The following is my translation of an article called: Das Weib in Haushalte der Steinzeitmenschen von Dr Ludwig Hopf. It appeared in a German popular science magazine, Kosmos Handweiser für Naturfreunde 1913, Heft 11, Seiten 419-423.
The original article is graced by a number of informative illustrations of a thoroughly scientific and therefore decent nature, and several depict tootsies with no blouses on! As these are scientific, you can catch an eyeful of their tits. Cor, they ain't even got no bikinis on! Everything's hanging out. For the purposes of serious study only, I am willing to supply copies for fellow academics. Please send 20 euros per image, and I'll forward them with an e-mail wrapped in brown paper. The correct notation is:
1. Stone Age crumpet, standing, facing slightly off-centre, one nipple full-frontal and second (dark) in profile.
2. Two bits of stuff, sitting, two bazookas head on, one other with a side view.
This offer doesn't apply to pervs. Voyeurs will have to cough up with 30 euros per nuddy picture.
I'm not aware of any previous translation.
Trevor Dykes.

The woman in households of the Stone Age people by Dr Ludwig Hopf
In the introduction of his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784) ('Ideas on the philosophy of the history of humanity'), Herder speaks of the usual division of peoples into hunters or fishers, shepherds and farmers, a division not made in accordance with the cultural level of the relevant peoples, but rather which sees the culture itself as essentially being a consequence of this or that way of life. "Appropriate," he then continues, "only if we know what these ways of life were. They vary, however, in every region of the Earth and mostly merge into one another so much, that the use of them as a basis for classification would be enormously difficult."

It is constantly necessary to clear away obsolete views on the original condition of humanity. This is what Lucretius did for the legend of an original golden age, a completely happy paradisiacal existence, in that he described the roughness and poverty of the ancient people in a manner that is increasingly being confirmed by the results of modern prehistoric research. And so we must hold the intelligent Herder in high esteem, as it was he who took on the prevalent three-stage hypothesis of the ancient world proposed by Rousseau (hunter-fisher, nomad-farming), and showed that this hypothesis of three cultural stages for humanity was based only upon assumption, and had not been critically examined, as to how and when they supposedly arose. That critical process makes the science of Herder all the greater, as he did not have the advantage of wide experiences about the lives of 'natural peoples' which we, as researchers of prehistory, must time and again use for comparative purposes, as such knowledge was then much thinner than is now the case. This means, that we now know there simply is not one 'natural people' that lives, year in and year out, only from hunting game and fish, and this leads us to the conclusion that people of the earliest times would also have been omnivores. And as for the purported sequence of the three cultural stages just mentioned, then the incorrectness of this hypothesis can be best demonstrated by the conditions in America. The North American Indians were never purely hunters and fishers rather, since the earliest times, they also practiced the raising of crops as well. In the whole of South America, in contrast, there was never a shepherding stage, with the use of milk as a main food as, along with agriculture, llamas were raised only for wool and as animals of burden, and for their meat. From real animal husbandry, milk-drinking nomads, we know that the enjoyment of plant resources is necessary for the survival of their tribe, namely plants for flour, and they acquire these through barter with agricultural peoples or, when necessary, they obtain them with violence. From this dependence upon agriculture follows the conclusion, that the agricultural stage, and not the nomadic one, arose first. And should the farmer have come into possession of the dog, then he could also pacify sheep and goats, and let them graze on the pasture beyond his crop fields (G Hahn).

Comparative observations of natural peoples, if conducted with the appropriate reserve, have made our view of the households of Stone Age people much clearer. Then as it says in the Australian fairy story: "one cannot live from meat alone", and similar conditions bring us to conclude the same for our ancestors. A large area of Central Europe, which has yielded the remains of Stone Age people and their tools and weapons, was covered with forest and heath at that time. Should plants then have also served a role in the households of the people, then it could only have been from roots and wild herbs, of beach seeds, hazel nuts and water chestnuts, of berries, wild seed and stone fruits. And while we are on this subject, then who would have collected these products for the sustenance of the family? Until recently, one could only read in anthropological works, including from the best of them, about Stone Age man, as if only the men had then actually existed. But just as such work appeals so little to the Australian men of today and the hunters of fishers of North America, who care more about playing sport, then Stone Age man would also not have been drawn into the forest to dig for roots or to collect berries and grass seeds. That leaves it as being in the province of his woman.

