in Hunter and gather society's men hunt and women gather this fundamental truth is taught in classrooms across the country it's what one author refers to as the conventional textbook generalization there's just one problem it isn't true in this video we're going to discuss that myth and some of the more recent research that disproves it so what brought us to this topic is we were recently updating some of the content in a couple of our courses namely a course on ideology and we stumbled across some more recent research regarding the idea of the gender division of labor and these articles fairly recent articles there's three of them started to get us to rethink the way we're even framing um this part of our course the articles are female hunters of the early Americas by Randall Haas at all back in 2020 the next one was the myth of man the hunter women's contribution to the hunt across ethnographic context by Abigail Anderson this year and then another one combines kind of the topic and this one comes to us from Big think this year as well it's called busting the male Hunter female forager myth once and for all these articles really go out to try and challenge the prior myths that come to us from from much older Works earlier in the 20th century some examples of these that kind of establish this myth that Nick was talking about one was a a book called man the hunter It Was Written in 1968 by Richard borshay Lee a relation of course the next one was women The Gatherer and that was written back in 1983 by Francis dalbert Dahlberg excuse me and the next one was hunting and Gathering the human sexual division of foraging labor that comes to us from Frank Marlow in 2007. there were a couple different what yeah I just wanted to add that man the hunter that book was an edited volume of the papers presented at a symposium of that was ethnographic work done on hunting and Gathering societies for the most part so this was really like a landmark like through the Line in the Sand up this was a gathering from researchers all across the globe that were presenting their ethnographic research so this was like in archeology an anthropology like a landmark sort of work and like you said right the title is man the hunter so it really establishes this myth you know suggesting that and in fact the suggestion overall in this uh edited volume is that the primary evolutionary reason for Homo sapiens becoming the dominant species I.E us developing larger brains Etc is a result of hunting right meat consumption and that man not man in general Min meaning men versus female that the males wore the dominant sex that were doing the hunting activity so implying and actually not implying stating directly that it was the male sex that was primarily responsible for the advancement of the evolution of the human species so that's really really convenient for somebody named Richard and another one named Irvin right really convenient assertion to make anyway um okay yeah that I mean and Nick's right I think that's one of the things that's kind of lost um on a lot of us now with the like proliferation of information via internet and YouTube and so on and so forth but but back in the middle of the 20th century when somebody writes some sort of landmark quote unquote and it is quote unquote because it's been proven wrong now academic work they're making that assertion and I assertion sticks for like a while right like I mean it's it it gets more and more difficult to to debunk during that period of time um luckily we have much more modern um research methodology now and also I mean there's been wild debates since sort of the beginning and latter part of the 20th century about this topic right and not just whether or not it was the males that were dominant right everyone sort of took as a truth the gender division of labor men hunting women Gathering but there was wild debate on why so all kinds of different reasons for why this existed right some people argued that it was a result of higher levels of testosterone in the men which resulted in uh just generally greater physical strength so they were physically more apt to be the hunters many people harped on the fact that women's women's women are the life givers right that biologically clearly they have the necessity to carry uh birth and then care for the children so they couldn't be out on hunts Etc right that's just a couple right there's many many uh in this debate reasons that were given but the overall arching sort of I think the thread of all this was that it was natural right that it was just a natural thing that the men were hunters and that the women were gathers that this division of labor specifically was a natural phenomenon that was dictated by the natural world now we're not actually go ahead and importantly we want to like use that word or they wanted to use that word natural to assume like this is just the way it is so when we are contextualizing This research in the middle of the 20th century obviously a wildly patriarchal Century right especially in in the Western World this is this is that rationalization for the current context that's the funny part oftentimes when we do this Research into the past I'm a historian but also archaeologists and paleontologists they're all guilty of this as well they're using their current social context to view these quote unquote artifacts or whatever it is whatever methodology they're using to view the past and thus rationalize the present not necessarily to give us any new insights on the past basically it's it's a connecting the dots well if it's this way now it must have been this way then and this is how we got here right so yeah and it's like recursive right they're viewing the past through their modern lens so then they're applying those biases to their research then which we're going to talk about specific examples in just a second the point is that we're actually not interested in this debate at all we're not interested in why men hunt and women gather because what we've seen with this modern research is the foundation of that debate has been disproven right it's faulty uh from the get-go women didn't hunt and Men didn't gather at least not in those simple terms so let's talk about some of the modern research and sort of its findings and how it goes to sort of unseat this fundamental truth that we've all been carrying and by the say when I say we like Jared and I are just as guilty as this we teach in our courses that women gather and Men hunt and that the women Gathering is the majority