Men Hunt, Women Gather?
Public consciousness of gender is shaped by stereotypes about how men and women should behave, even if we reject those sterotypes and the simple binary distinction they presume.
You've probably heard the phrase "men hunt, women gather". The idea is that hunting was once essential to human survival. Men hunted because they're naturally stronger and faster. Women, tied to the home by the demands of childrearing, were left to gather plants.
This idea was spelled out in a 1966 symposium and then book entitled "Man the Hunter" that strongly influenced anthropology and other fields. Since the beginning the idea has attracted controversy. Feminists, understandably, hated the assumption that biology is destiny as well as the implicit (or not so implicit) hint that women should stay at home while men go out hunting for mammoths, or promotions, or whatever. Anthropologists themselves argued over the theory and the data.
Meanwhile, this tidy little division of labor, being consistent with other gender stereotypes, quickly became a meme. It became a go-to as well for stand-up comedians – the surest sign that an idea is embedded in public consciousness. (Iliza Schlesinger: “They say men are hunters and women are gatherers — well, kind of. Women are gatherers. We like to gather information about [guys]… and then we hunt you.”)
Recent studies, including one published last week, are continuing to dismantle this meme. Rather than being an astute generalization about human evolution, it now seems like a dying cliche. In a word, the new data confirm that women hunt too. (Presumably, so do people who would've identified as non-binary if their culture permitted.)
I want to share the newest of these studies with you, then say a bit about the media coverage.
What I like about this topic (because I'm a huge nerd) is that it illustrate how our society has been statisfied, or transformed by modern statistics. Anthropologists, as well as the journalists who discuss their work, are referencing statistical concepts that their pre-20th century peers would not have mentioned.
Background for the new study
The study I'll be discussing builds on recent archeological work questioning whether hunting was once a primarily male activity.
If you think sexism isn't woven into science, you should see some of the older studies in this literature. Researchers have practically stood on their heads to discount evidence that prehistoric women hunted.
When a sharp, projectile-like object is found next to a male skeleton, the presumption has been that the object is a hunting tool and the male was a hunter.
When a similar object is found next to a female skeleton, the tradition has been to suggest that it's ceremonial, or used for domestic tasks, or that it actually belonged with a male skeleton buried nearby, etc.
Here's an example from a 1971 paper on the Gordon Creek Burial Site, a roughly 10,000-year old Paleo-Indian burial in northern Colorado:
“Since the burial has been determined to be a female, the inclusion of a projectile point preform has been difficult to explain. However, if the artifact had been used as a knife or scraper, typically women’s tools, then its inclusion with the burial is a more consistent association.”
In plain English, the researchers found a skeleton with a sharp object next to it that would ordinarily be interpreted as a hunting implement. But the skeleton was female. Therefore, the object was probably used for domestic work.
The logic here is patently circular. Females don't hunt. Therefore, tools buried with females can't be hunting tools. Since they're not hunting tools, we have no evidence that females hunt.
This example was quoted in a 2009 article by Dr. Randall Haas at University of Wyoming and colleagues, one of several studies questioning whether men were the sole hunters in prehistoric societies.
Haas and colleagues reported a case study of a roughly 9,000-year-old female skeleton from the Andean highlands who had been buried with a hunting "toolkit", possibly carried in a leather bag. The toolkit contained projectile points suitable for taking down big game, along with scrapers, choppers, and other tools for rendering the kill. In all, she had more than 20 different tools for the hunt, like a prehistoric version of James Bond. (Excuse me, Jane Bond.)
As with all case study research, generalizations are difficut to make from a sample of one. And so, at the end of their study, Haas and colleagues used some simple probability statistics to make a broader case. Reviewing the literature on burial sites in the Americas during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene (i.e., roughly 129,000 years ago to about 9,000 years ago), they identifed 27 skeletons whose sex was known and who appear to have been buried with big-game hunting tools. 11 of those skeletons are female.
Beginning with something called a probablity mass function, the researchers calculated that average female participation in big-game hunting was likely to have been 30 to 50%. As they put it, these data suggest that "early big-game hunting was likely gender neutral or nearly so."
If you're a stats person, I explain in the Appendix how these numbers were derived and why we can't draw such specific statistical conclusions. Here I'd like to emphasize two things:
(a) Pre-20th century archeologists wouldn't have used probability statistics to analyze data; and
(b) the fact that 11 of the 27 skeletons are females is good evidence in its own right, without statistical analysis.
