Gay Caveman? Uh....

The supposed "gay caveman" (photo courtesy of http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/04/06/article-1374060-0B81BCAD00000578-340_634x520.jpg)

Gay caveman? First of all, I'm not even going to go into the "caveman" part of that and how horribly inaccurate it is because this post is about gender in archaeology. So, onto the "gay" part of it. This assessment fraught with assumptions and biased projections of a modern Western cultural perspective.  First of all, it's entirely possible that the skeleton was sexed incorrectly and that it is indeed a woman, buried with the "proper" female burial. BUT, for the purpose of this blog post, let's assume that the skeleton was indeed sexed correctly and that this is a male buried in the fashion of a female.

After reading some newspaper articles online about the discovery, it's clear to me that the term "gay caveman" is obviously something the media is using, but no so much when it comes to actual archaeologists who acknowledge that the burial possibly indicates the "man" was of a gender other than male or female. The media, by labelling this discovery a "gay caveman," is not inferring something about the person's gender identity but rather their sexual orientation, something that is impossible to tell with archaeological remains such as this. A lot of people seem to often think that one's gender identity is going to directly correspond with a certain sexual orientation, but this is false. For all my fellow "30 Rock" fans our there, I'm going to use an example from the show: Jenna's boyfriend Paul. Paul does drag, but is a heterosexual man. Drag is merely something that he enjoys and implies nothing about his sexual orientation.

This just in: the media is full of turkeys. (photo courtesy of http://cdn.theatlanticwire.com/img/upload/2011/04/gay-caveman-courtesy-abc/large.jpg

We can't even really know the gender identity of this man, especially since he didn't bury himself. We can make some educated guesses about how those who buried him viewed his gender status, and we can speculate that this reflects how he viewed is own gender status. However, there are various possibilities other than the notion that he was physically a man that was identified -- either by himself or his community, or both -- as being a female. There's the possibility that he was a social deviant who was buried improperly for a man as a way to shame him or prevent a proper afterlife. It's also possible that he was some sort of ritual specialist, or some sort of other figure within the community that had special status.

News reporters are also looking at this burial as though it's isolated -- there is no information about whether or not there have been other burials like this found in the area or form other Corded Ware areas, and it does not really acknowledge that outside of the Corded Ware Culture many similar, possibly alternately-gendered graves have been found.

This also shows a case of a sort of double standard. A lot of the time people pay attention to graves where a physical female is buried as a male, and label these women as warrior women or women with higher status in their communities. These are generally not labelled lesbian, transgendered, or transsexual graves. This article http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8433527/First-homosexual-caveman-found.html acknowledges that Siberian shamans of the Corded Ware time would bury male shamans in a similar fashion but with richer funeral accessories -- this is the author's reason for ruling out that this burial may be of a ritual specialist. It does not take into account the fact that maybe resources were scarce when this individual was buried or that some other sort of situation occurred that would call for scaling back the grave goods for a ritual specialist.

My take on the media explosion of the story and the absurdity and idiocy of most of the reporting: don't harp on the archaeologists. The reporters twisted the assessment of what this burial possibly is just for a story. Which is terrible. Most people, outside of the academic discipline of anthropology (or archaeology...), are not going to be reading academically-written articles on this subject and will take what the media tells them at face value. They will assume that what they're being told must be true and will not know any of the actual facts. They take they parts of the story -- in this case, the "man buried in the fashion of a woman" part -- and ignore the other parts in order to have an exciting story. Classic media reporting.

photo courtesy of http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/legacyimg/2009/04/media-bias-2.jpg

Luckily, there are some journalists who will set the others straight.

There is actually an article I found here http://www.salon.com/2011/04/08/gay_caveman_absurdity/ that points out that a lot of journalists writing about the discovery were using the terms transsexual, transgendered, homosexual, and intersexed interchangeably and how utterly idiotic this is. This same article points out that the discovery could be exciting for the reason that it can remind those people with a rigid view of gender and what it is that gender is really a fluid concept and that it's probably been this way since the concept of gender was first socially constructed by our ancestors, which could (hopefully) show the less-than-accepting people in our world that homosexuality and genders outside the Western binary of male and female have existed in our species forever and are therefore natural and a part of who we are.

This article http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/04/17/gay-caveman-probably-not-gay-or-a-caveman/ actually points out a lot of the kinds of things I've said up until this point and is probably the most accurate and thoughtful piece of reporting on the find I've found so far (even pointing out, in addition to the diversity in human gender and sexual behaviour, the sociosexual behaviour of bonobos as evidence that the common North American heteronormative views are just strange...). It takes into account a much more academic standpoint on the discovery and the interpretation of it, and condemns the misinformed and attention-seeking news reporters that came up with and disseminated the term "gay caveman."