You know the theory that men, with their laserlike focus and glistening upper-body muscles, are intrinsically hunters? And women, with their blobby sedentary natures and passion for making corn-husk dolls, are intrinsically gatherers?
This theory has been known since 1968 as “Man the Hunter.” It’s false.
That’s right, big news in Scientific American this month. A new article by anthropologists Cara Ocobock and Sarah A. Lacy synthesizes the research that decisively debunks Man the Hunter, which held that:
Human ancestors had a division of labor, rooted in biological differences between males and females, in which males evolved to hunt and provide, and females tended to children and domestic duties. It assumes that males are physically superior to females and that pregnancy and child-rearing reduce or eliminate a female's ability to hunt.
Just one of the many problems Ocobock and Lacy reveal in the Man the Hunter theory is that female physiological evolution—and especially the biology of estrogen—didn’t factor at all into the argument that female humans don’t hunt. That’s odd. The estrogen receptor is around 600 million to 1.2 billion years old—roughly twice as old as the testosterone receptor—and new research shows it increases fatty acid oxidation, improves muscle recovery, and increases growth hormones. The collection of work on this subject, “Man the Hunter” (1968), which was published when it was widely believed women couldn’t run marathons, never even allows for female athleticism.
A second problem with Man the Hunter involves Hitoshi Watanabe, an academic who analyzed ethnographic data about the Ainu, an Indigenous population in northern Japan. Reviewing his work, auditors discovered he simply dismissed the copious evidence that Ainu women hunted, often with the aid of dogs. Instead, according to Scientific American, Hitoshi Watanabe “placed the focus squarely on men as the primary meat winners.” In short, ethnographic data spanning the past 100 years show that women from a wide range of cultures hunt and used to hunt animals for food. The Man the Hunter theory ignored all of this.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Magic + Loss to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.