What is it "good" evidence for? For the idea that some prehistoric big-game hunters were women. We don't know exactly what "some" means. Perhaps half, perhaps less than half, perhaps more. But we can be pretty sure of that the men hunt/women gather meme is deeply misleading.
A new study
The study, published in PLOS One this June 28, was conducted by Dr. Abigail Anderson and colleagues at Seattle Pacific University.
As archeological evidence that women hunt accumulates, some scholars have argued that they only did so during prehistoric times. Thus, Anderson and colleagues focused on ethnographic data from the past century. They selected 391 foraging ("hunter-gatherer") societies that constituted a balanced geographic mix. Of these 391, detailed information on hunting was available for 63 societies.
Is this a representative sample? Hard to say, since the researchers could only focus on societies with available data. I see no plausible, specific reason to doubt its representativeness with respect to gendered divisions of labor.
Anderson and team imposed meaningful guidelines on how they reviewed the ethnographic materials. For instance, they identified women as hunters only if women were actively described as hunting, killing animals, etc., as opposed to merely "accompanying" men, say, for the purpose of helping carry kills home. In the lingo of social science, the approach to content analysis seemed strong.
The main finding was that women hunt in 79% of the societies reviewed (50 out of 63). In almost all cases where data were available, women's hunting was described as intentional rather than opportunistic. In other words, women helped plan and then carry out hunting activities, rather than just, say, killing a pig that had invaded their garden. And, as the researchers noted, "In societies where hunting is considered the most important subsistence activity, women actively participated in hunting 100% of the time."
Although other results were interesting – more women appear to have hunted big game than suggested by prior research – these are the core findings with respect to gender. The data are strong, in my view, and position the researchers to argue that the men hunt/women gather meme is baseless crap. Their actual conclusion is more tactful and nuanced:
"The prevalence of data on women hunting directly opposes the common belief that women exclusively gather while men exclusively hunt, and further, that the implicit sexual division of labor of ‘hunter/gatherer’ is misapplied. Given that this bimodal paradigm has influenced the interpretation of archeological evidence, which includes the reluctance to distinguish projectile tools found within female burials as intended for hunting (or fighting), this paper joins others in urging the necessity to reevaluate archeological evidence, to reassess ethnographic evidence, to question the dichotomous use of ‘hunting and gathering,’ and to deconstruct the general “man the hunter” narrative".
The sexist's last spear
I am persuaded by Anderson and colleagues' evidence – I hope you are too – but someone who clings to the traditional view might say: "Well, look back at their descriptive statistics. Men hunt in 100% of societies, whereas women hunt in only 79% of them. In other words, men hunt, women hunt less. Men are always hunters, owing to their physical superiority. Women only hunt sometimes, and when they do, they play a subordinate role..."
Response to the persistent sexist
The first problem with this kind of reasoning is its over-reliance on aggregated summary data. Yes, in this sample, men hunt in a slightly greater number of societies than women do. But that's not grounds for holding onto a revised version of the men hunt/women gather myth. Rather, it calls for something different: A look at why, in 21% of the societies, women don't participate in hunting.
In other words, we should still treat men hunt/women gather as a myth. In most forager societies women do hunt. In that minority of cases where they don't, it would be worthwile to know why not. For instance, you might suspect that in some societies, women are excluded from hunting as part of a broader pattern of oppression. After all, by our standards, women are oppressed in other ways across many societies (including our own).
A second problem with the sexist's argument is that there's no evidence that women typically play a subordinate role in hunting. This may be the case in some cultures, but it doesn't appear to be the general pattern.
(What would "subordinate" mean anyway? When everyone pitches in, everyone's work counts. If women help kill the boar, then they're hunters. Perhaps only the strongest pair of men carry the dead animal home, but that would exclude the rest of the males too. You wouldn't fail to call the rest "hunters".)
Media response
The verbs used to describe new findings vary in accuracy, and in what they reveal about the source.
For instance, this week Forbes noted that the new study is "calling into question" the traditional stereotype that men hunt and women gather. That's a cautious statement, as you might expect from a business magazine, and a fairly accurate choice of words, since new studies rarely change minds overnight – especially minds that have been conditioned by pervasive stereotyping.
All the same, given that this study replicates and extends recent archeological work, I'd say that we've gone slightly beyond "calling into question" the traditional stereotype. Maybe "continues to dismantle" would be more suitable.
In contrast, NPR describes how the new study "upends" the traditional view. This seems to reflect the liberal perspective that men have traditionally been on top, and now we're being upended by the data. That's not exactly what's happening. It's more like we're being repositioned, right next to women. Men hunt; women do too.
