Googling the term "gay caveman" was not done without a degree of apprehension. As I typed in the words my mind was already filled with an idea of what I would find and I wasn't disappointed. The first headline that appeared was exactly as I suspected - "First homosexual caveman found" - no ifs, ends, or buts about it. If I had stopped reading at this point I would have not only gone through life misinformed but would probably have been an agent of dissemination, spreading this statement to others as "fact". However, delving further into the article I started to question a couple of points. First, there is no direct claim of homosexuality. The archaeologist uses words like "more likely" and "probably" but never states that this individual was indecisively homosexual. Second, the idea that this 'caveman' was of a different sexual orientation or was transgendered stems from his burial in a manner typically associated with females. I unfortunately immediately conjured to mind a stereotypical image of what this may have looked like and thankfully people with far better photoshop skills than mine have also jumped onto the that wagon.
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"Gay Caveman"
Photo Source: Freerepublic.com |
Archaeologists are limited in their understanding of the past by their understanding of the present. Modern societies, especially our western one, usually view not only sex but gender as a dichotomy; we are male or we are female. The idea of a third gender is slowly making its move to the front but we are still light years away from accepting that the true categorizations of gender are infinite. Archaeologists are by definition looking at material remains and trying to deduce ancient human history. Recognizing patterns is one way in which archaeologists have tried to give meaning to remains and while patterns provide great frames on which we can build they are far from absolute. The idea that ancient humans had the same or similar ideologies to our own contemporary ones cannot be accepted at face value. We may be able to study what they did but it is far more difficult to study how they thought. And an understanding of how they thought is exactly what we need before we can go about making claims that any ancient human was transgendered or gay.
Abbey- Great blog! While I was reading it, I never thought to look at how the archaeologists worded their findings. I like how you caught that they never really make a direct claim to homosexuality, I did not catch that.
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