by Angela Saini
But for some anthropologists, this way of characterizing the past struck a bum note. For one thing, it utterly diminished the role of women. This wasn’t even a time when sexism could go easily unchecked. Universities were starting to offer courses in women’s studies and gender studies, and female life scientists and social scientists were becoming famous in their fields. Primatology was on its way to becoming a female-dominated discipline. How could anthropologists now claim that women were the sidekicks in human history? By the end of the conference a growing cadre of scientists—many of them women, but some men too—were outraged. Already marginalized for decades, the hunting hypothesis was threatening to airbrush women out of the evolutionary story altogether.
Capturing their feelings, in 1970 anthropologist Sally Linton (later publishing under the name Sally Slocum) presented a provocative retort at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting. It was titled “Woman the Gatherer: Male Bias in Anthropology.” Her words echoed those of suffragist Eliza Burt Gamble, whose critique of Charles Darwin and his contemporaries had been published around eighty years earlier. Linton passionately condemned her field as one that had been “developed primarily by white Western males, during a specific period in history.” Given this bias, she said, it wasn’t surprising that anthropologists had failed to ask just what it was females were doing while the males were out hunting.
“A theory that leaves out half of the human species is unbalanced,” Linton announced. “While this reconstruction is certainly ingenious, it gives one the decided impression that only half the species—the male half—did any evolving.”
The focus of her complaint was the notion that women were somehow not equal providers for their families. Experts at the 1966 “Man the Hunter” conference already knew this wasn’t true. In fact, one organizer, Richard Lee, had been the very anthropologist to establish the immense importance of women in sourcing food. His fieldwork had shown that, while often not hunters of big animals, women were responsible for getting hold of every other kind of food, including plants, roots, and tubers, as well as small animals and fish. Men were the hunters, but women were the gatherers.
Gathering was arguably a more important source of calories than hunting. In 1979 Lee noted that among the !Kung hunter-gatherers in Africa, women’s gathering provided as much as two-thirds of food in the group’s diet. As well as feeding their families, women were often also responsible for cooking, setting up shelter, and helping with hunts. And they did all this at the same time as being pregnant and raising children.
By elevating hunting, anthropologists were willfully ignoring women, according to Sally Linton. She reasoned that the hunting hypothesis couldn’t possibly explain as much about human evolution as it claimed to. If hunting by men was what drove communication, cooperation, and language in our species, then why were there so few psychological differences between men and women? The original social bond in any human society would clearly have been between a mother and her child, she added, not between hunters. And what about the intellectual challenges of raising children? “Caring for a curious, energetic, but still dependent human infant is difficult and demanding. Not only must the infant be watched, it must be taught the customs, dangers and knowledge of its group,” she added.
The title of Linton’s passionate talk, “Woman the Gatherer,” was seen as the female counterpoint to “Man the Hunter.” And it became a rallying cry for other researchers who were determined to bring women to the heart of the human evolutionary story.
Adrienne Zihlman, now a prominent anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, had been teaching for a few years by the time Sally Linton addressed the American Anthropological Association in 1970. “It really struck a note,” Zihlman tells me. We are sitting in her home in San Francisco, a stack of papers and books in front us on the table. One book, which she wrote a chapter for in 1981, is titled Woman the Gatherer.
“Women were invisible. It’s hard for you to imagine what that was like. It was making women visible for the first time,” Zihlman continues. She was deeply inspired by Linton and decided to follow up on her ideas and build hard data around them, digging up evidence from observations of hunter-gatherers, primates, and fossils. Through detailed research like this, living with hunter-gatherers, and dissecting their lives, anthropologists and ethnologists like her now finally understand just how mobile, active, and hard working women really are.
One important myth to be cracked was that males were always the main inventors and tool users in our past. Zihlman is convinced this is wrong. While chimpanzees tend to pick and eat their food alone and on the spot, at some point in history humans began to gather and bring it back home to share. They would have needed containers to hold all this food, as well as slings to carry their babies while they gathered—and both probably before anyone created stone hunting tools. These are likely to have been the earliest human inventions, she says, and they would have been used by women. One of the earliest tools, meanwhile, would have been the “digging stick.” She tells me that female gatherers to this day use digging sticks to uncover roots and tubers and kill small animals. They’re as multifunctional as Swiss army knives.
What digging sticks, slings, and food bags all have in common, though, is that they’re wooden or made of skin or fiber, which means they break down and disappear over time. They leave no trace in the fossil record, unlike hardwearing stone tools that archaeologists have assumed are used for hunting. This is one reason, adds Zihlman, that women’s inventions, and consequently women themselves, may have been neglected by evolutionary researchers.