This brings us to a highly important chapter in the cultural development of humanity, namely that of the development of economic work through the behaviour of women. If we look more closely at what really happens during daily life among primitive peoples, then the man, when he is neither hunting or catching fish, lazes around while the woman is forced to bring home anything she can find from busy collecting from the available endemic plants, in order to feed the family, and it will be those plants within the reach of small children. The sustenance provided by accompanying boys and girls is not to be underestimated, then nothing that crawls or slithers escapes them, be it the snail and caterpillar, the frog and the lizard, up to the butterfly in the air or young bird in the nest. Much of this can be consumed raw; the majority, however, such as the meat of slaughtered animals, could have been roasted or baked as cooking was already done during the Neolithic. An example of the hard work of women from the natural peoples of today is taken, by Hahn, from the lives of Australian women, who collect the beans of Castanospermum australe when they are only 8-10 days old, these are then dried in the sun, roasted over a fire and finally ground into a rough flour. The women of the wild Californians prepared the heads of aloes for a few hours, and these were then baked in a fire hole for 12-20 hours. And, just as today the seeds of the Manna grass and, in years of shortage, also the knotweed are collected in Europe, ground and baked, then so, according to Hahn, it could have also been done during the Paleolithic. The fire was ignited by men either by rubbing softer and harder sticks against one another, or the very tiresome method of beating flint stones together, but maintaining the fire by laying on collected, thin sticks and protecting it under the ash was a matter for the women.

And how much more the plagued creature was expected to do! During the Paleolithic, the people seem to have gone naked. Evidence for this comes from the interesting outline sketches, dating from the Madeleine period, and kept in the Museum of St. Germain, which show a woman and a man. During the harder seasons, however, they most probably wore clothes made from the furs of slaughtered animals. The furs had to be prepared with a flint scraper, and the bone needles found earlier show threads from guts may have been used to sew them together, and that would also have been the work of the women. They probably made fur jackets in such a way that enable babies to be carried on the back during their many wanderings. Perhaps they could also have produced something to bundle the personal possessions of the family together, as we are used to seeing today with roaming bands of hunters.

Did the advent of the Neolithic bring changes in the position of the woman? A change, yes, but no relief but rather an increase in the female work burden. But it would be unjust to see the only cause of this labour as being tyrannical pressure from the side of the men. While they also acted as masters during the Paleolithic and took it as their right to attend to hunting and catching fish; additionally, they also had to work in line with the altering circumstances, in that they had to sharpen their stone tools and weapons, and chop trees to be rammed into the ground to support their hut homes. But everything else fell onto the shoulders of the women, and what brought this work about was mainly the instinctive drive born into animals, that of ensuring the existence requirements for themselves and their families. As presently occurs with the natural peoples living at a Neolithic stage, that is also how it would have been for humanity in prehistory. The women would have gone out with their boys and girls in order to collect fire wood and plant foodstuffs of all kinds. As they would see everywhere how plants grow from sprouting seeds, then they would have tried to encourage the growth of suitable plants themselves, and this in areas near to their huts. The heavy work of clearing the bushes and trees must have been done by the man, and this always provided an excuse for festivities after the completion of the business. The actual preparation of the land, the planting of the seeds and the care of the plants was taken on by the woman. Herder had already presented an example from the North American Indians of his time. "As beautiful as the wheat areas of North America are, it is still only the women among the Indians to whom growing maize and a few garden fruits is left. The aggressive hunter cannot imagine himself as being a gardener or farmer."

What the Neolithic women were doing was slash agriculture, a procedure which is not simply restricted to primitive peoples, but which continues alongside of the agriculture with the plough among cultivated peoples as horticulture. The tools used by the Neolithic women were the simplest imaginable: to bore holes for the planting of seeds, a fire-hardened, sharpened bit of wood; a grubber to open the land, consisting of a spike from a deer antler or a long, sharpened stone attached to an appropriately long stick. Animal assistance was not used, then even if a creature were available as a domestic animal, it would not yet have been used as a draught animal, but an only for the purposes of milk and meat.

As well as providing milk, we also see the Neolithic woman intensively providing for the needs of the family from the practice of gardening. The work of researchers into Pfahlbau locations (Additional note: literally 'post buildings) has provided an exact view into the foodstuffs then gained from plants. Poppy has been found, the seeds of which were probably processed for oil; root vegetables provided the parsnip; legumes were lentils, peas and beans; crops rich for flour were the important cereal grasses, the millet, barley and wheat. To use all that in the best interests of the family meant a great deal of work for the women, ranging from collecting the ripe fruit to grinding the corn on mill stones, the preparation of dough, and drying the loaves of bread on hot stones.

And if the meals were then cooked using water, then that would have meant yet another entirely new procedure in comparison to earlier, which would have firstly required the production of suitable vessels (pots, bowls, etc). The men would have also willingly left this work to the women. And how they had to work! The various forms of pots, as have been found in terrestrial and lake settlements and in the graves of people from the Neolithic, were not generally simple to make without a potter's wheel, nut they are well fired and frequently carry etchings or imprinted decorations with tasteful geometric patters, patterns which were a further achievement of the female hand.

The weaving of baskets and other containers from willow, rushes, grasses, as understood so well by the Patagonian Indians and other tribes of natives, would certainly also have been known by Neolithic women, and this must have provided them with excellent prototypes for the decoration of their pottery; even more important would have been the production and wearing of spun yarn, which they obtain from the flax provided by their gardening. The Rosegarten Museum in Konstanz possesses examples from the bed of the Lake Constance Pfahlbauten of plaiting, nets and weavings from yarn and string made from spun and turned flax threads by the women of the Pfahlbau people, and the Pfahlbau of the Laibacher Heath has yielded a clay idol with a long dress decorated with woven lace, and this is very similar to the lace pattern found on some Neolithic clay pots.

