In the autumn of 2023, several scientific periodicals published articles debunking the myth that, throughout evolution, men did all the hunting and fighting while women tended the hearth and children. According to the author of that article, Sophie Gray, that entire scenario is a recent construction. It was at a symposium in 1966 that the male hunter-gatherer paradigm was posed and it was treated as gospel until this recent research. Why? Because it supported the devaluation of everything women do. Gray wrote that this fiction was “widely wielded as a tool to justify the gender- and sex-based societal stereotypes held by those in power at the time to be the “natural order” of things (Gray, 2023)”.
Another article, “The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong,” written by Cara Ocobock & Sarah Lacy and published in Scientific American in November of 2023, cites almost the same evidence. I like this article very much because there is a fun video embedded in it.
Both articles cite a recent review of ethnographic literature by Abigail Anderson, Sophia Chilczuk, Kaylie Nelson, Roxanne Ruther, and Cara Wall-Scheffler for the prevalence of women hunting in foraging societies now, and whether it supports archaeological evidence that women participated in hunting. Here are some highlights:
Of the 63 contemporary foraging societies with clear descriptions of hunting strategies, 79% of them demonstrated female hunting. The widespread presence of female hunting suggests that females play an instrumental role in hunting, further adding to the data that women contribute disproportionately to the total caloric intake of many foraging groups (Anderson, et al, 2023). In other words, men hunt but women and children hunt as well, and provide more than half of the calories.
In contemporary Agta society, women are way more flexible in the hunt, using a variety of tools, hunting with their friends and kids, and with dogs. Men are far more limited in their toolkit and practices. This evidence challenges the narrative that men adapted to be smarter because they had to learn to hunt. We all hunted.
There is significant evidence that we have always been the primary keepers and users of dogs, which helped keep camp clean, warned of danger, provided fibre and warmth, and were critical to a successful hunt (Bethke & Burtt, 2023).
I will add that perhaps women had to be pretty smart to survive patriarchy.
Anderson, Chilczuk, Nelson, Ruther, & Cara Wall-Scheffler. (2023). The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts. PLoS ONE, 18(6), e0287101. https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.1371/journal.pone.0287101
Bethke, B., & Burtt, A. (Eds.). (2023). Dogs: Archaeology beyond domestication. University Press of Florida. ISBN 9780813066363.
Lacy, S., & Ocobock, C. (2023, November 1). The theory that men evolved to hunt and women evolved to gather is wrong. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-theory-that-men-evolved-to-hunt-and-women-evolved-to-gather-is-wrong1/
Unlearning Patriarchy 