The average mother having their average daughter at an average of 25 is historically probably quite an overestimate. 20 would be a much safer guess, but there’s a good chance it’s lower than that too.
Doesn’t change the math that much though, easily less than a thousand generations since the advent of agriculture either way.
Surprisingly no. At least in central and western Europe, child marriages were very much a nobility thing. Securing alliances and such. And even for those the first child may well have been much later.
I don’t have an individual statistic on hand but https://fakehistoryhunter.net/2026/01/18/age-of-marriage-giving-birth-in-medieval-europe/ has collected a bunch of sources that suggest that the usual age of first marriage in medieval Europe for women was around their mid 20s, pretty much the same as today.
I’m not talking about child marriage. Traditionally women were considered to be of marrying age at around 15 or 16 (note that this doesn’t mean they got married at exactly this age – it means the lower bound). The blog you link seems to be intentionally or unintentionally conflating child marriage (prepubescent girls) with marrying between 15 and 20. And indeed the sources it cites seem to largely support an average marrying age of around 20 for women until the 17th century.
This is also of course only for the medieval period, which is relatively recent all things considered. That still leaves 8500 years unaccounted for until the advent of agriculture, and during those 8500 years it’s far more likely for women to have given birth to their first child younger rather than older than in the medieval period.
Although interestingly we have to take into account how many children were born per woman and until what age. Then we have to consider how many survived.
This would push the average age above that of the average age of first childbirth. The child must survive to eventually descend to you. I don’t think it makes the age 25, but likely higher than 15
You’re joking though. Right? Or are you thinking about wealthy people? The ones who might be written about?
I come from several generations of “prom night” conceptions and “shot gun weddings”.
Read the page I linked. It specifically lists sources that specifically talk about peasants in medieval Europe who on average married later than nobility.
Prom night conceptions and shotgun weddings are a phenomenon of the 20th and 21st century and would have been considered absolutely scandalous for most of history.
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Anecdotal data isn’t
It is. But only as data point(s), not as a trend or generalization.
You can’t just look at the age of the mother when she has her first daughter. You also have to consider her age at the time of her last daughter. Even if she has her “prom night” daughter at 18, if she later has another daughter at 36, we’re looking at an average age of 27.
Plus talking about the deep past you have to consider infant mortality rates as well. If someone has 10 kids, but only the ones they had after 29 survived then that changes the math.
Lots of babies and children died before adulthood though, so its actually not a bad bet for 25 as an average birthing age for one that survives to adulthood. Not that every woman would lose her first 2 kids or whatever but enough certainly did to drive the average up somewhat from what it would be with modern medicine.
Always remember: these people were DNA-identical to us. All this life-saving, life-extending, life-improving technology… is always just 2-3 generations from poof
Tbf, it was also far more common for people to have a shitload of kids, which takes time and thus would mean the mother was a fair bit older for the youngest few. My grandma was the youngest of 12 and her mother was well into her 40s when she was born.
Can confirm. My great grandma told me she got married at 18 which made her an “old maid” at the time
But they don’t have a single kid, so the average age when giving birth is maybe higher
The greatest difference between us and our distant ancestors isn’t intelligence. It’s the knowledge we’ve inherited. Education is humanity’s greatest achievement.
We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. I’m grateful to those who lifted us up, and I’ll humbly do my part to lift those who come after us.
It’s society & available materials.
If you took all your knowledge 10k years ago the daily life would still fairly resemble the lives they had.
If you went back 10000 years you definitively would have become an inventor or philosopher of sorts (assuming you could speak their language)
Well, I guess it depends on your education, but we get taught things in elementary school that wouldn’t have been invented or discovered for thousands of years back then. And some technologies you likely could make without many pre-requisite technologies themselves
If the average person went back 10k years they would be regarded as insane or heretical. Even assuming communication wasn’t an issue, way too much of your knowledge is built upon things you don’t understand and don’t exist. You can’t do anything with electricity until you can refine metals and make copper wire. No average person knows the precursor plants for medicine. Brick making is beyond the average person and you wouldn’t have a kiln anyway. Working without metal tools makes most processes the average person would know impossible.