People from elsewhere pressed into Central and Western Europe after the end of the Paleolithic. We conclude this as the new culture arrived with few local precedents and, if we must accept that it is probable that the Paleolithic population did not entirely disappear, but rather remnants may well have remained that melted in with the new arrivals. Much has been written and said about where these arrivals came from. Recently, based upon differences in styles of decoration on the pottery, it has been assumed that one is dealing with immigrants from two different directions, and the tribes with string-like patterns on pottery are held to be from the north, while the ones with band-likes motifs on vessels entered from the southeast. However, these differences appear relatively minor in comparison to the massive cultural progress presented by the Neolithic as a whole, and a more important question arises: To whom does the lion's share of the creation of the new culture belong, to the men or the women?

I think answering this question should not be too difficult. We eagerly see this as the achievement of the man, and cite his production of better refined and securely fastened stone implements, the foundation of protected hut homes and stables with clay walls and, in conjunction with this, the establishment of larger, village-like settlements. We also want to assume it was the men in those settlements who laid down customs and took care of justice, and protected their dependants from hostile attacks. But the main thing, providing the food and, through that, ensuring the continued existence of the families and the entire tribe, fell to the women. One no longer had to simply depend upon luck as to whether the necessary plant foodstuffs could be collected or not as, through the labour of the woman, the gardening, secure harvests were obtained, and these could also be stored for the winter, and were always ready to be processed, ground and baked by the woman, and they could also be cooked with water or milk in self-produced pots.

A further important element in the households of these people was the use of milk itself, and this lay in the hands of the woman, and it enabled her not only to feed herself, but also to systematically reduce the death rate of children which otherwise plays a tragic role among natural peoples without dairy animals.

If we think further, that the clothing of family members was no longer completely reliant upon the furs provided by the men, that clean, light, washable clothes were increasingly woven by the women from spun linen, so one would hardly be able to deny that the woman of the Neolithic could be termed the soul of the household of that time.

Naturally, their life was an existence based upon much hard labour and, as long as the man could not call upon better assistance, then the gardening or the woman could not be replaced with real agriculture with or without the help of working animals. Among the requirements was the plough, and there is no trace of its presence available from the Paleolithic. We do know that the Hakenpflug (Additional note: some kind of plough, but an English equivalent presently escapes me), a length of hard wood with a pointed attachment fixed on at the back, which was in use at the start of the Metal Age, partly reaches back into prehistory and was, now and then, in use. Possibly it could also have been in use at the end of the Paleolithic, drawn through the hard ground either by the man alone or in partnership with his woman. But we cannot know for sure. We can only base conclusions on the myths of peoples, that the transition from gardening to agriculture, in the earliest times, was an important, epoch-making occurrence in the history of human life. The cults, that most peoples connect with agriculture, are based on the belief that the merciful benevolence of gods led to the introduction and expansion of cultured fields. It was Prometheus for the Greeks, who Aeschylus praised thus:
"I too was first to harness 'neath the yoke strong animals,
Obedient made to collar and to weight,
That they might bear whate'er of heaviest toil."

How very different it is in the record from Moses! It is not spoken of there as being a godly blessing, but rather as a curse. "Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." With this curse, God throws the first people out of the Garden of Eden, without the promise of future help, and left them entirely to their own devices, and only in an Islamic myth did the Archangel Gabriel not simply give the exile Adam the plough and oxen, but he also taught him how to prepare fields and to sow cereal seeds.

The human perception contests against the thought that work is a burden from a curse, which was first laid on people after they had fallen. On the contrary, we feel the researcher, Ed. Hahn, is correct when he states that the work for people, as well as for animals, comes from an instinctive drive to fulfil the conditions for the existence of themselves and their progeny. And as is especially apt for the agriculture that developed on from the gardening of the woman, this blessing for humanity cannot be better expressed than with the beautiful words of Wundt in his Comparative Psychology of Peoples (II, 2): "So the agriculture is, with its necessity for permanent settlements and its progress in civil order, the first field of common labour, with this labour being directed towards the acquisition of products which, in a double sense, places value on cultural goods. Firstly, it can only be achieved though common negotiation but, secondly, at a relatively primitive cultural stage, its benefits are only attainable with mutual gain. And this is what justifies the view, that the agriculture prepares the way for all further cultural advance."

At the stage of agriculture with the plough, it is the work of the man that is most important but, if it were not for the active assistance of the woman in the house, garden and field, then the achievement of this cultural stage would not have been thinkable.

An index of more of my translations of old Kosmos articles can be found at:

Kosmos Translations Archive

A number of Mesozoic (and post-Mesozoic) location summaries can be found at Localities.