Oh my goodness. This blows my mind. I love it. Please read it. Here are some things I just learned from this text:
"Everybody had just taken this man-the-#hunter hypothesis for granted. So no one really decided to evaluate it," says Haas. "It wasn't really a question on a lot of people's minds."
In 79% of societies, women did hunt.
And my favourite:
The best hunters were grandmothers.
@suvidu
"…the myth that man is the hunter and woman is the gatherer is probably the second most enduring myth that naturalizes the inferiority of women."
Men made this up to supress women. I think.
@Esssie31 @suvidu Funny: I've always considered the hunter-gatherer distinction to be pro-feminist, because even if there once was a need for men to be larger and stronger in order to survive "out in the world," that time is long past.
My next question is: if men weren't going longer distances, hunting larger more dangerous animals, and encountering more dangerous predators/enemy humans etc. as a result, then why did men evolve to be physically larger and stronger on average than women?
@msbellows
Well, it would mean women were more or less unable to survive without men in the wild. I do not consider this "pro-feminist".
And we never know why things evolved in a certain way. Evolution has no aim and happens by chance. Maybe it is just because in the species we evolved from, the males had to fight each other for the possibility to mate.
@Esssie31
@Esssie31
This is a possibility. But as male mammals can never be sure it's really their offspring, I would rather put my chances on them fighting for mating possibilities. The more, the better.
But we'll never know for sure :-)
@msbellows
How woke is The Stone Age: Alpha Grannies!
@TheWokeWanda
Fortunately, the concept of alpha beings is long proven to be wrong, even in wolves where it originated from false study subjects :-)
Nowadays we know: alpha is just an unfinished product, like alpha releases of software ;-)
Best part of the story:
A team in Peru found a 9,000-year-old person buried with an unusually large number of hunting tools. "We all just assumed this individual was a male," he recalls. "Everybody is sitting around, saying things like, 'Wow! This is amazing. He must have been a great hunter, a great warrior. Maybe he was a chief!"
...then a colleague who specialized in analyzing bone structure arrived and delivered a bombshell assessment: The remains seemed to be female.
@suvidu I skimmed the original paper last week and, as the NPR piece gets at, there is some subtlety here. The headlines kinda give an impression of "See? The mastodon hunting parties were probably 50/50."
Women DO hunt more than is commonly thought, but in most cultures there are still sex differences. Men and women usually use different tools and techniques, go for different sorts of game, etc..
Still, in ~1/3 of that 79% of their sample women hunt LARGE game, which is cool to know!
@suvidu What I didn't see when I looked through the paper (which may well be my failing) was how common within a given culture hunting men or women were. Is this something done by 90% of men but only 50% of women, for example? Or the reverse? Or is it about the same? The study seemed to be more about whether the practice EXISTS among women in each culture and less about how common it is.
Anyway, the article is not paywalled if anyone wants to look:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287101
The sexual division of labor among human foraging populations has typically been recognized as involving males as hunters and females as gatherers. Recent archeological research has questioned this paradigm with evidence that females hunted (and went to war) throughout the Homo sapiens lineage, though many of these authors assert the pattern of women hunting may only have occurred in the past. The current project gleans data from across the ethnographic literature to investigate the prevalence of women hunting in foraging societies in more recent times. Evidence from the past one hundred years supports archaeological finds from the Holocene that women from a broad range of cultures intentionally hunt for subsistence. These results aim to shift the male-hunter female-gatherer paradigm to account for the significant role females have in hunting, thus dramatically shifting stereotypes of labor, as well as mobility.
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