Other species provide clues, too, that suggest hunting and toolmaking are not exclusively male domains. The primatologist Jane Goodall has shown through her intimate observations of chimpanzees that females are more skilled at using simple tools and cracking nuts with hard shells than males are. This is partly because they spend more time doing it. Zihlman points out in a paper in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology in 2012 that young chimpanzees learn from their mothers to “fish” for termites and that their daughters spend more time watching them than their sons. Some chimpanzees have even been spotted hunting for small animals, such as squirrels, using sticks that they bite off into sharp points. “It is predominantly females, particularly adolescent females, that hunt this way, doing so almost three times as often as males,” she writes.
Other scientists have also tallied how many calories hunter-gatherers bring home to their families and how this breaks down by sex. They’ve reinforced earlier observations that the food brought home by women is vital to keeping everyone alive.
Men’s contribution to calories from hunting varies hugely, depending both on the society and the environment they’re in, explains Richard Bribiescas at Yale University, who has done fieldwork with the !Kung in East Africa and the Aché hunter-gatherers in eastern Paraguay. “For example, in the group that I worked with years ago, the Aché, they were bringing in 60 percent of the calories. In groups like the !Kung, men were bringing in 30 percent of the calories. It also makes a difference in the type of game they’re going after. In the !Kung, for example, they were going after very large, high-risk game like giraffe. It was boom or bust. Whereas with the Aché in Paraguay, the largest thing they would hunt would be the tapir, which is about the size of the small pig. They were getting a lot of small animals, which are a lot more reliable. So it really varies with the environment,” says Bribiescas.
In a 2002 paper in the Journal of Human Evolution, anthropology professors at the University of Utah James O’Connell and Kristen Hawkes confirmed that hunting is rarely a reliable source of food. Observing more than two thousand days of hunting and scavenging, they estimated that the Hadza in northern Tanzania, for instance, successfully brought home a large animal carcass only one hunting day in thirty. In none of the societies that have been studied do men bring home all the food. At worst, they bring in far less than half. This means that relying on male hunting, i
n many places, would leave families hungry.
“Something beyond family provisioning was needed to explain men’s work,” Hawkes and her colleagues have written. They’ve argued that the reason male hunter-gatherers persist with hunting big animals rather than gathering or chasing smaller prey, like women tend to do, is that it offers them an arena to show off to others, boosting their status and attracting mates.
But the question of who does more for the survival of their families remains a bone of contention. Hawkes’s observations have been challenged by anthropology professors Michael Gurven at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Kim Hill at Arizona State University. In a 2009 paper they published in the journal Current Anthropology, titled “Why Do Men Hunt?,” they revisit the hunting hypothesis. Gathering plants, done mainly by women, can be a risky source of food, they argue. Plants are often seasonal, for instance. And men in some societies, including the Aché hunter-gatherers in Paraguay, do target small, more reliable game, suggesting that they aren’t just looking to display their hunting prowess.
Rebecca Bliege Bird, a professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University’s College of the Liberal Arts, meanwhile believes that researchers such as Gurven and Hill cling to the hunting hypothesis because of the communities they’ve happened to study, in particular, the Aché. “Some people’s ideas about what hunting and gathering were like in the past tend to be shaped by the society they’ve spent most of their time in,” she explains. “In Oceania, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, women contribute a lot to production. And in other places, like South America, women contribute less to production.”
She adds that the evidence to date makes the hunting hypothesis nothing less than “old-fashioned and ridiculous.”
The other myth around the hunting hypothesis is the question of language and intelligence. Were anthropologists right in thinking that male hunters drove forward the development of human communication and brain size? Sarah Hrdy’s work on infants and mothers has supported Sally Linton’s suggestion that language probably evolved, not through hunting, but more likely through the complex and subtle interactions between babies and their caregivers. Over generations, Hrdy explains, babies that were just a little better at gauging what others were thinking and feeling were the ones most likely to be cared for. “They have to engage and appeal to others. They have to understand what someone else is going to like,” she adds. This quest for engagement could have provided the original urge to communicate, pushing our ancestors beyond simple chimp-like calls toward sophisticated language.
More recent research has bolstered this idea. In the summer of 2016, Steven Piantadosi and Celeste Kidd in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester, New York, published evidence in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that child care may have been one major factor in driving up human intelligence. Human babies are particularly immature and helpless when they’re born, compared to other mammals. One reason for this is that their heads are so big—to make room for their large human brains—that if they were born much later, they simply wouldn’t fit through their mothers’ birth canals. “Caring for these children, in turn, requires more intelligence—thus even larger brains,” write Piantadosi and Kidd.
A runaway evolutionary process, in which brains got even bigger and babies were born even earlier, could explain why humans eventually became as smart as they are now.
The picture all this leaves us with is very different from that of the sedentary, weak, and dependent woman that some evolutionary biologists have painted in the past.
“When you see pictures of what these women can do, they’re pretty strong,” Adrienne Zihlman tells me. In her chapter in the 1981 book Woman the Gatherer, she includes a striking image, shot by anthropologist Richard Lee, showing a seven-month pregnant !Kung woman striding through the Kalahari like an athlete. She’s supporting a three-year-old child on her shoulders, brandishing a digging stick in one hand, and hauling the food she’s gathered on her back to take home.