And, I wouldn't say that the myth is wholly upended just yet – there's been pushback on Twitter (where else?), and the stereotype remains embodied in our material culture. A 2019 study showed that a Google image search of "prehistoric humans" yielded 207 depictions of men hunting, but only 16 of women.
Finally, and a bit more violently, CNN describes the new data as "shattering" the traditional myth. You can almost hear the pieces clattering on the floor.
CNN is is in dire need of reader attention these days, so it's no surprise if its writers talk about myths getting "exploded" or "shattered". But what's interesting about CNN's coverage, apart from the fact that it's reasonably accurate, is that, like other news organizations, the statistics are included. The 79% figure is reported. An expert is quoted as cautioning against overgeneralizations, because data on hunting were only available for 16% of societies in the original group of 391. More broadly, variability and flexibility in hunting behavior are noted.
Conclusion
The men hunt/women gather myth never had much of a chance, at least phrased in that narrow way, because the word choice reflects a pre-20th century, categorical way of thinking: Men are like this, women are like that.
Variability within each gender has always been noted, some of it of relevance to hunting. For example, in the 1739 polemic "Woman not Inferior to Man", penned by "Sophia", we read:
"Are not the Women of different degrees of strength, like the Men? Are there not strong and weak of both sexes? Men educated in sloth and softness are weaker than Women; and Women, become harden'd by necessity, are often more robust than Men."
The key difference between Sophia and a 21st century social scientist is that nowadays we quantify the variability. (Also, we don't talk about men being "educated in sloth", though we may know guys who fit that description.)
In the anthropological literature on hunting, including the new study, the most persuasive statistics are the simplest ones – i.e., the mere percentages indicating that substantial numbers of women in foraging societies past and present actively hunt. Here what's important is not the variability within sexes but rather the lack of variability between them. But we shouldn't let the specificity of the data mislead us. Most scholars, including Anderson and her team, would not conclude that women hunt in exactly 79% of all foraging societies. Still, that percentage is more than large enough to dispel a persistent myth about gender differences.
I'm going to hunt for some chocolate now, because that's what real men do (as do real women, and real non-binary people). Thanks for reading!
Appendix: The probablity mass function in Haas et al. 2009.
If you have a background in probability theory, Haas and colleagues worked with the standard probability mass function for a binomial random variable.
Specifically, the researchers assumed two possible outcomes (male or female) and ran 27 "trials" – that is, they noted the sex of 27 skeletons buried with big-game hunting projectiles. These skeletons consisted of 16 males and 11 females.
However, instead of assuming that each skeleton had a 50-50 chance of being female, the researchers worked backwards, calculating the probabilities of each total percentage of prehistoric hunters being women given that 11 were found to be so in 27 trials. Also, they restricted their analyses to deciles (0% vs. 10% vs. 20% etc. of all prehistoric hunters being women).
The researchers concluded that "plausible models range between 30 and 50% female participation." They didn't define "plausible", but since they only determined probabilities for deciles, it's easy to reconstruct their analysis. I did so and calculated a roughly 70% chance that the percentage of prehistoric hunters who were women ranged from 30 to 50%.
In a way their approach seems brilliant. We can treat the sexes of 27 skeletons in prehistorical burial sites as potentially "random" in the same sense that 27 coin tosses are potentially "random", because we're lacking key information – in one case, about culture, in the other case, about the physical conditions of the throw (the speed, trajectory, and rotation rate of the coin, for instance.)
However, some obvious problems with the application of probability theory crop up here.
1. Even if we accept all the assumptions, 70% leaves a lot of room for error.
2. Small sample size means that the 30 to 50% estimated range could change substantially as new burial sites are discovered.
3. In the case of the coin toss, we know what we don't know. We know, for instance, that most people can't spontaneously bias the outcomes of a series of coin tosses. (Try tossing 10 heads in a row.) With the archeological data, we don't know what we don't know. The 27 skeletons buried with hunting implements may be a systematically biased sample, at least in part. One could speculate endlessly on the possibilities.
Like other statistics, probability calculations are intended to manage uncertainty. But sometimes the extent of uncertainty we encounter is too great to be managed with any credible precision. Haas and colleagues' study, like the one I reviewed in this newsletter, call for us to replace the men hunt/women gather myth in favor of more lucid narratives. Women in foraging societies both present and past have clearly hunted. What may remain perpetually unclear is how many of them did so.