This Just In

Posted By: Kathleen DavidPosted On:

Scientists in the Czech Republic believe that they have discovered a gay caveman.

Supposedly, unlike other cavemen, he likes Geico because he believes the company’s name is actually Guy Co.

PAD

36 comments on “This Just In”

    1. Why would we ever think that? 🙂
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      The article says they know he was gay because he was apparently not into “jugs”.
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      So what?
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      Maybe he was an ášš man.

  6. as interesting as this could be the evidence seems kinda weak. I don’t know maybe the reporting glossed over the details that would have cemented it or perhaps the “discovery” was reported prematurely for media coverage and potential grant money???

  7. Suddenly Fred and Barney are standing a lot further apart.

    Really, though, before this went public, I would have liked to see the facts doubleczeched a little more.

      1. Suddenly Fred and Barney are standing a lot further apart.

        Everyone, all together:

        “We’ll have a gay, old time!”

  8. I thought this was a joke.

    Was this discovery made public on the first of this month, by any chance?

  9. I weep for science when I read crap like this. Oh for the days when scientists were all intelligent oddballs who stuck to the facts, not making nonsense up so they can get in the Huffington Post sandwiched in between Letterman Gets Completely Distracted by Eva Longoria’s Skimpy Outfit and Teen Rides Jumping Cow
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    This will probably get 1/billionth the attention: http://www.livescience.com/13620-gay-caveman-story-overblown.html
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    Birefly–he wasn’t a caveman. There’s no evidence he was gay. He may not have been a he. Impressive.
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    meanwhile, how did THIS story slip through the cracks? http://www.theonion.com/articles/archaeological-dig-uncovers-ancient-race-of-skelet,932/

    1. .
      “Birefly–he wasn’t a caveman. There’s no evidence he was gay. He may not have been a he. Impressive.”
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      Yeah, there’s that little tidbit as well. That’s another thing that they’ve recently been looking back on and correcting some false early data. Some of the ways that some people were identifying gender by skeletal remains turned out to be almost grade school level thought about gender identification.
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      “meanwhile, how did THIS story slip through the cracks? http://www.theonion.com/articles/archaeological-dig-uncovers-ancient-race-of-skelet,932/“
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      Ah, the Harryhausian people discovered at last. Next week, we locate Atlantis.

  10. .
    Uhm…
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    The guy was buried approximately 5000 years ago. That doesn’t quite qualify him as a caveman. Cavemen would really have to come from the earlier parts of the Palaeolithic era, and the end of that was a wee bit farther back than 5000 years ago.
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    This line in the Huff piece is also incorrect or poorly written.
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    “The man had been interred on his left side with his head facing east, with no weapons and household jugs.”
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    He was found with a jug at his feet. It’s in the science and archeological news sites that deal less with the dazzle and more with the details.
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    From what I’ve read, even the actual archeologists have not used the words “gay,” “homosexual” or any other variation on that theme. They used wording that would translate roughly to the grave being a “third gender” grave. While some in the press might argue that this means gay, the recent discoveries in archeology with cultures that had “gender specific” grave rites has been that the facts have been somewhat skewed by our perspectives on things. They’ve been going back and looking at a few of the “third gender” graves found in various cultures and finding that the signs of wear and tear on the bodies are in line with the wear and tear of members of the opposite sex who (at that time) had certain traditional jobs. There was a case study some time ago where they found that some “third gender” males who were buried in a “female manner” had the same type of spinal arthritis as women of the time who would work the fields and food gardens. They also had the same tools buried with them.
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    They’ve also found in gender rite specific cultures a few women buried with weapons and in the position believed to be the “male” position. Their remains showed the signs of combat injuries and they were buried with weapons. The odds are that they were not gay, but rather that they were buried in the rite that went with their (admittedly unique in the case of some of the cultures where this is being looked at) status.
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    Given the poor reporting of this matter and the discussions in the archeological field in the last few decades…
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    This is likely turning into yet another example of how our “news” media is a bad joke and of how pop culture and bad news reporting makes us even more ignorant of our past than we were before we heard the “news.”

    1. Jerry, “This line…” was incorrect or poorly written? Isn’t that kind of like pointing out the Fer de Lance in a pit full of the rest of the world’s most venomous snakes?

    2. Actually, that line wasn’t incorrect at all… you simply didn’t ignore the part between the hyphens when parsing it.
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      “The man had been interred on his left side with his head facing east, with no weapons and household jugs — almost always reserved for women in the region during that time — placed at his feet.”
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      Parsed: “He was interred without weapons, but instead with jugs at his feet. And BTW, jugs were almost always reserved for the wimmenfolk.”
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      I will agree that jumping to the “He’s gay!” conclusion is a bit of a reach…

      1. What hasn’t been reported is that when one of the archaeologists first found the site, he said, “Wow! Check out those jugs!” And now a woman archaeologist is suing him for harassment.
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        PAD

    3. Given the poor reporting of this matter
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      Given that this was from the Huffington Post, aren’t you being redundant?
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      The Post treats scientific matters as about as well as the WND treats liberal politics.

      1. .
        “Given that this was from the Huffington Post, aren’t you being redundant?”
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        I would be if I was just talking about Huff Post. The story has been picked up by a few news agencies as a news item. If you’ll note, the Huff Post piece sources the thing to the Telegraph and the Daily Mail. It’s also been covered by Fox News, Yahoo, AOL, MSNBC, The Week and various local and national network news broadcasts as well as being carried as an odd tidbit in various news papers.
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        A handful of news editors wanted a hot button headline. Everyone else has just been picking it up and parroting it rather than reporting the news and/or checking the facts. We have a news media that we’ve grown to deserve by our choices and habits. Unfortunately, the vast majority of our news media is a piss poor joke by and for either partisan hacks, morons or a combination of both.

