Did Women Evolve to Hunt?

A recent piece in Scientific American argued that women, too, evolved to hunt. It caused a stir. Here is my attempt to assess this argument about human origins, guided by one of the authors.

This is a written breakdown of my conversation with Cara Ocobock (@caraocobock). You can listen to conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or other podcast platforms. Just search for “On Humans” and find episode 29. If you enjoy this piece, please do consider subscribing. You will get one after every new episode — so no spam!

Photo: Cover of the November 2023 Scientific American

Introducing “Woman the Hunter”

How natural is a sexual division of labour? Very natural, claims a popular theory. Indeed, it was the secret to our success: men evolved to hunt, women to forage. This allowed women to focus on childcare while staying economically productive. Men, on the other hand, could focus on high-risk hunting. At the end of the day, everyone could have steak and veggies for dinner.

But why do we think so? Is there a chance that we are simply projecting our gender roles onto the human past? Or is the opposite happening: When modern films portray ancient women as hunters, are they simply projecting their liberal dreams onto prehistory?

A recent cover story of the ⁠Scientific American⁠ tackles this question head-on. The authors, Cara Ocobock and Sarah Lacy, write:

“[According to the orthodox theory,] hunting was a major driver of human evolution and that men carried this activity out to the exclusion of women. … Man the Hunter has dominated the study of human evolution for nearly half a century and pervaded popular culture. … The thing is, it's wrong.” (My emphasis)

As you might imagine, some heated discussion ensued. This is understandable. But I felt that much of the science was lost under the emotions of the politics. To clean things up, I invited one of the authors, Cara Ocobock, to discuss the paper on the show.

This was a fascinating conversation. I learned a lot about the topic. But perhaps more striking was the lessons it taught me about reading popular science. As I will suggest towards the end, only reading the popular article (or the tweets about it) would give a very distorted view about the science under the surface.

A Short History of “Man the Hunter”

The theory about “Man the Hunter” was shaped by the 1966 academic symposium of the same name, held in at the University of Chicago. This almost mythical event is often thought to be the birthplace of modern hunter-gatherer studies. In line with the all mythical events, it has come to mean different things to different people. 

For many, Man the Hunter is the beginning of a respectful approach to hunter-gatherers, the moment when we first realised the virtues of their lifestyle. For the most ambitious interpreters, it was in Chicago that we started understanding that agricultural was the worst mistake in the history of the human race.

Not all agreed. To the harshest critics, Man the Hunter became the symbol of our faulty attempt at using modern-day tribes in modelling the deep past.

And then there was a middle way. Some anthropologists, mostly women, accepted the value of the general project, but were unimpressed by the lack of attention to women. According to them, Man the Hunter is a perfect example of what happens when men sit down to think about the origin of Man.

So what did this group of men conclude? The most ambitious theories revolved around the following idea: hunting made us human. Hunting required endurance (best achieved as a naked biped), complex vocalisation (a foundation for language), and most importantly, coordinated team-work (a foundation for civilisation). But we should notice the unstated implication: Woman the Gatherer was a passive recipient of more than the steak. She gained her very evolution as a gift from Man the Hunter. 

A pushback was guaranteed. Towards the end of the 20th Century, critics wrote books such as The Woman Who Never Evolved or Woman the Gatherer. They argued that women’s tasks, such as childrearing and gathering, were essential to the evolution of everything from human sociality to our long lifespans. (I had the pleasure to converse with one of the icons of this movement, Kristen Hawkes, in episode 6 of the podcast.) 

This was an important pushback. We learned a lot. But not enough, some claim. Rather, we should question the very existence of strong gender roles in human evolution.

This takes us to the cover of Scientific American and my conversation with Cara Ocobock.

Woman the Hunter: An Argument in Three Movements

The Ocobock-Lacy argument proceeds in three movements. The first movement presents archaeological evidence for female hunters. This was fascinating and, to my money, the most convincing part.

The second movement explores physiology, debunking the idea that female bodies are incapable of hunting. This was fun and socially important discussion, but as I will argue, it is somewhat peripheral to the core argument.

The final part is anthropology, especially ethnographies of modern-day hunter-gatherers. This is where the things get more murky. After all, Ocobock and Lacy are talking to two audiences. On the one hand, there are the “people on the street” who might think that women never hunted. This is the “easy” job — difficult only due to politics and prejudice, not because of a lack of data. The more difficult job is to convince the community of hunter-gatherer experts. As far as I know, no one in that community believes that a woman has never touched a hunting weapon. But many do regard hunting as a mainly male activity. So should this more nuanced theory be "buried for good?” Or is the Ocobock-Lacy argument actually in line with the mainstream opinion of hunter-gatherer experts? It is difficult to say. I will return to this point ambiguity. But let’s start with archaeology.