of the calories and so forth right all of that is a false narrative and we have to admit too that like we fell victim to that as well right we were going on with the archaeologists and anthropologists were giving us so let's talk about some of the research it has disproven this the first article we we changed the course by the way yeah we changed the content obviously with new research but that's what happens is when you do receive new research and new information you make those necessary changes to of course the discourse it seems to be not as common in other discourses but regardless Nick what was that first article female hunters of the early Americas like Jared said is published by Haas uh at all in 2020 and they performed a meta-analysis of burial sites across the globe uh and you can see the map it was in the Americas I guess specifically and the first one was in the Americas the other one was more Global yeah 27 sexed individuals from 18 burial sites which are associated with big game hunting tools so they looked at specifically burial sites and they narrowed it down to which of these burial sites were the remains that were found sexed and which ones of them were buried with big game hunting tools specifically is what they were looking at here so there were many more burial sites where either their Mains weren't sexed or they weren't buried with hunting tools clearly that's outside the purview of what we're talking about here of those 27 individuals 11 were identified as female so that's 40 of all of the remains that were found that were buried with big game hunting tools 40 of those were female and so the researchers conclude from 30 to 50 percent female participation indicating that big game hunting was likely gender neutral or nearly so among late pleistocene early Holocene populations so that last quote is a big claim right that they have backup with data and research Etc they're saying that essentially somewhere between 30 to 50 percent of these societies had females that participated in hunting right so about half so they're saying basically this was a completely gender neutral activity that it the the the idea that solely men hunt and solely women gather is essentially out the window right that's not at all supported by the data here from these various uh burial sites the time frame also matters that late Plies to see an early Holocene um is just before the birth of of what we call the state right and and the movement towards a more patrilineal slash patriarchal way of viewing the world so it the timeline actually does matter this is before we get to the quote-unquote Neolithic or agricultural revolution whatever you prefer so that that I think also plays a role but we'll talk more about that in just a moment in one study myth the myth of man the hunter women's contribution to the hunter cross ethnographic context published this year in 2023 the research has examined ethnographic studies of foraging Societies in various parts of the world outside the Americas they were motivated actually by the prior article that Nick just mentioned in 2020 um to take this outside of of just the North and South American continent and look at other other societies they looked at 63 different foraging societies 79 of the groups had documentation on women hunting of the 50 societies that had documentation on women and hunting 41 of those societies had data on whether women hunting was intentional or opportunistic and of the latter 87 percent of the foraging societies describe women's hunting as intentional as opposed to 12 percent of societies that described hunting as merely opportunistic just they would happen to be happening at that exact moment and we're going to get some calories right now in societies where hunting is considered the most important subsistence activity women actively participated in hunting 100 of the time they have a pretty strong thesis so bear with me as I just read it I'd rather just read it directly from them on this on this qv3 article women in foraging societies across the world historically participated and continued to participate in hunting regardless of the child bearing status the collected data on women hunting directly opposes the traditional Paradigm that women exclusively Gather in men exclusively hunt and further elucidates the diversity and flexibility of human subsistence cultures because the hunter-gatherer Paradigm has prevented the recognition of contributions by women to hunting a new framework would enable past and future discoveries to be evaluated in the context of female hunters furthermore the term forager is suggested by breitman should be used to acknowledge the non-sexual division of labor concerning hunting and gathering in order to develop an inclusive framework for understanding human culture so this is kind of interesting what do you think of that thesis this idea it's not just a thesis of what they found based on their more recent research as well as the article that focused mostly on the Americas that we've already talked about but going back to another researcher breitman who back in I want to say the late 90s Brightman also was already making this argument that that and they didn't have this research behind them quite yet but that the term forager is much better than hunter-gatherer which kind of divides us and that we should probably just use foraging Society going forward which would be a huge linguistic change to the way we frame like archaeological historical uh sociological concept constructs from this time period what do you think of that as like not just like this is a thing that we found but this finding should change the way we think and even speak about past social organization sorry I think they're exactly correct right I mean they basically say two things here one that the previous Paradigm the hunting gatherer Paradigm minimizes women's contribution to the survival of human beings right very clearly but too like you said and perhaps as I say more importantly I don't know if it's more importantly it's equally as important we need to change our language going forward right that we have to draw a line in the sand and say we have to stop using even this terminology right Hunter and gatherer because it's just not applicable anymore to the findings that we're seeing here that this term by breitman foraging societies is perhaps more apt because it eliminates the division of labor in the name right and so it's more inclusive and it's more accurate right I think is the key here right it's more an