Seen from an evolutionary context, strength like this makes sense. Our sedentary lifestyles and beauty ideals that prize skinniness and fragility in women over size and strength can blind us to what women’s bodies are capable of. But if the lives of modern-day hunter-gatherers are anything to go by, our female ancestors would have done plenty of hard physical work. Subsistence living, which is the way humans survived for several million years before they settled into food production of their own around ten thousand years ago, is so tough that they wouldn’t have had any other choice. Millions of women around the world now still have no option but to do hard, heavy work to survive.
Women are also known to be particularly good at endurance running, notes Marlene Zuk, who runs a lab focusing on evolutionary biology at the University of Minnesota. In her 2013 book Paleofantasy, she writes that women’s running abilities decline extremely slowly into old age. They’ve been known to go long distances even while pregnant. One example is Amber Miller, an experienced runner who in 2011 ran the Chicago marathon before giving birth seven hours later. English runner and world record holder Paula Radcliffe has also trained through two pregnancies.
For a large chunk of early human history, when humans migrated out of Africa to the rest of the world, women would have traveled hundreds or thousands of miles, sometimes under extreme environmental conditions. If they were pregnant or carrying infants, the daily physical pressures on them would have been far greater than those faced by men. “Just reproducing and surviving in these conditions, talk about natural selection!” says Zihlman. “Women have to reproduce. That means being pregnant for nine months. They’ve got to lactate. They’ve got to carry these kids. There’s something about being a human female that was shaped by evolution. There’s a lot of mortality along the way that really can account for it.”
This may even explain the mystery of why women are on average biologically better survivors than men are. “There is something about the female form, the female psyche, just the whole package, that was honed over thousands and thousands, even millions of years to survive and spread around the world,” says Zihlman.
The harsh realities of subsistence living would also have forced women and men to be flexible and share workloads. “The thing about hunter-gatherer societies is that there is less rigid division of human labor because everybody learns everything,” she explains. In our ancient past, thousands of years ago, it’s even possible that men would have been far more involved in child care and gathering while women would have been hunters.
“Being a woman hunter is a matter of choice.”
“I was up the river, and I saw a couple of women with bows and arrows. That was 1972,” recounts anthropologist Bion Griffin, an emeritus professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He and fellow anthropologist Agnes Estioko-Griffin (they are married) are speaking to me over an unreliable line from the Philippines, where they both live.
Bion describes his first eye-opening trip to the island of Luzon in the Philippines. It’s home to a tiny hunter-gatherer community known as the Nanadukan Agta. Today, logging, farming, and migration have changed the Agta way of life utterly, drawing them away from subsistence living and integrating them into the farms around them. They share this fate with many of the other remaining hunter-gatherers around the world. But forty years ago the Griffins were lucky enough to catch the tail end of the Agta’s old way of life. The Nanadukan Agta were then known to fish and hunt regularly for wild game such as pigs and deer, using bows, arrows, and the help of dogs.
What made them unusual, though, was that Agta women hunted and fished.
Women hunters are not unheard of. In the 1970s the scientific literature included a few references to female hunters scattered across the globe, all the way from the Tiwi people in hot Australia to the Inuit in the cold Arctic north. But Nanadukan Agta women were perhaps the most enthusiastic and regular female hunters of all. “We found first of all that within thi
s particular group, a considerable number of women hunted,” Bion tells me. “A lot of women don’t carry bows but will use knives, or knives strapped onto a sapling that’s been cut down, in order to finish off a cornered deer or a pig that the dogs are holding. . . . And we found that there were a few women that loved to hunt. We found out that they were very successful in hunting.”
Women hunted even when they had alternative ways of feeding themselves, adds Agnes. She recounts one time when the men of the group went off for several days on a hunt. Rather than gathering roots or fruits or trading with local farmers, a group of women went out on their own and killed a pig. “It was their choice to go off hunting,” she explains. Bion adds, “It varies from women opportunistically hunting and killing when traveling in the forest, including when they’re carrying their babies and kids with them, to young grandmothers or very mature women who had a long history of hunting but who have no real demands on child care, except the usual grandmothers always helping out and taking care.”
Agnes Estioko-Griffin published some of these findings in a paper in 1985. She noted that every able-bodied Agta, male or female, knew how to spearfish. Of twenty-one women above the age of fourteen in the group, fifteen were hunters, four had hunted in the past, and only two didn’t know how to hunt. In half of all the hunting trips she observed, men and women hunted together. If there were differences, they were in the way women tended to hunt. For instance, a woman never went alone, to avoid the risk of people suspecting that she was having a secret tryst with a lover. Women hunters were also more likely to use dogs to help with the kill.