Which famous old magazine has gotten more Woke during its Internet Age decline: Teen Vogue, Cosmo, Forbes, or Scientific American?
The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong
The influential idea that in the past men were hunters and women were not isn’t supported by the available evidence
By Cara Ocobock, Sarah Lacy on November 1, 2023
Scientific American November 2023 Issue
The idea that women did some hunting in some cultures sounds like a sure bet, but the anthropologist authors can’t help themselves from overstating their case hugely in the name of feminism.
… It also bears mentioning that much of the research into exercise physiology, paleoanthropology, archaeology and ethnography has historically been conducted by men and focused on males. … In studies focusing on athletic performance, Emma Cowley of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her colleagues found, only 3 percent of publications had female-only participants; 63 percent of publications looked exclusively at males. This massive disparity means we still know very little about female athletic performance, training and nutrition, leaving athletic trainers and coaches to mostly treat females as small males. It also means that much of the work we have to rely on to make our physiological arguments about female hunters in prehistory is based on research with small human sample sizes or rodent studies.
Nah, we actually know a huge amount about female athletic performance. You can download immense amounts of track and field data on men and women.
… The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.
That’s silly. Why put obviously false statements in your article?
Now when you think of “cave people,” we hope, you will imagine a mixed-sex group of hunters encircling an errant reindeer or knapping stone tools together rather than a heavy-browed man with a club over one shoulder and a trailing bride. Hunting may have been remade as a masculine activity in recent times, but for most of human history, it belonged to everyone.
These kinds of categorical overstatements make the authors sound silly. The problem with intellectual discourse these days is that saying absurd things rather than hedging down to some reasonable Not All Cavewomen statement is safer these days if you belong to a Protected Group, like women, and thus can dismiss your critics as Sexists who are too Sexist to be listened to.
I can’t imagine prehistoric women stabbing woolly mammoths with spears was a regular practice.
But what about snare-hunting rabbits? Or, more interestingly, women bowhunting small game? I found a survey claiming that 16% of bowhunters in the US at present are female.
Sounds overstated … But still, the idea of some kind of link between women and the bow has deep roots. See Artemis, the virgin huntress.
A famous scene in the TV show about the British royal family, The Crown, shows Prince Philip taking teenage Lady Diana Spencer on a stag hunt to see if she really is princess material.
As far as I can tell, screenwriter Peter Morgan made up this part, but it’s so redolent of ancient Indo-European tropes about Artemis/Diana as the virgin goddess of the hunt that it works:
On the other hand, how big was the game that even a strong woman could expect to kill with an arrow before the invention of the compound bow?
The recent cultural history of women participating in bow sports and hunting in 19th Century Britain is extremely well documented. In the English-speaking world, archery in general fell out of fashion during the musket days, but then became fashionable again around 1830. During Victorian times, archery target shooting (but seldom, so far as I can tell, bowhunting) was highly trendy among ladies.
Similarly, riding to hounds, or foxhunting, became co-ed around 1860 when Victorian lady hunting enthusiasts started riding horses astride rather than side saddle (you can’t jump fences riding side saddle and expect to survive). [Note: I’m probably wrong about this.]
By the early 20th century, women foxhunters were utterly common. For example, in P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories, Bertie Wooster’s favorite aunt, Dahlia, is famous for her loud voice that had long resounded across the most storied fox-hunting grounds of England:
“Go away, you crazy loon!” cried Aunt Dahlia, in that ringing voice of hers which had once caused nervous members of the Quorn to lose stirrups and take tosses from the saddle.
In general, some upper class English young women were competing, with the broad approval of Society, in various kinds of sport by the later 19th century at the peak tide of Victorianism. For instance, the first Ladies Singles lawn tennis championship was held at Wimbledon in 1884.
So, women and hunting down through history and prehistory sounds like an interesting topic with some cultures encouraging some female participation and other cultures discouraging it categorically.
I’d hardly be surprised if on average the optimal amount of meat generated by females hunting would be in the, say, 1% to 5% range depending on the local ecology and technology (e.g., has the bow been introduced yet?).
But, of course, a lot of cultures would decide that small advantage isn’t worth the social disruptions that women hunting would cause, so they just ban it completely.
One problem contemporary feminist anthropologists like the authors have is that it’s now considered in poor taste to point out that indigenous tribes have often been sexist social constructionists. Partly because of their small numbers and limited technology, they often tend to devise simple sex roles that follow strict gender lines rather than try to accommodate the small number of Aunt Dahlias who were born to hunt. (Other times, probably, the reverse happens and small tribes need to make use of every individual to survive.)
But, to 21st century anthropologists, indigenous tribes are the Good People, so it’s in poor taste to point out the sexism of many tribes. In contrast, American capitalism is the Bad Thing, so you aren’t supposed to notice that our giant capitalist economy is amazingly good at seeking out niche markets, such as women who like to hunt, and finding ways to encourage them.