accurate description of what societies during this time period were like and I think it's important to note right it's not just that you know we talk about men hunting women gather it's not just that women also gathered research shows that across the board men were also Gathering right it's that both sexes were doing both jobs whenever necessary or whenever you know dictated by the natural environment Etc so it was really a blending of these activities but the main point is that women also hunted right and this functions to sort of unseat the thesis that you know the domination of the male sex and its role in the survival of humanity over time and its evolution of humanity as well that women were hunting just as often right so both of these studies I think go to reveal that this is just a mint the myth of the male Hunter it's really just a result of the biases of previous researchers which we already mentioned briefly right that were doing their work with their own from within their own patriarchal lenses right and it's just one example you know host's study analyze burial sites where female remains were found with hunting tools and the researchers at the time when they discovered this you know back in the mid 20th century or slightly later than that um we're just kind of dumbfounded of how this could have happened and they came up with all kinds of excuses right causes for perhaps the reasons for this right that it was just an accident the hunting you know the arrowhead Etc the point was just happened to be found in the grave with this uh skeleton or that there was some substrate mixing right that this was from a different time period that just had settled in a way where it appears as if these remains were buried with this tool and so forth like it was just beyond then the the simple truth that this woman was a hunter right they refused to make those connections because of the biases that they held themselves due to the strength of this myth right so if you're a researcher that's finding these skeletal remains and it's just ingrained within you that minhunt and women gather then every time you find find a woman with some kind of hunting tools you have to somehow justify that in a way that isn't that this woman hunted right it couldn't be that it just couldn't right so it's just interesting how you know the new research is just revealing the biases of the previous findings and helping us to understand that this whole thing like has just been a myth right I mean it really has to be clear uh what they were finding um especially in the Peruvian examples were not just like a random spear that happened to roll into like a burial chamber or something along those lines they were finding um women buried with entire like there were hunting kits they could tell that there was a hunting kit it's obviously made out of animal hide and there's all types of like different sized knives and cutting tools um as well as like again Spears for for the actual kill itself so it wasn't just like a random one tool back then you would carry an entire pouch full of like various different tools for all different parts of the hunting process and that's what was being buried so just to be clear that it there's nothing random about this process so and they even talk about in uh cameras both of the articles are just one of them but how they were also specialized to the individual person right so the tools that have different sizes Etc so they were highly specialized hunting kits that they're finding with these remains that you know prove pretty much without a doubt belong to that person that was in that burial site specifically right so like Jerry said this isn't just like an accident like oh it happened to roll in there when we were burying the person right like it it's definitely assignable to that person for sure so in terms of like concluding thoughts I mean we don't have a lot we're not we're this obviously kind of changes the way we think about the past and it obviously changes the way we should be thinking about the present it certainly challenges the oversimplified binary Paradigm presented in earlier works and it's wildly important in terms of thinking about the origins in terms of social organization and resource acquisition and and as Nick had alluded to earlier life givers and sustainers and and so on and so forth I don't think it challenges any of um our previous takes on on foraging societies being matrilineal it doesn't necessarily change anything along those lines but but it definitely changes some things um I guess here I'll just say it like this it throws a much needed wrench in the ever turning calves of the mighty male bringing home the bacon trope basically the last few thousand years which has been used to rationalize so so much inequality um so yeah I think that's that that's the most important point is how that narrative has been used to justify modern inequality right modern patriarchy Etc that this is just natural this is how it's always been right look at all this evidence we've had gender division of labor sort of along these lines right the bringing home the bacon Trope I love that right it's just always been like this this is natural this is Humanity from the beginning of time has naturally divided things like this and so that's why it is this way right we can debate sort of how it came into being and why it sort of takes on these characteristics but we really can't debate the fact that it exists like that's just a known truth well the point of all of this is that it's not a known truth that it hasn't always been like that that now that we remove these goggles of like our patriarchal biases we can see that the previous research was completely tainted that it wasn't like this at all and that we actually can't use the past to justify the present uh inequality meaning like the far past right yeah we can go back to like the 1900s and justify what's going on now right and that we can see a clear link those two things but no longer does the argument that like you know well men hunting women gathered so now women must stay home and take care of the kids while the men are out working that's just natural that's false right and so we must understand that and now as Jared said begin to change the way that we not only think about the past very clearly but think about the present and the current inequities that exist within our society thank you thank you thank you to our patreon supporters if you liked that episode consider supporting us on patreon I am Nick I'm Jack Raider