Why Did Ancient Humans Have Kids at 12?
Noxenn / Volt / Dodoz | 11 July 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F63f-UivWU
3:22 "in parts of Europe"
Norway, Scotland, maybe Sweden, Denmark, England, maybe Hamburg and Berlin ....
Sure, less good nutrition, and lots of the year with no light much of the day.
5:28 No decade long time when body and hormones say "adult" and society replies "child" ...
Thank you, Old Rome (also followed by Christians).
7:21 "and your offspring will benefit from a more mature and more resourceful parent"
Well, not if teens and single life drive some to suicide or if some are socially held back from being considered mature anyway, as per psychiatry or child protective services.
Those factors don't just delay, they handicap even after the delay is over.
[tried to add:
Not to mention the clear non-benefit of being aborted since mother is considered "too young"]
8:01 Pelvis, trade off.
BEST time for first child birth is between 17 and 25. Now consider that as a point, a limit.
Before that, down to 13, the pelvis is narrower, but more malleable, after that the pelvis is wider but harder.
30 is riskier than 13, other things being equal. At least according to the Gynaecology professor of my mother.
8:25 "it cost lives"
I'm going to a study on Ethiopia, where young childbirth is pretty common.*
Result: A total of 61 studies met inclusion criteria, encompassing all Ethiopian regions. The pooled MMR was estimated at 366.6 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, showing only modest progress from previous decades.
This was between 2015 and 2015
13:21 With some modification.
Biologically ready can happen between 9 and 18, but the younger years were in fact cut off in Christendom, as in Ancient Rome, due to a legal age of 14 for the male and 12 for the female participant of a marriage.
20 secs up to 14:05
We look back at 12-year-old brides and young mothers in the ancient world, and we feel a very natural, very justified sense of unease, sometimes horror. And honestly, that reaction is appropriate given what we now know about adolescent development, about the risks of early pregnancy, about the psychological and physical toll it took.
Count me out from this "we" and I object to "justified" and ""what we now know".
That early pregnancy is a risk was always obvious. But for very long this risk has been mitigated by good medicine. Waiting to 30 is objectively speaking riskier. It works out in Sweden, and wouldn't work out in Ethiopia, for the same reason that many of the teen mothers who die in Ethiopia would have survived in Sweden.
Adolescent development is an ideal age for the bonding that needs to take place in a marriage. And the two last items, "psychological and physical toll" are simply redundant for the first two items.
In other words, you are uselessly catastrophising about it.
15:25 "Began climbing steadily across most of the world."
You frame it as a kind of very natural development.
In fact, it was more of a project starting in 1880's US, among other centres. Making early teen marriages illegal. By now, that policy is being viewed as "the natural course of things" and early pregnancies are often death sentences due to that culture and to legal abortion.
In Italy, at least, under Il Duce, a mother of 14 who aborted went to prison, as older mothers and a mother under 14 who aborted, whoever legally put her up to it (she hadn't legally consented to abortion) went even longer to prison. However, normal marital age was 18 / 18, as it had been since the Risorgimento (and somewhat earlier in Sardegna), and getting married earlier was, if at all possible, then as a derogation when a girl was already pregnant.
In Austria, under Francis Joseph II, a woman of 21 could marry without asking her parents, but a girl of 14 could marry with parental permission. AEIOU.
16:05 "how far our species has travalled" ... into brutal abortion mills, among other things.
* Maternal mortality in Ethiopia (2015-2025): a systematic review of recent evidence and determinants
Merga Abdissa Aga 1, Ding-Geng Chen 2 3
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41462176/
BMC Public Health. 2025 Dec 29;26(1):539. doi: 10.1186/s12889-025-26101-w.