They are both metaphors for underlying insecurities. And unless you're a man, you will never know how a man feels about it any more than I'll know how a woman feels about it.

About the knuckle walking picture... probably didn't happen that way! They think knuckle walking is a more recent development in other apes.

http://www.newscientist.com/article...-the-trees.html

Well, there are these operations...

<sarcasm>Ah, but you're forgetting the cardinal rule of this game; by invoking my privileged position as the oppressed outsider, I cannot be disagreed with!</sarcasm>

...............

Dang it!!!!

No doubt, the then anthropologists were highly influenced by male-stream vision of their time. But even more than this, were they actually paid to promote Darwin’s theory of women inferiority? (which is more of rhetorical question, I presume:/).
Hopefully, as these superior females graduate they’ll restore historical truth . For now there is unfortunately only one well-known female, who conducts such researches on a large scale, anthropologist Olga Soffer. But alas, she who fights alone cannot do much. Even the book The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory she issued in co-authorship with Adovasio and Page is taken with a chuckle, at best. Nancy, I believe there is nothing to do with obesity, it is just a hyperbolized expression of fertility, which was highly praised at that era of high mortality rate. It is rather the totem to which females prayed asking for fertility or successful pregnancy.
Moreover, you well see by yourself how toned, sort of well-knit your body becomes with paleo eating.

You know, as to that picture there is actually the other item which caught my attention: the hat or hairdo of that portly lady, just take a look how finely these braids are woven, in all my sincerity I can hardly weave even one of such multiple braids. It reminded me of marine cordage at my dad’s vessel. With all the evidence from Soffer, Adovasio and Lee-Thorp, prehistoric women appear to have really taken an active part in feeding their families and hunting activities, net hunting in particular, with the group of males and females throwing net over prey and clubbing it to death. So females were in great macho shape

Yet they are extremely accurate portrayals of an obese female. How could they have gotten the proportions and distribution correct if they'd never seen one?

First I would like to answer the question simply by saying, most likely there are few examples of cave women probably because there are more men anthropologists than women. I think if someone is going to create a model of how a primitive person looks, they do this because they are curious and want to know how that relates to them. If it were a woman creating this model, she would tend to create the model of a woman, because she can relate to that better than creating a model of a man, and vise versa. If you wish to see more models of female cave people, either A, create more demand for it, or B, become an anthropologist.

Second, please people; stop basing your self-pride on the gender you are. You were born this way and had little to do with it. We should as a society put little emphasis on weather women are superior at one thing, or if men are. Even if you prove that one is better at something than the other in general, you could always be the exception to the rule, so it really still proves nothing. Base your pride on your own accomplishments and your own ability to grow and to better yourself, and you will have a much stronger foundation.

Finally, some people said there were examples of fat cave people. Well, I am sure there were, even eating Paleo. Remember, our bodies were designed to store food so that we could survive the winters. Sit around and eat a ton of fruit and see if you don’t gain weight. The Paleo way of eating is pretty simply, eat what is natural and your cravings get under control so that you now have the ability not to over eat in the first place.

Just my 2 cents

Very well said, MeatGood. Now, if we can only get the women to go along with it, it'll be okay....

(Couldn't help myself)

Seriously, do you know what the "obese" carvings remind me of? Queen bees. I could see particularly fertile women being worshipped and lavished upon with the most tastiest food, and probably elevated to queenly (or kingly) status. I also think that the shackles of post agricultural, post christian women-are-inferior mentalities simply didn't exist in paleo times -- particularly in times when existence may have been a struggle. It is a subsistence and economic absurdity to have second-class citizens of any sort. In times of need, people use their talents to the fullest extent, and all talents are demanded.

MeatGood, together we have 4 cents.

There was a book a year ago called The Diana Files by Fiona Capstick which includes some discussion about paleo women and hunting, I think, but I never did see the book so I am not sure how much material is in there.

EDIT - oops sorry wrong book, the Diana Files looks like a vanity publishing thing,. I was misremembering The Invisible Sex, and now that I check I see that's by Olga Soffer.

Typical male response: a sanctimonius, patronizing lecture telling others how to think. (Sometimes this is too easy. )

Ha!

Interesting idea! I can get behind the notion, just wonder if it is anything other than fantasy! I still have such a hard time accepting that there could have been that sort of obesity in those times.

I think you could annunciate better if you took your tongue out of your cheek.

Hey meatGood, come to think of it, gender inequities might be a status quo worth maintaining afterall!

In regards to the obese carving being accurate, I was thinking it might have had to do just with the particular diet/environment of the particular people who carved it and has nothing to do with our idea of "the paleodiet". I say this because the other night I was watching a show about some aboriginal h-g-like tribes from Papus New Guinea but they all had these bloated fat tummies; I was a little dismayed. Well I went online and looked them up, and apparently their staple food is starch that they extract from a certain tree that is native to their area. It's not hard to become obese on a diet that is over 50% starch! I'm guessing something similar could happen to a tribe who mainly subsisted on starchy tubers or somesuch. Maybe these fertility goddess women were even preferentially fed the starchy foods specifically so that they would become fatter.