The myth of the hunter (and warrior) man no longer holds up

There is an influential narrative about our species and those that have preceded us along our evolutionary branch, captured in the ambiguous idiom “man is hunter”. According to this narrative, which flourished mainly between the beginning and the first half of the 20th century, given that hunting and meat consumption would have driven humanity’s most surprising evolutionary changes, including bipedalism, brain growth and tool usewould be i males to have contributed most to the process. The ancestral males, so swarms of twentieth-century anthropologists wrote, roamed far and wide in search of prey, while the females remained at the main settlement, gathering plants and caring for the offspring. In this vision, male hunting and female gathering would be a very ancient division of labor between the sexes, born perhaps more than 1 million years ago.

The reason for this “natural” subdivision, according to the supporters of the theory, would be mainly in the superior strength of men, in the time to be dedicated to the offspring by the mothers, in the menstrual blood, capable of attracting predators and alerting the preys, or even in a supposed “more sedentary and less aggressive” nature, as anthropologist Brian Hayden wrote in 1981.

In reality, since the 70s and 80s of the last century, the archaeological evidence that women contribute substantially and always to the human carnivorous dietnot only through the collection of small animals, but also as huntersand have actively participated, at least in the past, in wars.

The archaeological evidence, however, has more recently been traced by the supporters of the “hunter man” theory to a past that is no longer current, almost to a sort of socio-cultural “experimentation”, losing compared to a dominant model very similar to that of the original and preferred narrative of a society led by men primarily in hunting and warfare, and then, by extension, in politics and its own social structure.

New evidence, just published, belies this further version of the “naturalness” of a distribution of activities between the sexes hitherto considered prevalent.

Even in modern societies, that of the “hunter man” is a mythas soon as we take into consideration a sufficiently large sample of different human organizations, instead of focusing on those globally more widespread and homogeneous to ours.

After analyzing data collected over the last 100 years on more than 63 different hunter-gatherer cultures, it was found that women hunt in 79 per cent of the societies analysed, regardless of their status as mothers. More than 70 percent of female hunting appears to be intentional, and not the opportunistic killing of animals encountered in the course of other activities. Furthermore, intentional hunting by women appears to target animals of all sizes, most often large game. The analysis also revealed that women are actively involved in teaching hunting practices and which they often employ a greater variety of weapons and strategies hunting than men.

Probably, the erroneous theory of predominantly or exclusively male hunting arose because it was founded on nineteenth and early twentieth century data, when ethnographers and explorers were all white men, who followed other men in their traditional activities, and did not document the activities particularly well feminine; but this myth, hard to die, today no longer has a reason to exist, in the light of the available data.

Nor is female hunting a uniquely human trait. As known for years, in some specific populations of Senegalese chimpanzees, the preparation of wooden spears, intentionally pointed to be used in hunting, has been documented. Well, also in this case it is the females who mainly use weapons and lead the hunt with them in the majority of occasions, even if the hunting bands are made up to a greater extent of males. This is a specific feature of populations that use hunting weapons, because in other groups of chimpanzees that hunt without them, males drive and spend more time in that activity.

The picture is therefore clear: as archeology had already documented, in primates, also in modern populations and also in species that very recently separated from ours, the distribution of activities based on sex does not necessarily include hunting at all (and war).

The rigid division of labor in these areas, when it emerges, defines a special and particular, not particularly “natural” type of male-led society in both chimpanzees and humans; the “warrior queen” of Copper Age Spainwhich we have discussed on these pages, probably it did not represent a particularity at all, but only the manifestation of a range of recurring possibilities in our evolution.

It is for this reason that one must be very, very careful about introducing supposed measures of “naturalness” into human behavior, derived from ethno-anthropological investigations that are not recent: modern research, based on quantitative analyzes rather than on ethnographic accounts, has amply demonstrated and go on to demonstrate how many of our most established clichés are, in fact, based on prejudicealmost always for the benefit of the category to which the explorers of a century ago belonged.