Research shows women are hunters too. It’s a familiar story to many of us: In prehistoric times, men were hunters and women were gatherers. Women were not physically capable of hunting because their anatomy was different from men. And because men were hunters, they drove human evolution.
However, this story is not true, according to research by University of Delaware anthropology professor Sarah Lacy, recently published in two articles in Scientific American and American Anthropologist.
Lacy and her colleague Cara Ocobock of the University of Notre Dame studied the sexual division of labor in the Paleolithic era, about 2.5 million to 12,000 years ago. Through a review of existing archaeological evidence and literature, researchers found little evidence to support the idea that roles were specifically assigned to each gender.
The team also examined female physiology and found that not only were women physically capable of being hunters, but there was also little evidence to support that they did not hunt.
Lacy is a biological anthropologist who studies the health of early humans, and Okobock is a physiologist who draws analogies between the present and the fossil record. The researchers collaborated after complaining about a series of papers that used this putative null hypothesis that cavemen had a strong sexual division of labor, men hunting, women gathering. Lacy asks, “Why is this the default? “We have overwhelming evidence that this is not the case.” says.
Researchers have found examples of equality for both sexes in ancient tools, diet, art, burial customs, and anatomy. “People found things in the past and automatically gendered them as male, and they didn’t acknowledge the fact that everyone we found in the past had these markings, whether it was on their bones or on the stone tools placed in their graves,” Lacy said. We can’t really tell who did what, can we? We cannot say, ‘Oh, it’s just men’s flint’ because there is no signature left on the stone tool to show who made it. “But from the evidence we have, there appears to be almost no gender difference in roles.” says.
The team also examined the question of whether anatomical and physiological differences between men and women prevent women from hunting. They found that men had an advantage over women in activities that required speed and strength, such as sprinting and throwing, but women had an advantage over men in activities that required endurance, such as running. Both sets of activities were necessary for hunting in ancient times.
The team emphasized that the estrogen hormone, which is more prominent in women than in men, is an important component in providing this advantage. Estrogen can increase fat metabolism, which provides muscles with a longer-lasting energy source and prevents muscle wear and tear by regulating muscle breakdown. Scientists have traced estrogen receptors, proteins that guide the hormone to the right place in the body, back 600 million years.
“When we look deeper into anatomy and modern physiology and look at the skeletal remains of ancient humans, we see that there are no differences in trauma patterns between men and women because they were doing the same activities,” Lacy said. says.
In the Paleolithic era, most people lived in small groups. The idea that only part of the group would hunt didn’t make sense to Lacy. “You live in such a small society. You really have to be very flexible. Everyone needs to be able to take on any role at any time. “This seems like an obvious thing, but people didn’t perceive it that way.”
The theory that men were hunters and women were gatherers first became famous in 1968, when anthropologists Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore published “Man the Hunter,” a collection of scientific papers presented at a symposium in 1966.
The authors suggested that hunting advanced human evolution by adding meat to prehistoric diets, contributing to the growth of larger brains compared to our primate cousins. The authors assumed that all hunters were male.
Lacy points to the gender bias of previous scholars as one reason why the concept became widely accepted in the academic world and eventually spread into popular culture. Cartoons on television, feature films, museum exhibitions and textbooks reinforced this idea. When female academics published research to the contrary, their work was largely ignored or devalued.
“There were women publishing about this in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, but their work was constantly treated as, ‘Oh, this is a feminist critique or a feminist approach,'” Lacy said. This was before any studies on genetics, and many studies on physiology and the role of estrogen. “We wanted to both re-emphasize the arguments they had previously put forward and add new things to them.” says.
Lacy says the “man the hunter” theory continues to influence the discipline. While he acknowledges that much more research needs to be done on the lives of prehistoric people, especially women, he hopes that his view that labor was divided between both sexes will become the default approach for research in the future.
Lacy says that for 3 million years, both men and women participated in subsistence gathering activities for their communities, and dependence on meat and hunting was maintained by both sexes. “This is not just something that men do and therefore male behavior drives evolution. The gender roles we actually assume today are not innate, nor do they characterize our ancestors. “For millions of years, we were a very egalitarian species in many ways.”
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