GAY CAVEMAN (Bet I caught your attention)

Gay cavemen! Yes, you heard me right. Anthropologists' claimed to have found a gay caveman. Czech archaeologists say that they found a skeleton that "they believe, is that of a he, not a she: a man apparently buried not like other men — head facing west, cache of weapons — but like a woman" (McDowell, 2011). To me, this does not imply that this caveman was "gay." This could imply so many things. Perhaps this person was a shaman who was sacred, and therefore; buried in a different way from other men. Perhaps he was a criminal or deviant, and people wanted him to be turned in a certain way so that when he was in the after life he was confused. It's so difficult to come at this in a culturally relativistic way because we have no idea how many different genders a certain society in a certain time period. I felt this topic came to a conclusion too easily. Theories about these kinds of things don't just appear over night, they take lots of time with lots of data and research. I feel like it was unnecessary for a newspaper to take set of data and turn it in a big thing.

I did some research and noticed that, like myself, many people were disagreeing with the newspaper article about the "Gay Caveman." In one of the articles I read, a researcher with the Czech Archaeological Society, Kamila Remisova Vesinova, stated that the following: "we think, based on data, that it could be a member of a so-called third gender, which were people either with different sexual orientation or transsexuals or just people who identified themselves differently from the rest of the society" (Barber, 2011). Like I imagined, it is impossible to count how many genders there are among cultures. There is no universal number since gender is culturally constructed. I believe this was the best explanation and conclusions these Anthropologists could derive from the amount of information they had. I'm glad that there were many articles articulating the problem with the original article because people should should be informed that based on that particular set of data, it's impossible to draw such distinct conclusions. It's too bad we can't just go back to the past and ask them ourselves.

Bibliography
McDowell, A., 2011. Gay caveman probably not gay or a caveman. National Post, Aug. 7.


Barber, M., 2011. 'Gay Caveman' not definitely gay nor caveman, say archaeologists. Postmedia News, April 8.