I. Archaeology

In 2018, a discovery in Peruvian Andes made headlines. As Ocobock explains:

“[The archaeologists were] working at a site that's about 11, 000 years old in Peru. They had several grave sites of multiple individuals, and with the bony remains they also found several hunting implements. And they had assumed that they must have been male, because there's this kind of long held belief that males were hunters, females were gatherers, and these very strict sexual division of labor. And so then they actually did the analysis on the bones themselves, and they found that almost half were female!”¹

This was a superbly important finding, and it made to it the New York Times. But how common is this? Is Peru just an odd outlier? Ocobock stressed that we cannot know for sure, for it is not inconceivable that other researchers were not as careful with their genetics. She suggested that this should prompt re-examinations:

“Folks will likely be going back over some of their archeological sites to make sure that they got that analysis right — that they didn't just assign male because they were buried with hunting implements or war implements.”

I hope so. But what evidence do we have today? Her next response was one of the most interesting ones.

“Let's go further back to Neanderthals who, in some parts of the world, lived as recently as 30 000 years ago. Neanderthals are really interesting in that they were much more focused on big game hunting [than Homo sapiens]. They focused on big game hunting and they did it in a way that was up close and personal with those big animals, likely involving spear thrusting and spear throwing. Because of that style of hunting, they got injured a lot.”

Easy to believe, I said. Ocobock laughed and affirmed:

“The Neanderthal fossil record is filled with injuries. The fun part of this is that [their injury pattern is] very similar to the injury pattern we see among modern day rodeo clowns, people whose job is to get in the animal's way and protect the rider when the rider falls off the animal.”

This was a surprisingly painful window into the life of a Neanderthal (or a rodeo clown). But here comes the twist. Ocobock asked me:

“If you were expecting to see a big sexual division of labor between males and females, what would you expect the injury pattern to be between males and females?”

My attempt at a measure answer went as follows: “Well, I guess even without going into the specifics… different”. Ocobock laughed heartily — she was a particularly jubilant guest — and said:

“Yeah! You would expect something different. You wouldn't expect to see the exact same injury patterns between male and female Neanderthals. So here's the deal: there's no difference in injury patterns between female Neanderthals and male Neanderthals! They were all doing the same thing. They were all getting involved in the hunting.”

I found this fascinating, and frankly, much more convincing than the Peruvian finding.² The latter is, after all, just an anecdote.

Ocobock’s argument faces a problem, though: we are not Neanderthals. And the evidence about Homo sapiens is trickier.

Luckily for our ancestors, their fossils show less injuries. Bows, spear throwers, and other projectile weapons made a difference. Hunting became safer. But luckily for archaeologists, even this leaves a trace. Neanderthals have injuries in the rodeo-style. Our ancestors had injuries in tennis-style. They got “thrower’s elbow”, which you can see in the fossils. And there is a sex-difference. As Ocobock explained:

“We start to seeing throwers elbow more often among males than females.”

This suggests that men were doing more of spear throwing or such. But there are two important caveats. The first one is about the difference between more and all.

“We do still get throwers elbow amongst females.”

Another caveat has to do with preferred hunting styles. Higher levels of testosterone give men, on average, an advantage in strength and power — so things like throwing a spear. Admittedly, this might have been a reason for men to do more of the hunting. But another theory is that women simply picked weapons more suited to a lower upper-body strength. (Think of goddess Diana with her bow and arrow.)

Arguably, this is speculative. But any theory about the composition of palaeolithic hunting parties is a form of enlightened speculation.

The point about testosterone brings us to the second part of the argument: sex differences in athletic performance.

II. Physiology

In 1966, it was commonly believed that women cannot run the marathon. It seemed reasonable, therefore, to argue that women could not possibly have hunted. After all, human hunting techniques are widely held to rely less on sprints (which humans are terrible at) and more on endurance (which we are uniquely suited for).

Well, we are not in 1966. And armed with modern exercise physiology, Ocobock makes life very difficult for the “women cannot hunt” camp. For example, it turns out that oestrogen, which females produce more

“protects against muscle damage… Oestrogen [also] increases the amount of fat that muscles will burn to do activity. And fat gives you more calories per gram of it, which means you get longer, slower calorie burn, which can help you go further and it can delay fatigue. It also helps spare muscle mass.”

I was curious if this means that those carb-dense “sports gels” would be less needed for female runners. Ocobock said she does not have data on but suggested that it would make sense.

So oestrogen is great for long term endurance. Indeed, there are some models suggesting that women should start having an advantage over men soon after the marathon distance.

“One paper has modelled it and they put it at 60 km.”

Ocobock notes that this is just one speculative paper, but the general finding stands: gap between male and female athletes diminishes the longer the distance. Oestrogen also gives women an interesting advantage linked to strength training: while men tend to have a higher maximum capacity, women tend to be able to do more repetitions at a certain percentage of their maximum capacity.

