alt Hacker NewsThis is very common in Indian villages too. As small kids we used to carry 30-40 kgs of green grass bundles on our heads in the mornings. Girls definitely carried more than their body weight. People carried a stack of pots on their heads with full of water. Carrying two equal weights hung from the two ends of a bamboo bar (kaavidi) on your shoulder is extremely common. There was even a folk story of a boy who carried his two parents on a kaavidi wherever he went.
But none of that farm work was seen as something special. It's just a routine thing. Media and academic research makes things look special and interesting. Samething goes for romanticism, mystery, fiction as well.
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Did you move the results of number one and number two also in clay pots on your heads?
>kaavidi
This is an interesting word. Halfway across the Alpo-Himalayan backbone the word for this tool is "kobilitsa", cognate to "kobila" (female horse) and I always figured it was a metaphor for the arched form of the bar (and probably referring to how women were stuck with the task of fetching water with it).
But now it seems the word "kaavidi" has reached our ancestral lifestyle all the way from the Indian lands! And the transformation it underwent was more due to how people "normalize" foreign words; same linguistic churn that gives us backronyms and false etymologies (see also "eggcorn"). Whoa
I presume linguists have already studied the naming of household implements when deriving Proto-Indo-European. I've never encountered much literature on the subject, nonetheless I find the subject rather fascinating.