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I was reading this article on coindesk.com. The first line of this article says

"For all we know, the first cave-dweller to rub two sticks together was a misogynist. Or maybe just a mean person."

It got me wondering why would you call that cave-dweller or the guy who invented the fire, a misogynist. Is there a logical reason behind this or is there a story behind all of this?

PS: I don't know if this is the correct StackExchange site to ask this question. If it isn't, please comment the other site and I will remove this question.

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    I think it is only an example; the point of the author is to assert that: "the identity or character of the creator has little, if any, bearing on the value of the creation." – Mauro ALLEGRANZA Nov 26 '17 at 17:26
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    The question is not about logic and hardly about history. – Mauro ALLEGRANZA Nov 26 '17 at 17:27
  • @MauroALLEGRANZA any other tags you would like to suggest? – Aditya Nov 26 '17 at 17:28
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    "journalism" ?<<<<' – Mauro ALLEGRANZA Nov 26 '17 at 17:36
  • The author is not speaking about anthropology; in the same vain, he may had used as example the invention of the telescope, amde by a laymen before Galileo. The concept he is stressing is: "the value of the creative result is independent fron the "value" of the creator". – Mauro ALLEGRANZA Nov 27 '17 at 13:03
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First, let me kill that idea. Anthropologists do not accept the idea that early humans were cave dwellers. While there have been a few groups of people who did, for the most part, caves are not very hospitable environments. They are dark, cold, and wet. A lot of material was found in caves because neanderthals and early anatomically modern humans used these caves as part of their rituals.

As for how misogynistic early humans were, there is a lot of discourse on this matter. Almost certainly there was a lot of division of labor, but it is complicated to determine how these people lived. We usually look to existing hunter-gatherer societies to give us some insight. I need to look into this study more, but it seems to have some useful information related to this topic.

Ignorance & Headlines

Now as to why the article in question makes the claims that it does. For one, it is a matter of ignorance. We are still clinging to a lot of false myths about early humans. For another, it fits an agenda. For these articles, the truth is less important than getting a lot of readers. The topic resonates with a lot of people and so, even if it does not match scientific theory and evidence, it is still a "good" article in the sense that it gets readers.

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Misogyny seems a conceptually rather complex attitude for such an early human to adopt. Could the early human in question have been a woman or is misogyny exclusively a male phenomenon ? Might the male, if it was a male, have been a misandrist rather than, or even as well as, a misogynist ?

Not the least baffling element in the question is that there is no logical, sociological or anthropological connection between fire-lighting and a sexual or gender attitude of any kind. But I guess the questioner knows that, which adds to the puzzlement.

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