this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 minutes ago

Some of my ancestors came to the United States on the Mayflower and that was only like 8 or 9 mothers ago.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago

Do we have a community for genealogy?

[–] [email protected] 31 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (2 children)

25 is too old for most mothers the farther back you go.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

So from your article, it seems to say the opposite

The female average age of conception is 23.2, AND this includes a recent rise, so it would be even lower than that when considering older times

Also, it's unclear if the average also accounts for the fact that there is are significantly more child being given birth to in the very recent past, which would skew the number way up

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 hours ago

Every time I see people argue this I always wanna ask, are you considering that people don't stop having kids after 1 or 2? I'd wager that most women had the majority of their kids around that 23ish mark when you include that lady who had 10 kids from 15 to 35

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

I don't think 23 is wildly off from 25, and honestly this is just the first one I found that mentions it, I've seen various different sources for different reasons in the past. But the average is based on genetic mutations, and obviously in any given human it's irrelevant how large a generation is as to how much genetic mutation is contributed by the generation. Like even if there are 8 billion people today, that doesn't imply that you somehow got more generic inheritance from your parents than they did from theirs back when there were 6 billion people or whatever. Judging average to be the average per generation (a reasonable inference given the methodology) the last few years won't make much of a difference in a timescale of 250k years

I can't find the article I vaguely remember from a while ago, here's another random one that has mothers in the bronze age ranging from 16-40ish https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314262257_Bronze_Age_Beginnings_The_Conceptualization_of_Motherhood_in_Prehistoric_Europe although you can't really infer much about averages from that.

Anyway yeah there have been periods in time when average age of mothers was younger, but generally if you look back on a long timescale it's been older than people seem to assume. Seems to be quite common to have the notion that women all had children at 16 or whatever back in the day but not much to really bear that out that I can find.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Not even that far back, modern medicine is wonderful

[–] [email protected] 1 points 26 minutes ago

Enjoy it while it lasts.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago

When numbers divide

[–] [email protected] 37 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

This is framed like 80 generations is a small number, but that's huge. Culture and civilization moves so quickly that even 3 generations ago life is barely recognisable. I can't even imagine what life was like 40 generations ago.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Many people don't realize that the amount of change our culture goes through in a lifetime is unfathomable historically. Before the 1800s it took a good decade for news to truly travel around to everyone in a region, and that was considered timely if it happened at all. Farming, hunting, homemaking, war, stayed exactly the same for dozens of years at a time and changes were usually made abruptly due to conflict before stagnating again.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

But after enough stagnation, at least we’ll get the great scattering.

[–] [email protected] 75 points 14 hours ago (3 children)

The lengths Americans will go to in order not to use the metric system is insane.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

They were discussing converting the AU to 1 'your mom' as a better frame of reference, but France wouldn't sign on

[–] [email protected] 23 points 12 hours ago (3 children)

I am interested in learning about this metric time.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

metric time actually was a thing, and it sucked so nobody used it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

It didn't suck exactly, time is just so much more prevalent than other units that switching to a new system was even more contentious. Current time is just as arbitrary (although maximizing for maximum number of prime factors is pretty nice, even if it doesn't mesh nicely with other metric units)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 46 minutes ago

Metric really missed out by not being dozenal. SMH

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

Oh?

"450 mothers ago" is roughly 363,500 megaseconds ago.

To be fair, measuring that in moms seems more intuitive.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

From your link, I rabbitholed to there and found gold

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I’d like mothers represented metric tbh, I’m in a meeting and not able to do the math rn but if anyone else can oblige …

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

You can probably propose a new SI-base unit of "a mother", but what does it measure?

"Metric" just essentially comes from "metering". People confuse "metric" with "decimal", which is sort of the point of the person I replied to. While metric time technically exists insofar as you just use seconds as the base unit, omit minutes and hours and just do SI-prefixes, the French did also try decimal time, but it was just horrible.

So if "mother" was the base unit and it measured something, in this instance time, the advent of agriculture was roughly four hectomothers ago. Or 0.4 kilomothers, if you will.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

Mother as a unit of time.

Ty

Edit the mother epoch presumably is the same epoch as all time, just … related to the mothers as above.

Ty

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago

But see we already got the base unit of a second for time. But for generations, perhaps?

One kilomother would've been the early modern human, roughly. Ten kilomothers ago homo sapiens was just coming into being. A hundred kilomothers ago homo erectus would've just been coming into existence. A megamother ago we would've been diverging into great apes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 hours ago

It's also about the speed of light in millifortnights (2.9e8), within a 4% error margin.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 hours ago

The French tried to impose "metric" time way back in the day. Even they learned that was a bad idea and quietly dropped it. The solar system seems to prefer it's base12 time.

I think it maybe helped give rise the the saying: "The French follow no one. And no one follows the French."

[–] [email protected] 7 points 12 hours ago

What is the conversion from imperial mother to metric mother? About 1:1.26?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 14 hours ago (3 children)

And if everyone of your ancestors was unique (so no inbreeding) 80 mothers ago there would had to be 2^80^ = more than 1.2 septillion people on the planet

[–] [email protected] 9 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

And if your grandmother had wheels she would be a bicycle.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

Village bicycle*

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[–] [email protected] 96 points 21 hours ago (13 children)

Yeah only 2 generations ago, LGBT people were considered mentally ill. 4 generations ago women were considered unfit to vote. 8 generations ago about half the US though it was OK to own slaves. It takes a while for ideas to die out. That's why US elections turn out the way they do.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Humanity isn't progressing uniformly forward like this. Lgbtqia+ people were considered normal part of society by various cultures. Also Magnus Hirschfeld was an advocate for lgbtqia+ people a hundred years ago. Slavery has been transformed into modern slavery because the western world has found other, more concealed ways to force people into labor. Ideas may die out, but they will pop into people's head again and again.

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 23 hours ago (8 children)

That’s not a well-founded assumption. The average age of first birth was only 21 as recently as 1970. Go back a few hundred years and it’s way younger than that. Many women throughout history became mothers as soon as they were able (right after the onset of puberty). Many cultures had rites of passage into adulthood for boys and girls of that age. There was no such thing as adolescence.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

As the other commentator says, medieval Europe was mostly early twenties. Studies of stone age remains suggest a first birth age average of 19.5 and contemporary hunter gather societies have a comparable average. Sexual activity generally begins earlier, during adolescence, but the most "reproductively successful" age for beginning childbearing has been shown to be around 18-19. Also, this age at first birth isnt "Average age of a child's mother" as many women would have multiple kids over their life, so the average sibling would have a much older mother at birth than the firstborn.

Its important to remember that puberty has shifted massively since industrialisation, "menarche age has receded from 16.5 years in 1880 to the current 12.5 years in western societies". So the post-puberty fecundity peak, that use to happen 17-19, when women are fully grown enough to minimise birth complications, now happens at a disressingly young 13-15. Not only is this a big social yuck for most western societies, but it's reproductively unideal, because of the complications linked to childbirth at that age.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Huh, that’s interesting. Do we know why the menarche age has receded?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

if you click that second study link it's exactly about that

[–] [email protected] 52 points 22 hours ago (13 children)

In Western Europe at least back to the early medieval period it was common for anyone who wasn’t nobility to have their first child around 22. The younger you are the more likely you’re going to have serious (fatal, back then) complications. It was the nobility that was marrying off barely pubescent kids.

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