fluid sex and gender roles may have been what created humanity
okay so I put together this theory, from a combination of my fascination with  early human development, and my love of zoology. Idk, Iâm not, like, a genius or anything, somebody else has probably written a whole book on it, but as I see it:
human beings rose/survived, because men help women. It is not, despite what some toxic communities say, a womanâs natural role to help a man⌠women have always been the ones doing the important work and the true labor, and part of why humans are so successful is because men evolved to be womenâs helpers.
let me sum up. No itâs too involved, let me explain
alright, see, basically, as brains get bigger, babies:
A: are more difficult/dangerous to birth, and therefore are born at a smaller/more helpless stage of development and
B: have a lot more brain to develop and therefore take much longer to mature mentally, resulting in much longer childhoods.
THIS MEANS: a motherâs level of care in raising a baby becomes more intense, and lasts longer, and, importantly, begins to overlap more and more. You wind up with more than one helpless child at once.
Modern great apes canât have 10 overlapping children, because they reach adulthood in about 7 years and are totally incapable of caring for five or six offspring. They do face the beginning stages of this issue and sometimes have one infant and one other child at the same time - and what we see is, (for example) chimp daughters go through a stage of wanting to hold babies and sort of play âmomâ which is very convenient for a tired mother chimp who could really use the occasional baby sitter.
The boys donât help much. The boys wind up having to go live with all the other fighty young-adult boys in their own group (thatâs chimps - baboon boys have to go off solo to find another group that doesnât know how shitty theyâve been, and other apes have other situations, but baboon and gorilla daughters go through the babysitter stage like chimps).
âAlphaâ males (such a stupid designation) do engage in some fatherhood activities, bit it is pretty minimal compared to what the mothers do.
Humans though, started having babies⌠while they had toddlers, while they had an eight-year old, all while their oldest two kids still required care⌠and at some point they needed a lot more help
Now when you look at when that difficult overlap of children started happening in early humankind, it coincides with a steady decline in sexual dimorphism. (I donât want to talk down to anyone, but in case itâs helpful to anyone, sexual dimorphism is when animals of the same species are very different shapes depending on their sex, look at orangutans for an example of this)
See, most male mammals are sort of built to fight and fuck, and that about ends their usefulness to the species. So even in purely vegetarian gorillas we see enormous canine teeth only in the dude gorillas, and they are about twice the size of the lady gorillas; they are mostly big fighty motherfuckers who spend 90% of their lives just sort of hanging around in case anybody needs any fighting or fucking.
^^^look at the size and shape difference between mom and dad here, and mom doesnât have the same kind of fangs - below, you can see the difference in not only teeth, but the sagittal crest, that bone mohawk that lets strong biting muscles anchor to the skull. Both eat the same exact diet of leaves, the big pointy teeth and strong biting muscles are for fighting
(Unsurprisingly the big males in apes of all kinds often sort of bully their way into getting/going/doing whatever they want, and for some reason male humans observed this and thought it was leadership. Iâll have to do a whole other post on the leadership dynamics of social mammals, because the bull does not lead the cows my friendsâŚ)
ANYway as humans got bigger brains and more intense childhoods, men started getting much less comparatively fighty, and more equally sized/shaped. In short, humans became less sexually dimorphic. Not all the way, obviously, but a LOT, especially compared to a great many mammals.
You can see a discrepancy in sexual dimorphism even between chimpanzees and the bonobo chimps whose males no longer fill the fight function (itâs easy to tell from their physiology that both male and female bonobos arenât fighting as much, and as we all know, everybody in bonobo society is taking on the âfuckâ role). Take a look, bonobo males and females are much more similar to each other than we see in classic chimps, being nearly the same height with much less of a weight difference.
We can see similar things happened in early-human / pre-human species like Australopithecus, a lessening of dimorphic physicality
(pretty sure thatâs supposed to say âshowedâ and not âshouldâ up there lol)
Clearly the men werenât doing as much fighting. What were they spending their time on? Well, as I pointed out, right at the same time they were losing their fighting adaptations, the children were needing a lot more care.
I think early human men werenât fighting as much because they were too busy being dads
So my theory is this: protohuman women started having several children a few years apart, who needed more care and supervision for longer. A proto-human mother might have had a newborn, a two year old, a four year old, a seven year old, an eight year old and a ten year old, and that is just far too many children for a mother in the wild to raise without significant help. Canât get much help from the other women because they ALSO have a bunch of kids to deal with
The helpful daughter behavior probably became even more selected for. Soon, any mother who had a son who was also interested in helping with his younger siblings had an advantage in raising successful successors.
And any boy who grew up helping to raise his younger siblings, or being partially raised by an older brother, those boys were going to be more apt and able to help raise their own children later in life, giving that family a real advantage.
At the same time, if most of the men were helping raise children, it would have left previously âmaleâ activities with less individuals to do them. I believe men being active in child rearing combined with natural human social adaptability to solve this, by raising more daughters to fulfill those âmaleâ roles as needed.
Female gorillas cannot fight off leopards and other gorillas nearly as well as male gorillas can, the males are literally 200 pounds heavier and have serious physical adaptations for deadlier biting. Female humans, on the other hand, can pretty much do anything male humans can do, partially due to a lessening of sexual dimorphism.
(Similar forces are at play with meerkats - everybody helps with the kids, everybody fights in territory raids, and as you can see in this picture of two meerkats mating, there is very little difference in physical size or shape)
Basically, I believe that men stepping up to help women is the very thing that enabled us to become human, and that women being perfectly capable of doing whatever men can do is the human trait that allowed that to work so well.
if men couldnât fill nurturing parenting and familial roles as needed⌠and if women couldnât be anything a man can be⌠ I donât think humans would have become humans.
Bigger brained children with longer periods of helplessness would have died off and we never would have developed increased intelligence and evermore cooperative and complex social dynamics.
So for a man to be a good father/son/brother/partner/community member⌠for a man to help do all of the things that women do daily, I think is one of the most truly human things a man can do. And for a woman to decide to do anything a man would do, is again, the epitome of being human. Our ability to easily fill roles other more rigidly gendered primates would struggle to fill is a quintessential aspect of our humanity.
Weâve only come away from that model in the last few thousand years after more than 3 million years of sticking with it,. Men accepting their role as womenâs helpers and child care providers is still the best way to bring the species back in order, imo.
THATâs âjust human natureâ. THATâs âjust biologyâ and thatâs the theory that sort of presented itself to me in the course of my personal studies.
Also, i talk a lot about a sex and gender binary here, because the interplay between the two ends of the spectrum is the heart of the topic, but obviously even in the animal world there are plenty of individuals that are either in between or outside this binary, just look at the lion/esses of Botswana â born with female sex characteristics like a womb and vulva, but developing secondary male sex characteristics like a full mane, and fulfilling male roles like territory marking and fighting off intruding males from outside the group.
I just believe that (for a mammal, for some fish changing sex and gender roles is just a normal part of the life cycle, but as a mammal) humans are especially adaptive in this area which is, i think, the very thing that allowed us to become human in the first place, by bringing males in from traditional male roles to nurture and raise children, and then raising some of those daughters to go out and take up now vacant roles as needed
anyway, thatâs my theory
