It's fucking wild how many of our modern ideas are based on some random guy making shit up like a hundred years ago.
For example, the common depiction of Neanderthals as brutish, hunched-over idiots? Some French guy in 1908 just decided to recunstruct a skeleton in this manner.
[...] while the Old Man of La Chapelle did suffer from a degenerative joint disease, the deformation caused by this should not have affected Boule's original reconstruction of the individual’s posture.
It appears that Boule's own preconceptions about early humans, and his rejection of the hypothesis that Neanderthals were the ancestors of modern humans, led him to reconstruct a stooped, brutish creature, effectively placing Neanderthals on a side branch of the human evolutionary tree. (Boule even gave his reconstruction an opposable big toe like the great apes, but there was no bone deformity that should or could have led to this interpretation.)
Or the typical picture of Vikings wearing horned helmets. There is no evidence whatsoever to prove Vikings ever wore helmets like that, and the idea came from opera costume designs from the 1800s.
Or worst of all, the idea that in early human hunter-gatherer societies, the men were doing the hunting while the women stayed at home watching the kids and picking berries.
This idea comes from the "Man the hunter" symposium held in 1966 at the university of Chicago. There, a group of anthropologists came up with the idea that hunting large animals was what set us apart from other primates and advanced our evolution as a species.
And they just assumed only men were doing the hunting, therefore, men's behavior advanced our species, and that apparently means men are just inherently better than women.
This supposed "proof" is used to this day for bad science about gender. Let's just glance over the fact that in modern hunter-gatherer societies, the diet is made up of about 80% gathered food, and you can feed a lot more people for a lot longer with gathering than you can with hunting.
On top of that, humans are persistent hunters, meaning we slowly but persistently stalk prey until it collapses from exhaustion. Our hunting style required endurance above raw strength, and female bodies are kind of built for endurance and stamina.
This is why the gender ratio of hunters in prehistoric times was about fifty-fifty.
In 2018 this preconceived notion that only men were hunting was shaken even more when they found a 9000-year-old skeleton of a 17-19-year-old person in Wilamaya Patjxa.
At first, the skeleton was assumed to be a male hunter since they found hunting tools in the grave as well. But DNA analysis showed that the hunter was actually a woman.
This led to the scientists questioning if other hunter burials were actually men or just assumed to be men. So they looked at other prehistoric hunter graves previously discovered in the americas and assumed to be male, and it turns out... about 50% of those hunters were actually female.
The more you learn about history, the more you realize just how much "common knowledge" is just complete bullshit.
Here are also two very good videos I got most of this info from in the first place.
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