- [<] Status Log - created:: 2022-01-23 - status-updated:: 2022-02-22 - status-updated:: 2021-04-24 - current-status:: #articleseed/afterword - [S] Marketing - purpose:: This would make a good accompaniment to something involving a rite of passage that is weird or unexpected in Verraine. #storystem/fic - [b] References - https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tqkby5/why_were_there_445_days_in_46_bc/ I answered the following question for [[rAskHistorians]]: > [When did we humans start measuring our biological age? If you were born in the winter do people just assume that every winter is your "birthday"? When did a concept of "legal age" start to matter?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/lbtwn7/when_did_we_humans_start_measuring_our_biological/glxh58t/?context=3) > > Also a couple of assumptions I've made, please correct me if I'm wrong! > > 1.) Early societies that haven't discovered agriculture don't have a calendar so one's date of birth is insignificant. > > 2.) Assuming that "legal age" is relative from culture to culture, is this the reason way rites of passage were created? (ex. kill a tiger and you become a man) > > 3.) I only mostly hear about rites of passages in the context of boys becoming men and not much about girls becoming women, is this because most cultures use a girl's first period as their transition to womanhood? I can't answer your _full_ question but you said to correct you if you're wrong, so I want to talk a little bit about: ASSUMPTION #3, specifically rites of passage in in ancient societies the context of girls becoming women. I've been reading [[The Civilizations of Africa by Christopher Ehret|The Civilizations of Africa]] by Christopher Ehret ([[Early African Trade Centers|on recommendation]] from [u/Commustar](https://www.reddit.com/u/Commustar/) in response to one of my questions, actually) and I thought you might find value in this excerpt about the spread of Sudanic Agriculture (6500-5500 BCE — according to my reading, this culture was primarily centered around raising cattle in steppe conditions): > None of the early Sudanic peoples practiced either circumcision or clitoridectomy, but they did engage in another notable kind of bodily marking, **the extraction in** _**adolescents**_ **of the two lower incisor teeth.** Unlike circumcision, this trait is visible in the archaeological record. When archaeologists encounter skeletons lacking the two lower front teeth, they have a useful marker for identifying the sites of Sudanic civilization. The author is otherwise very careful to denote which things we know little about with regards to women (see below), so my read here is that these peoples used this rite of passage into adulthood for both genders. So while I think it's certainly true that _some_ cultures use a girl's first period as their transition to womanhood, I would be wary about statements like "most." The preceding paragraph mentions two distinct rites of passage and it's talking about a relatively small segment of human history, but certainly it's equally likely that many ancient cultures had distinctive rites of passage that didn't relate to the start of a menstrual cycle, for example how Victorian era England had "coming of age" balls years after the average onset of menstruation. Another section of the book discusses the early Niger-Congo peoples and says: > We suspect that Niger-Congo peoples from early times, like the Afrasans, practiced male circumcision as a rite of passage from child to adult status. In recent centuries this custom could be found in a great many Niger-Congo societies scattered as far west as Senegambia and as far east as Cameroon. **How girls may have been initiated into adulthood in early Niger-Congo civilizations is not known**. A smaller number of Niger-Congo societies in West Africa did practice cliteridectomy in recent eras, but we remain unsure how old this custom may actually have been. I'm mentioning this specifically because the "we don't know" is not the same thing as "there wasn't one." ASSUMPTION #1, specifically lunar calendars and the important reasons why humans might have kept track of time even in societies that don't engage in agriculture. There's an theory that floats around the internet (and I _swear_ I read the Civilizations of Africa book recently but I only have dead tree copies and I can't find it using the index) along the lines of: > The cyclical nature of menstruation has played a major role in the development of counting, mathematics, and the measuring of time... Lunar markings found on prehistoric bone fragments show how early women marked their cycles and thus began to mark time. Women were possibly "the first observers of the basic periodicity of nature, the periodicity upon which all later scientific observations were made" (quote is from William Irwin Thompson: _The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light,_ St. Martin's Press, 1981, page 97). Actual _source_ of the quote is ["Women as the First Mathematicians" by Claudia Zaslavsky](https://web.nmsu.edu/~pscott/isgem71.htm). Regardless of whether or not women invented calendars in order to keep track of their cycles, though, Zaslavski relays that > Alexander Marshack later concluded, on the basis of his microscopic examination, that it represented a six-month lunar calendar. The dating of the Ishango bone has been reevaluated, from about 8000 B.C.to perhaps 20,000 B.C. or earlier. Similar calendar bones, dating back as much as 30,000 years, have been found in Europe. Thus far the oldest such incised bone, discovered in southern Africa and having 29 incisions, goes back about 37,000 years. Agriculture, by contrast, (again according to the Ehret textbook I've got in front of me) began roughly between 9500 and 7000 BCE. Independent groups in the Middle East, East Asia, and ehhhh let's call it North Central Africa for the sake of brevity, began raising and nurturing particular food sources, probably as a result of the end of an ice age. Again, I can't speak to when humans specifically started measuring _biological age,_ but hopefully I've shed some light on the other bits of your implicit question. Therefore, based on my reading, I would say that ASSUMPTION #2 is false, mostly due to the fact that calendars predate many rites of passage (e.g. cliteridectomy in West Africa).