Thing is, statements like the one in the post are just as ignorant as the claimed "enemy".

You know what else takes 28 days? A moon cycle. We have absolutely no context, what this means. A period tracker bone is a perfectly valid hypothesis, but without any proof or context nothing more than this. It could have been used for moon phases, sheep counting, trade, or simply for testing stone knives.

This specific instance probably.

But the point is soo much of history ignores the female perspective (or the non-european perspective). Sometimes intentionally like all the female scientists that contribute to foundational studies and don't get their name on the published paper.

And this is really damaging; I have a family member that legitimately believes that european-descent men are the smartest throughout history (when I brought up the Islamic Golden Age as a counter example he accused it of being propaganda).

American schools are so bad at teaching diverse history. So many still struggle with the basic truths about Columbus and the Natives.

Agreed, when speaking of the distant past, I always assume that by "man" they mean "mankind" aka human.... Not males.

In the grand scheme, I don't think it matters whether the thing was done by a male or female, the fact that it happened is the interesting thing about it.

I'm 100% positive that both men (males) and women contributed to these things, and it is impossible to know how much influence each sex had on any given thing, so I'm not sure why the sex of the ancient person who did it, matters.

That's the correct interpretation of that use of the word, and the quote in the post is meaning to use it in that way before pretending it's a gotcha.

The term man (from Proto-Germanic *mann- "person") and words derived from it can designate any or even all of the human race regardless of their sex or age. In traditional usage, man (without an article) itself refers to the species or to humanity (mankind) as a whole.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_(word)

Same here. My native langauge is not gendered and I rarely associate “man” in academic spaces with “gender” category. I usually need more info to tilt to gender in discussions.

I'm pretty sure that was the intent behind the original wording. The interpretation of this being the remnant of a female human makes sense to me, but as this is an anecdotal account of Sandi Toksvig's time in university, we really have no idea if this is a good example of the lack of a female perspective in anthropology or just a convenient strawman to make a point.

In any case, cool meme.

This and "hey guys"

I don't know about English, but in French in the 19th century men did enforce the use of homme (men) instead of humain (human) in the déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen, and in the language, because they did want to segregate women. It was a purposeful and deliberate decision.

I am convinced it's exactly the same in English.