Man the Hunter, Woman the Gatherer--Predominantly But Not Exclusively. The Evolutionary Psychology of Sex Differences

In 1965, 67 of the leading scholars of human hunter-gatherers gathered at the University of Chicago for a symposium on "Man the Hunter," which resulted in a book with that title edited by Richard Lee and Irven DeVore (1968).  The fundamental idea underpinning the conference was that since through most of their evolutionary history, most human beings had lived in small bands of hunter-gatherer foragers--hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants--the hunter-gatherer way of life was the environment of evolutionary adaptation in which evolved human nature had been shaped.

As part of that adaptation, there were sex differences between "man the hunter" and "woman the gatherer"--men predominated in hunting, and women predominated in gathering.  One could infer from this that there were evolved natural differences on average in the psychological propensities of men and women, with men more inclined to be aggressive hunters and women more inclined to be caregiving mothers whose foraging was limited by their need to care for their children, which impeded women from hunting large animals.

For me, this supports the idea that there is an evolved natural desire for sexual identity.  Human beings generally desire to identify themselves as male or female.  All human societies have some sexual division of labor.  And although different societies assign somewhat different sex roles, there are some recurrent differences that manifest a universal sexual bipolarity in the pattern of human desires.

Those who want to deny or at least play down these natural sex differences will criticize the dichotomy of man the hunter and woman the gatherer, so that they can argue for male and female gender differences as being personal and cultural constructions rather than evolved natural propensities.  A recent example of this is an article in PLoS ONE--"The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women's Contribution to the Hunt Across Ethnographic Contexts" (Anderson et al. 2023).  This article has received wide coverage in the media, including the journal Science.

The authors report: "Of the 50 foraging societies that have documentation on women hunting, 45 (90%) had data on the size of game that women hunted.  Of these, 21 (46%) hunt small game, 7 (15%) hunt median game, 15 (33%) hunt large game and 2 (4%) of these societies hunt game of all sizes" (6).  They conclude from this that "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" (6).

I think a better title for this article would be "The Myth of Man as Exclusively the Hunter."  The authors do a good job in refuting the idea that men are exclusively the hunters and women exclusively the gatherers.  James Woodburn expressed this idea in the original Man the Hunter volume when he said:  "Hunting is done exclusively by men and boys" (Woodburn 1968, 51).  But as far as I can see, most of the hunter-gatherer scholars have not said this.  Most have agreed with Robert Kelly (2013, 218-24) that while hunting is not done exclusively by men, it is predominantly done by men, particularly the hunting of big game.  So, the difference between men and women is a matter of degree rather than kind.  If I am right about that, then what Anderson and her colleagues are refuting is mostly a straw man (or straw woman).

All of their evidence supports the conclusion that the hunting of large game is usually men's work, although women regularly hunt small game, and occasionally there are individual cases of women hunting large game.

Their first cited evidence of female hunting is Haas et al. (2020).  But they do not acknowledge the remarkable admission in the online Supplement to that article that "the WMP6 burial is the only burial securely identified as a big-game hunter burial in the entire sample of late Pleistocene and early Holocene burials in the Americas."  Notably, Haas et al. do not include this statement in their published article.  I have written about this in a previous post.

As far as I can tell, none of the evidence in Anderson et al.'s article shows that women are the same as men in the regular hunting of large game.  Consider, for example, three societies where they see women hunting large game—the !Kung San, the Hadza, and the Bakola.  According to their authority for the !Kung San, although there are a few cases of women hunting small game, "basically they leave hunting to the men" (Lee 1979, 235).

According to their authority for the Hadza, although "the common view that males only hunt and females only gather is not true," it is nevertheless true that women mostly hunt small animals, and there is "a marked division of foraging labor" between men and women (Marlowe 2010, 269).

According to their authority for the Bakola, although the women participate in hunting, gathering "is reserved mostly for women and children" (Ngima 2006, 58); women participate in net hunting, but only as beaters and not as hunters (51, 57, 65-67); and women are excluded from ceremonial net hunting (66).

They cannot point to any evidence for a hunter-gatherer society where the hunting of big game is predominantly by women, or at least equally with men.

REFERENCES

Anderson, Abigail, Sophia Chilczuk, Kaylie Nelson, Roxanne Ruther, and Cara Wall-Scheffler. 2023. "The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women's Contribution to the Hunt Across Ethnographic Contexts."  PLoS ONE 18(6): e0287101.

Haas, Randall, et al. 2020. "Female Hunters of the Early Americas." Science Advances 6: 1-10.

Kelly, Robert L. 2013. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lee, Richard B. 1979. The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lee, Richard B., and Irven DeVore, eds.  1968.  Man the Hunter.  Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.

Marlowe, Frank W. 2010. The Hadza: Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania.  Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ngima Mawoung, Godefroy.  2006.  "Perception of Hunting, Gathering, and Fishing Techniques of the Bakola of the Coastal Region, Southern Cameroon." African Study Monographs, Suppl. 33: 49-69.

Woodburn, James. 1968. "An Introduction to Hadza Ecology." In Lee and DeVore, 49-55.