The Descent of Man, Man the Hunter, Man the Inventor. The study of human evolution is littered with these phrases and others like them, yet until recently little mention has been made about the women who obviously were present. Scientists are the products of their culture, which can and has led to science being marred by ethnocentrism. In the case of the evolution of humans, scientists projected their world view into the past. As that world view was focused on white Western men, it stressed the importance of traits exhibited by modern white men.
In order to understand what this meant to the view that developed about the origins of man, we must start with the old theory of the origins and elaboration of the human species. In this theory, our story begins in Africa, with the parent species of both the apes and ourselves. Evolution leading to Homo sapiens involves the development of stone tools and language, both of which are improvements resulting from hunting. In this way, the ancestor forms became men.
But what were the women doing? According to this model they were losing the estrus cycle and becoming sexually available year round. That's it. And having babies, of course. This posited dichotomy of man out-and-about and women being biological as a full-time endeavor tells us more about the Victorians and their descendants, than it does about our hominid ancestors. And that isn't the only problem with the theory. Most notably, our hominid ancestors were bipedal long before meat was an important part of the diet.
So what is the new model, and what is it based on? The new model is informed by Jane Goodall's Gombe research, cross-cultural studies of modern gatherer-hunters, and new analysis methods of stone tools and bone. The new story also begins in Africa, with a hominid ancestor something like a chimpanzee.1 Yet how humans come about reads much differently than the old tale.
Presumably this common ancestor lived much like modern common chimps, in forests eating fruit and insects. We now know that chimpanzees do eat some meat, generally other primates or kills made by other animals. Our earliest ancestors may have done the same, but this is not the hunting of the first model. This is predation and savaging, and involves no tools. Which is not to say chimps don't use tools; they do. Chewed leaves as water sponges, modified twigs and stems to dip for ants and termites are examples of their tool usage. Chimpanzees learn the use of these tools from their mothers, and female chimps spend more time termite dipping than the males do.
It is not certain why our human ancestors became bipedal, but it is postulated that as the climate in Africa changed and the amount of savanna increased, some groups of the common ancestor started adapting to the savanna. Modern chimps are knuckle-walkers, but they can walk bipedially in order to carry objects, to scare off baboons,and to get a better view when walking through tall grass. In the savanna, food and water sources are more scattered than is true in the forest, and there is greater danger from predators. Those that could travel for long stretches and bring food back to a safer location for eating would be more likely to survive and produce descendants.
The transition to full-time bipedialism resulted in a number of structural changes. The great toe takes its modern form, thereby stabilizing the foot. The pelvis becomes more bowl-shaped as opposed to the long form found in apes. While these changes make it easier to walk for longer periods of time, it resulted in several new problems. The change in the big toe meant the feet couldn't be used for grasping, important in rapid tree climbing and for infants clinging to their mother. The evolution of walking resulted in mothers having to carry their infants more, as walking became a more difficult skill to acquire and a more tiring one as well. It is likely that some females invented slings in order to carry their children. Such a development would have also allowed for easier carrying of gathered foods, many of which have to be prepared in some way.
We know that primates, including non-industrial modern humans, get most of their calories from plant foods. If we take as an example of the gathering-hunting lifestyle the !Kung, modern people living in the Kalahari Desert, we find that women gather about 70% of the food. This is not to say that proto-human men were dependent on women for their food; both sexes eat various gathered foods in the field. The !Kung and other modern gatherer-hunting people have sexually divided hunting from gathering, as stalking game is difficult to do while carrying children and/or bundles of gathered foods.
Here a very important point must be made about the archaeological record. Until the invention of modern garbage dumps, very few environments could preserve objects made of plant materials. As a result, the kinds of tools that would have come first, tools made of wood, plaited plant materials and hide, would be unlikely to become a part of the archaeological record. This is particularly true in the areas where the proto-people lived. By the same token, the kinds of evidence for plant foods that would be preserved are not readily apparent. Floatation methods and microscopic analysis has found that seeds and pollen are at times preserved in sites, however these methods are recent developments. As a result of these factors, a disproportionate weight was placed on stone tools and bone fragments, which are preserved preferentially to other remnants.
Returning to our hominid, we have a being that is basically human in body with a largely ape-like head. It has a long dependent childhood in comparison to other animals. The brain has increased some in size but retains the basic layout of the pongoid brain. We would postulate greater tool use than found among modern chimps, as a result of the need to compensate for problems resulting from new conditions, such as babies incapable of simply hanging from their mothers. They would be cultural animals, as are in fact chimpanzees. We know that chimps must learn to care for young, and even how to mate. Through play they also learn rudimentary tool use.
But how did these beings become us? It is thought that tool use played a definite role. The making of a tool requires a lot of steps, some at spatial and temporal distance. The making of complex tools, stone or otherwise, requires precision for their production. Interestingly, language requires many of the same traits. In fact, the same part of the human brain controls the hands and the tongue. The old theory considers language to have evolved from hunting grunts and signs,after men had developed stone tools. However, it is just as plausible that language developed from the long term interaction between mothers and children. We do know that female chimps taught American Sign language in captivity do teach signs to their offspring, much as if it were a new kind of tool. However language developed, it would have increased the ability to teach complex skills, share information such as food source locations, as well as increasing group bonding.