You just start with math, there’s plenty of math the average person learns in an average school curriculum that you could re-“invent”. After that people would start taking you more seriously
Now they might consider you heretical or blasphemous still. If you played your cards right you could try to present yourself as a messenger from god although I personally really wouldn’t want to go that route
Have you ever read “Lest Darkness Fall”? It’s a great exploration of these concepts. Dude gets isekai’d back to the Roman Empire. All of his ideas fall on deaf ears because “obviously the Roman Empire is the peak of all cultures” and there’s no room for improvement. Except for his idea for an optical telegraph system, they really fuck with that. Honestly an amazingly realistic book haha.
That does sound interesting actually!
And yeah, it makes sense that an empire would be interested in communications technology hihi
Math is probably the least useful at that age, maybe later in the bronze age it gets more useful as society can support some knowledge work. 10k years ago people don’t have time for math, the majority of people are focused solely on survival. That’s stone age and the very beginning of agriculture.
I absolutely agree (I didn’t say it wouldn’t change things), but the first decades/generation would still be pretty basic, much of the knowledge wouldn’t be applicable until you build your tools, get basics sorted, build safety nets, etc.
I’m trying to make the distinction between the ability to just ‘make’ as a proof of concept & actually apply that knowledge at scale that makes any difference in that accident context. Like metalwork - without (smol-)city-sized communities (labour, and accumulated resources like winter food & shelters) it doesn’t make sense bcs you don’t end up with enough use-cases.
(Ofc immediate location is a great factor in what knowledge is more applicable and what not - surviving in the Arctic circle would be much different to the some savannah).
I do agree with that!
10k years ago you can legit skip to making steel by making a charcoal furnace with bellows. Steam engine is also straight forward, animal husbandry could get you way more food per animal in a generation, and basic hygiene makes lives way longer.
I can go on but in short there’s loads of knowledge pretty much anyone can bring to 10k years ago that changes lives significantly.
How do you get iron ore in quantities that would allow to build anything worth building & maintaining?
(And what would you possibly use a resource-extremely-hungry steam engine for that needs to be fed that a wooden watermill couldn’t do? You would need to build up society/economy even to justify a usecase for a watermill, otherwise you just build a monument.)You could build an electric battery 10k years ago, but what for?
Where do you get species directly suitable for animal husbandry?
Or ppl to produce & use higiene products?
I can go on but in short there’s loads of knowledge pretty much anyone can bring to 10k years ago that changes lives significantly.
I absolutely agree with that.
animal husbandry could get you way more food per animal in a generation
My dissertation chairman was involved in a research project in India back in the 1960s. Some agricultural extension folks had gone there because they had assessed Indian cattle as “weak” and “sickly” and were trying to introduce American breeds as a substitute. The locals wanted no part of these animals and eventually the researchers tried the radical approach of asking them why not. Turns out that while these cattle could plow 50% more land in a day, they ate twice as much food as the Indian breeds.
The light went on in their heads and they set about attempting to cross American cattle with Indian cattle and breeding the most efficient animals. Turns out they couldn’t get any more efficient than the original Indian breeds.
I’m a bit skeptical about the stream engine just because it requires not just metal working but precision metal working where a piston needs to form a seal with the tube it’s in not just at one place but anywhere it moves in that tube, to spin a shaft without wobbling to the point that it comes apart at the intended speed. Even more difficult if it needs to be hardened, since a bit of warping is common during a quench.
I think it’s easy to take a lot of things for granted and miss that modern (or even just industrial age) things aren’t just the result of advancing a single tech tree but multiple tech trees coming together at the same time. Like I didn’t even go into the lubricants and gaskets a motor requires.
That’s a beautiful way of thinking about it!
Idk, I’m very whelmed by this, warnings weren’t needed, sounds just about right.
Our entire economic system is built upon this, too. The idea that people other than the ultra wealthy can just retire and… not work when they get old for example (retirement funds are biggest shareholders of publicly traded corporations btw).
Developed countries are seeing the damage of growth stopping and we haven’t done much to mitigate it. Productivity per worker is, of course, way up luckily - but so are people’s lifestyle expectations. If we all wanted to live like they did in ancient Greek times (minus the pillaging of neighboring countries I guess), we wouldn’t even need many workers. But people want so many things that didn’t exist 100 years ago, let alone 2+ millennia ago.
