Gay Cavemen

For this weeks blog we were given the blog prompt:  Google “Gay Caveman” - What are your reactions to this? What you find?

The first site I came across when I searched "Gay Cavemen" was a website that stated archaeologists had found a 5,000 year old gay cavemen, which is perhaps the oldest homosexual cavemen ever found. This was intriguing to me because I had not thought about individuals of 'being gay' thousands of years ago, considering 'being gay' is still an issue today. However, of course when you think about it logically individuals have never chosen to be gay that is the way they are are born and created. By looking at our previous ancestors they too must have figured that out. 

(Gay Cavemen positioned like a women)

(Daily Mail, 2011)

The image above shows the gay cavemen's body, which was dated to 2900-2500BC and buried in a way normally reserved for women in the Corded War culture in the Copper Age. This skeleton was found in a Prague suburb in the Czech Republic. How this man was buried is very different from other men and women from this time. The body was found facing east placed on his left side which is not a commonly known characteristic of male burials. In his grave, none of the burial goods like weapons, hammers, knives were found which is peculiar for this time frame and males in general.This was thought to be the first transsexual or third gender grave based on the view that the goods were not gender specific. Therefore, they stated that this person may be viewed as neither male, nor female, or a combination of the both. They later thought differently and changed the grave to be homosexual. This led archaeologists to believe this was the first homosexual cavemen in history. 

The articles on this topic are very interesting because there are many different views that come about as to whether or not this person is homosexual or  third gender. People also question why the burial resembled more closely to a female grave than a males. I think that these questions are all valid because it is important to figure out how to tell whether homosexuality is able to be determined by looking at a dead body. I am sure there are many homosexual, lesbian, and transgender burials still out there. I also believe that a lot of burials have most likely been mislabelled all along due to not recognizing signs or misinformation. This is an interesting topic because it focuses on an issue that is still relevant in our society today and also can provide hard evidence that individuals have been gay for thousands of years. I think that looking at sexuality is very important in order to understand past civilizations because it helps clarify concepts that archaeologists have been wondering about for a long time. 

References: 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8433527/First-homosexual-caveman-found.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1374060/Gay-caveman-5-000-year-old-male-skeleton-outed-way-buried.html