Somehow, biologically modern human beings did come into existence. Women and men are anatomically very similar, showing very low levels of sexual dimorphism. While caution must be used when making generalizations from modern populations ( who have had as much time to specialize culturally as we have), within that caveat they are about the closest we can get to understanding what life might have been like for early humans. From cross-cultural examples, it is clear that nearly every task can be accomplished by either sex. While the sexual division of labor is common, which tasks are performed by women and which by men is highly variable with the exception that only women can bear and suckle children.
Most prehistoric sites have been reconstructed according to ethnophallicentric models. It has been presumed that hunting and later agriculture were accomplished by men, that they were the most important tasks, and that the women were just, well, off doing womanly things. In order to correctly understand the prehistoric world and the roles of women and men in that world, we must know what tasks were done, including the more perishable ones, and by whom these tasks were done.
Some kinds of work will only be evidenced when pieces of the finished goods are preserved under abnormally condusive conditions. Basketry for example has few specialized tools. Other tasks such as weaving, can be evidenced by durable tools or parts of tools. Clay loom weights, bone shuttles and spindlewhorls commonly are the only evidence for weaving we can find, as the looms themselves are generally made of wood.
Another kind of evidence for tasks done and the only sure way of telling which individuals did which tasks is the bones of prehistoric people. Many tasks result either in repetitive motion injuries or increased muscle and bone size in certain parts of the body. Through the analysis of such evidence, taken in conjunction with the sexing of skeletons, it should be possible to gain a better understanding of what real prehistoric women and men were doing.
One wonders how such a blatantly sexist interpretation of human evolution came to exist. One wonders also how it retained credibility for so long. Recall that the early work was done during the Victorian era, by upper class men. They were supremely qualified to believe that man was the actor in the drama of human evolution. And the work of real men (as opposed to men of the lower classes) was hunting, warfare, and thinking. Proper women (as opposed to lower class women) dealt with home and hearth, and provided heirs. All other models were the result of depravity or worse, and the Victorians were well noted for trying to stop such practices in any corner of the world found. Anthropology and history show many examples where European males reshaped cultures into their own image2.
Given that they could ignore the reality of living, breathing, and, often, cussing people, it is not hard to believe they would say what they wanted on the basis of still bones and mute stones. The use of stone tools can be problematic without microwear analysis, which requires sophisticated equipment and a sense of inquiry3. Frankly, were we to find a knitting needle out of its normal context, could it not seem a weapon?
Rather like the scientists who expected the missing link to have a humanlike brain and an apelike body got fooled by Piltdown Man4, so the Victorians and those that followed were fooled to read the prehistoric past the way they wanted. After a time, the first model, which I presented as a unified whole so as not bore us all to tears, was so much the standard that to question it was unthinkable. Margaret Ehrenberg herself says that had she asked what the women were doing while Neolithic Man made arrowheads, the question would have been considered frivolous.5 Women had lost tenure for writing books on subjects not considered as worthy of study as traditional/male-oriented fields.6
When men began to write the history of man, they left women out of the story. Projecting onto the past their present, violence was seen as the driving force in the evolution of Homo sapiens. Every stone tool was seen as a weapon, every development the result of brutal conflict. The Darwinian concept of survival of the fittest7 was considered in terms of "nature red in tooth and claw"8. Our ancestors were envisaged with Humian lives: nasty, brutish and short. In their own time, history was seen as the parade of armed conflicts and the story of the conquerors and the vanquished. Day to day life was considered to be of little import. It was with this attitude that they approached the reconstruction of our distant past.
Taking such a view results in a very skewed picture of the world. Much as war is large portions of boredom with brief moments of sheer terror, life is mostly made up of many recurring small things punctuated now and again by the extraordinary. Populations must procure food, find shelter and reproduce themselves if they are to continue. If they don't achieve those goals, nothing else matters. Nothing. For humans, this is reducible to the instruction of the young; we are largely without instinct. We are not precoded to know what is edible and how to get it. It is through tools, including knowledge, that we can protect ourselves from the elements and predators. We are a species that must learn how to mate and to bear and care for young.
The notion that the task of raising the next generation belongs to only half of the species is problematic at best. That recent history has seen this as appropriate and valued the task lower than nearly all others is a sign of a systemic fault. The "man the hunter" story of evolution projects unequal power relations between the sexes to the very beginning, making it impossible to challenge a flawed status quo. The importance of the new feminist scholarship is that it shows that humans, female and male both, are not victims of an "original sin"; the supposed inferiority of one sex and the tasks thought natural to it are results of historical forces and not dictated by biology. What was wrought by people can be be rewrote; we do not have to accept a flawed status quo.