We also went on a long diversion into why we should be careful at taking modern athletic performance as evidence of universal truths: women sports are still underrepresented, underfunded, and understudied.

I find this socially important. The relevance to Man the Hunter -theory is less clear. After all, no one in 21st Century is seriously suggesting that women are incapable of, say, running marathons. (I just completed the Oxford Half, and I can assure you there were hundreds of women ahead of me!) Sex differences in endurance sports are marginal at best. Given that the exact link between sports performance and palaeolithic hunting is deeply speculative, I don’t think any sensible debate will be settled by the physiological evidence.³

So let’s turn to anthropology, a field which is everything but peripheral to the argument. Indeed, anthropology is the field at the eye of the storm. And I will argue that this is more than a figure of speech: at the core of the storm, the winds are calmer than one might think.

III. Anthropology

What about the ethnographic record, I asked Ocobock. After all, the most common response to her argument is that Man the Hunter is a theory rooted in the ethnographic data. In modern day hunter gatherers, women rarely hunt. So what is her take on this?

“My take on that is going to refer to a different Cara, Dr Cara Wall-Scheffler. She and a couple of her students came out with the paper this past summer where they actually took a deep dive into an ethnographic database.”

The team studied every hunter-gatherer ethnography where they found a mention of who did the hunting. That was 65 hunter-gatherer groups. So what did they find?

“[Around] 80 percent of them show women were hunting.”

That’s 50 groups of hunter-gatherers! This is an important finding. Again, no one should be claiming that women don’t hunt, nor that women hunters are limited to odd case such as the Agta people in the Philippines.

But issues remain. One has to do with the technical issues in the sampling. According to many critics, the figure of 80% is too high due to such issues.

But I raised a further problem: the paper does not tell us how often women hunted. Were the hunting parties fully mixed? Or did the odd woman hunt every once in a while? And at the end of the day, this is where the only real debate lies, at least in serious academia. And contrary to the impression given by the Scientific American piece, we do have data on this.

The data is not all bad for Woman the Hunter. For example, there is an Australian hunter-gatherers, the Martu, where women are reported to bring in over 50% of the meat. But this an exception. As I presented the problem to Ocobock:

“Frank Marlowe is one of big names in this field and I have seen a paper from him where he tries to [get the numbers on how much men and women hunt]. And I think he's just a really good example of why I think that there are two different audiences that you are talking to. On the one hand, you have the audience saying that “a woman can't hunt” I think that the case is well made: we know they can and they probably did. But then you have people like Frank Marlowe who does very very careful analysis trying to make predictions on how much sexual division of labor there is.”

(You can check the paper I am referring to here.)

“What [Marlowe] does is to put numbers on the level of sexual division of labor and see how much this correlate with this or that. The basic take home message is that there is a curve going from vegetables where it's majority women, all the way to a big sea mammal hunting, where it's almost exclusively men doing it. And then in the middle, you have things like hunting fowl where it’s majority men, but not always.”

I know it is unfair to ask someones’s reaction to very detailed data that I have not given them a chance to look at. (You can see it below.) But I was not so worried about the details as the basic approach. As I expressed it:

“I'm wondering, if you're not presented with this kind of caricature of “females can't hunt” but you're presented with a very careful analysis by someone like Frank Marlowe, suggesting that there is sexual division of labor but it's a question of percentages, how much do you think there would be disagreement?”

Photo: A table from Marlowe (2007)

I was genuinely curious to hear Ocobock’s response. She took a moment to think, and responded:

“I honestly don't think it is an opposition to what we're saying, because again, we're not saying that only females hunted or that even females did the majority of the hunting. .. I am absolutely fine with there being a sexual division of labor. I am not fine with it being an elimination version of sexual division of labor — that there is none of this crossover.”

I was glad to get an honest response. It seems that Man the Hunter should be buried in public. But in private, something much less revolutionary is happening.

This is not to say that Ocobock is completely happy with mainstream hunter-gatherer studies.

“What we are saying is that evolutionarily, in our deep past, there is no evidence of a deep sexual division of labor.” (My emphasis)

[EDIT: My recent communication with Ocobock suggests that her position has changed. See the footnote for details⁴.]

I think Marlowe would disagree. He passed away in 2019, so we cannot know. But my hunch is that he would say the percentages are starker than Ocobock gives credit for. He might say that the division was “deep but not rigid” — deep enough to be a basis for evolutionary models.

This sounds similar to the opinion of Vivek Venkataraman, my guest from episode 14. Living with the Batek people in Malaysia, a very gender-egalitarian group of hunter-gatherers, Venkataraman has witnessed no rigid gender roles. For example, teenage girls often get interested in blow dart hunting. Some keep doing it. But at the end of the day, a vast majority of hunting is done by the men. And from a political point of view, Venkataraman sees an interesting lesson here: gender equality is not necessarily about a 50:50 split in all economic activity. In a beautiful finishing line, he writes:

“… among a liberated society of equals, status and power has little to do with who brings in the meat.”