      3. A handful of news editors wanted a hot button headline.
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        In the last week or two as well, everybody had a story about how a new study showed that TSA’s pornoscanner machines are safe with their radiation output.
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        Only, there wasn’t a new study. It was just an article rehashing old studies that do not prove the machines are safe.
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        But the media doesn’t care. They just want headlines, and they’ll create them if they have to.

      4. .
        But… but… but… Craig, it is a new study. It’s more recent than the one before it and they haven’t done one since then. That makes it the new study. And my 12 year old truck is my new truck since it’s not my old car that I had before it and I haven’t gotten myself a new car since buying the truck.
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        See, it’s all in how you spin it.

  11. Of course, this ancient fellow MIGHT have been gay. I’m sure there have been homosexuals in every period of human history. Seems they’re taking a pretty big leap to assume anything about his sexuality based on how he was buried, given all they can do is guess at the context.

  12. This also illustrates what I call The Star Trek Theory of Homogeneous Alien Cultures. Ever notice how when they land on a planet everybody looks, acts and dresses exactly the same? We always assume that’s how ancient cultures were, based on the very limited evidence we find. If, 10,000 years from now they dig up one or two bodies and extrapolate they might think that New York City was populated by firemen and prostitutes.
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    On of the first neanderthals found was an old arthritic man and his reconstruction led to decades of people thinking of the race as a bunch of hunchbacked stoop shouldered ape men. Who knows what this guy’s story was, if he was a guy? Maybe he was a great warrior, celebrated in song and campfire tale, killer of Lothar of the Hill People, hero of the Rock Battle of Great Round Lake but he grew weary of constant battle and laid down his pointed stick to become Master of the Big Fish Dance, and it was his personal request that he be buried without any instruments of destruction. Who knows? These people had lives, it wasn’t all working at the quarry and fighting dinosaurs.

      1. But they DON’T end up parallel to us–we have myriad cultures, races, fashion, religions, etc. But in most sci-fi series they have exactly one. Or maybe two, and those two are at war. Trek did have the Maquis but that was not a planet or culture.
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        I get the fact that budget constraints make it easier to just come up with one look for aliens. It also saves time when they contact a world and apparently have no trouble knowing who to talk to–there is only one country, apparently. I just find it interesting that in most of our imaginings of the future we always go for a homogeneous look when, in reality, there is more diversity than ever. look at an old high school yearbook and it looks like they were stamped out of a machine with very few variable settings. Now the kids are all over the place in looks, haircuts, clothes, etc.

    2. What you’re saying, Bill, reminds me of a routine Paul Reiser did in his HBO special many moons ago.
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      It could be, he suggested, that the guy they dug up was just the “loser” of the group, and all of his paleolithic peers in Neanderthall Heaven are dismayed that he’s the one that’s been dug up as representative of their race.

  13. People have always been very myopic when it comes to social norms.
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    In the early 20th century, lots of scientists tried to falsify any data of animals engaging in sex with the same gender, because homosexual acts were supposed to be an “aberration,” “healthy” individuals had straight sex only, and it was just assumed that the same would hold true for all of human history and even animals.
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    Nowadays, gays are more accepted and have a social identity of their own, and lo and behold, people are starting to get evidence of “gay cavemen.” I very much doubt that in 2500 B.C they had the same sexual politics and roles that we have today.
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    It is far more likely that many males would occasionally engage in sex with other males, without having a “gay” identity. People also are prone to confuse sexual orientation with gender identification and also with the transvestism fetish.
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    Labels are convenient, and sometimes even necessary, but they truly cause people to confuse the map with the land.

    1. It’s in a similar vein, I suppose, that when pederasty became popular among the elder statesmen of ancient Greece, suddenly Zeus acquired Ganymede as his “cup-bearer” (wink wink, nudge nudge) and many of the other gods and heroes followed suit. People do tend to retcon the past to fit their own view of the world, don’t they?

    1. “Dudes! I could be wrong, but I think that to have a ‘gay caveman,’ you need a skeleton that is both gay and a caveman. And this ain’t either!” John Hawks, an associate professor of anthropology at University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote on his blog in bold type.

      My esteemed colleague Mr. Chandler pointed out the same thing without the use of the word “Dudes.” Anthropology with Bill and Ted. I knew I should’ve gone back to school to be a teacher.

    2. Yes, a much more reasonable explanation.
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      The “third gender” in native tribes is more akin to “transexual” than to “gay,” but even so it’s a social role that doesn’t correlate well to our modern social mores.

  15. Jerry Chandler made a good point, although I personally believe that its most likely that the ‘third gendered’ people in Ancient societies were most likely gay/lesbian.

    This all led me to another thought, though.

    Not to be insensitive to the GLBT Community, but I’ve always wondered about a particular ‘class’ of Transgendered: Crossdressers, if they are indeed included in the definition of “GLBT”. At what point is a ‘line’ drawn between a true sexual identity issue and something that can amount to nothing but a fetish (sexual or otherwise)?

    Being a Huge Geek, by the same token I’ve seen people at Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Comic conventions that can be classified as ‘Trans-Species”: if given the chance, they would prefer to live and dress as Klingons (or sexy Cat Girls, regardless of their actual gender 🙂 )all the time. I suppose the most infamous ‘example’ of this would be the lady who, years back, choose to dress in her Starfleet costume while attending jury duty (although it can be argued that she did so to avoid that duty 🙂 ).

    Now, people such as that would rightly be classified as a bit off, but why is a man or a woman who sexually identifies as the gender they were born with but just prefers to dress in the ‘opposite gender’ clothing not looked on the same way.

    Again, not intended as an anti-GLBT statement in any way, just looking at the situation from a uniquely Geek perspective ^_^

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