For now, we could just solve this by importing more workers from 3rd world countries still experiencing growth. Slow down their economic growth and our decline. But people are racist and don’t want to.
The good news is, once those 3rd world countries have strong enough economies, they’ll also stop producing babies as retirement plans as has been the case historically (you’d have like 8 or 9 kids so you can live on the family farm while they do all the work - when the economy gets better, you stop doing that).
Yeah, basically a brand new species behaving like an infestation in an abundance of (mostly finite) resources, not building sustainable socioeconomic systems that would allow for social & scientific advancements in absence of “infinite™” growth of imaginary numbers (eg gdp).
Far away from Star Trek even when we have those ideals theoretically available to us. (That’s why transporting knowledge back in time wouldn’t necessary be of use.)
I pointed out that the people in those photos screaming at Ruby Bridges are still alive and vote like mad and my brother was flabbergasted.
My grandmother passed away in 2015, but when she was born in 1922, there were Civil War veterans and people who had been owned as slaves still walking around. She was 43 when the Civil Rights Act passed
Anything but metrics…
The advent of agriculture (11.5 kya) was 4.5 hectomothers ago
I came here to say “obviously American, anything but metrics…”, but you bet me to it.
I may be an ignorant American, but can you explain metric time to me? What is the SI unit of time? Days? I’ll meet you in 4 decidays, 3 centidays, and 20 millidays.
USians are so insulated that they don’t know the rest of the world has 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes each.
Half a cup of seconds
Gives perspective on how accelerated change has become in modern times.
Similarly: we all come from an unbroken line of people who had children.
It may be that throughout history not having kids is common. Gay people who never had children may have been common. Ugly, poor or unpleasant people who never managed to find a partner may have been common. Asexual people may have been common.
Straight people who had sex but never had kids were probably not common, just because good contraception wasn’t available.
Still, if you’re a person who, for whatever reason, is not going to have kids, none of your direct ancestors can understand that life.
First law of socio-genetics: Celibacy is not hereditary
From some book of Murphy’s laws I found at home as a kid and fell in love with
Not necessarily accurate, though.
See selfish genes (ideally from someone other than Dawkins), and gay uncle hypothesis.
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I don’t know what a selfish gene is and I cba to read a textbook right now, but IF you really want to take this seriously, a recessive gene is enough to make the statement untrue.
I do however suspect that this joke law was meant as a joke.
tldr: natural selection doesn’t select for fit individuals, it selects for genes, and at the population level. Plenty of species have strong drives in individuals that will destroy their individual fitness, like bees and ants, but those genes survive just fine.
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A bloodline ending is also probably incredibly common. But, not once in our direct ancestors has a bloodline ever ended.
That’s actually one of the things that got me thinking about this. My family has a tradition that the first born son always gets a certain first name. My dad’s the third-born male, so he didn’t get the name, and didn’t pass it down to me. But, his oldest brother did, so it’s my cousin’s name.
My cousin’s probably not going to have kids. Or, if he does, they’d be happy little accidents who aren’t part of the family and don’t get the first-born-son name. So that name and that tradition dies with him. It’s a bit unfortunate because over time that first name has become less common and I like the name. So, for the first time in centuries(?) there won’t be someone with that name.
I thought about it a bit, and realized, it’s probably actually fairly common. When you’re the end of a chain like that, you might feel pressured because everybody before you had carried on the tradition and passed on the name. However, that has to be the case, because if your father or grandfather had failed to pass on the name, you wouldn’t be around to see it.
There are probably “bloodlines” ending all the time. But if you’re part of a “bloodline”, it probably feels like a big deal because everybody until you has ensured it survived.
(Having said that, “bloodlines” are a dumb concept, since each parent provides about 50% of the DNA. So, even if you’re a “Trey” and share the same name with your dad and grandfather, you only share half your DNA with your dad and a quarter with your grandfather. In a sense, you could say that the strength of every bloodline is cut in half with every generation. That is, unless you’re breeding with blood relatives, and then the bloodline may be strong, but the genetic disorders are even stronger.)
Not just people, it goes back all the way to the origin of life, whether that happened here or elsewhere and life just somehow ended up migrating here.
