly likely—if anything the reverse.)