There’s an unbroken hereditary line between each of us and cells that first tried to eat mitochondria and instead of breaking them down into one meal’s worth of energy and nutrients, they ended up forming a symbiotic relationship, giving our ancestors (and us) the ability to take more energy from the oxygen that was slowly filling the atmosphere than it was causing damage and surviving the earliest known mass extinction as well as snowball earth.
Then our lineage was able to survive the Cambrian explosion, I’m guessing that’s than brains evolved and suddenly life could control a wide variety of different shapes and body types and it did before settling in to the more common body types that survived to this day.
We survived countless mass extinctions, including all of the major ones, like massive asteroid impacts that rained molten glass all over the globe just from the rebound and made today’s global warming seem quaint. Each of our ancestors was able to survive to the age of reproduction without getting eaten by the giant insects of the Carboniferous (though we were still in the water so kinda lucked out), we survived the early oceans/seas, the emergence of amphibians and reptiles. We survived the dinosaurs, probably as tiny nocturnal rodents. We survived past that when birds and mammals diversified after the dinosaurs were gone.
We survived when primates started changing the very nature of the game of survival, despite several other species getting a head start on populating the globe. For better or worse, we took the planet from Neanderthals, homo erectus, the Denisovans, the hobbit-like hominids, and any others that left Africa before us (not to mention dominated the competition inside Africa).
Only at that point did we start surviving the brutal history of our species and all the wars, famines, plagues, natural disasters, building collapses, personal disagreements that could have turned violent, religions, brutal rulers, collapses of civilization, and emergence of the next set of bandit or war lords.
Also billions of years of single-celled competition prior to that mitochondria symbiosis event.
Even crazier if you think in human lifetimes. Taking the global life expectancy of 72 years, the beginning of our era was 28 lifetimes ago.
Middle Ages ended 8 lifetimes ago.
I think about this, and do this math in my head too, all the time. 80 mothers to Ancient Rome. 400 mothers to start of farming.
What impressed me more was just how MANY ancestors you would have at that 40 generations back.
Mathematically it’s a lot. Realistically a lot of those ancestors end up being common after 4-6 generations.
You know how the Mormons keep genealogy records for, like, everyone they possibly can? I am American so we may be more mixed than some places but those records went back pretty far and out in a lot of directions geographically. No overlap, lots and lots of people. I mean at some point mathematically it’s more people than the population of the world so you have to be right but they had 20 or more generations in some directions, it was thousands of people on that chart going back hundreds of years, it was crazy.
I also did notice that most of my ancestresses did marry between 25-28, not 14 as Little House on the Prairie had me believing before.
25-28 sounds about right for men. For women that seems way to old, 14 is still very young, but around 20-23 was common.
Also keep in mind that a church could bend the truth and just not publish the overlap. You can have a few branches going way back and just be unknown on those that overlap with them.
I was very surprised too, but that’s what the records showed. Of course the records that go on are well off Europeans and English and Irish, and the ones who were in Louisiana since it was French. I can’t know anything about the rest. I did expect to find what we would consider child brides but no, way more were mid-20s. I was under the (apparently quite mistaken) impression that the past was more “marry young or be considered unfit”. Didn’t really note the ages of the guys, as I didn’t have any preconceptions about that.
My own mom was 30 when she married, had 4 kids pretty quickly. Her mom married at 24. Her grandma, though, at 18. But on my dad’s side it’s 25, 27, 20, 22, 25, if I go up the patrilineal line. Which gets up back to the freaking 1700s, seems so long ago. But even back to the 1600s, one 16 year old & 2 who were 25.
I found that remarkable but more it seems likely that my perception was shaped by stories, and less likely that my dad’s family was outliers.
I looked up the average age of mothers at the time of their first child birth in 1863 because I really badly wanted to make a joke about a “score” being 20 for that reason.
Sadly the average age was 22-26 so my day is ruined.
Idk, they had kids a lot earlier than 25 for the vast, vast majority of world history.
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According to this scale, Aboriginal Australian cultures are 2,600 mothers old.
My parents are/were 90. I started telling them they’ve been alive for more than a third of the history of the United States. They loved hearing that shit.
By this math, humans have only been around for about 80,000 mothers.