I asked Ocobock about her reactions to Venkataraman’s thinking. Her response was stern:

“I don't think that runs counter to what we were saying in our articles in any way, shape, or form.”

Again, I appreciated the honesty. But there is a catch here. My impression is that Venkataraman, like Marlowe, represent something of a mainstream opinion amongst serious hunter-gatherer scholars. They are the modern torch carriers of Man the Hunter -tradition. They have moved on from many of the early generalisations, for sure. Their theories are more data-driven more nuanced. As Venkataraman’s writing shows, they show genuine interest in gender equality. But driven by their data, they keep modelling hunting as a mainly male activity. Is their approach to be “buried for good"“? It does not seem so. Admittedly, the disagreement might simply lie in the numbers. But when I asked Ocobock for her view on the gender split of ancient hunting parties, she refused to give an estimate.

“I would just be making it up. And I don't feel comfortable just making up numbers.”

Fair enough. But this did leave me wonder: where, if anywhere, should the followers of Marlowe adjust their views? I thought hard about this after our conversation. The issue became especially pressing to me when I realised that Ocobock had suggested, albeit speculatively, that female hunters were probably less common in warmer climates. Given that most of human evolution happened in Africa, this seems to further bolster the view of Marlowe and others.

This is no minor quibble. It bears heavily on how we understand the current debate.

Implications for the debate

I heard varying reactions to “Woman the Hunter” article. “It’s revolutionary!” a local barista told me. (Yes, I am lucky to live in an area where baristas have anthropology degrees!) But there were also those who thought that there was only one interesting thing about the article: that anyone had ever thought the opposite. As one Reddit user wrote in response to a similar article:

“It blows my mind that anyone would think any able bodied person would be left out [of the hunt] ... It’s just stupid.”

I might paraphrase: Not only stupid, but also sexists.

And indeed, it would be a miracle if sexism has played no role in the saga. But there is more to the story. Remember that Ocobock was not ready to discredit the position of the leading hunter-gatherer experts — all of whom regard hunting as a mainly male activity in most communities. So there seems to be something more than sexism at play here. What is this something? Perhaps something as mundane as the tendency of science popularisers, even scientists themselves, to slip from less to none and from more to all.

Not that slips in language are a trivial matter. Sloppy language leads to sloppy models. These can be detrimental to science and society. And asking our theories to acknowledge the contributions of ancestral women is, well, more than reasonable. In this regard, I am grateful to Ocobock for shaking me out of my own slumber. But are we living through a revolutionary debunking of a leading scientific theory? It does not seem so.

Inside the eye of the storm, the disagreement seems mild at best.

I hope you enjoyed this piece! I recommend listening to the episode if you did. There are some links below. Just find the On Humans and episode 29. I hope you enjoy it! 

Thank you, as always, for reading! 

Take care,

Ilari

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1. All quotations have been simplified by deleting filler words, filler phrases, and other parts not critical for the argument. Given the sheer number of such edits, I have decided to hide them to ensure legibility.

2. At this juncture, I could not resist a small diversion to the details of the Neanderthal fossils. It turned out that their foot injuries often healed. And as I learned from Jeremy DeSilva, a bipedal mammal does not heal their feat without social support. To me, this suggests that Neanderthals had friendships and a sense of social solidarity. Ocobock added that they also had medicine. Apparently we have even evidence of a successful amputation! I found this fascinating. But it was a digression from the argument.

3. Ocobock is writing a book which looks at human evolution through the female body. (The book will be called That’s What She Said: The Story of Hu(wo)man Evolution.) So these details might become woven into a bigger argument. But for now, I must say that the physiology seems peripheral to the argument. It is certainly important per se. I would love to send a copy back in time to 1966. But no serious proposal in the contemporary literature will fall due to it.

4. In our recent communication, Ocobock described her position as follows: She mostly agrees with Marlowe, Vivek, etc. about modern-day hunter gatherers, but doubts that modern ethnographies are useful models of the deeper past. Instead, she would focus on archaeology, where the evidence suggests something closer to a 50:50 split.

This is a reasonable position, but it raises many questions. Why would these activities become more sexually divided during Holocene? And if ethnographies are useless as hints of the deeper past, what role is Wall-Scheffler and others playing in this story? And what exactly has led Ocobock to change her tone since our conversation?

There is a further point I would like to add here: This revision does not change my conclusion about the origins of the problem. Using modern hunter-gatherers as (imperfect) models of the past has been a mainstream paradigm in the study of human evolution. Even if misguided, this paradigm is a big reason why so many anthropologists have believed in “Man the Hunter” and “Woman the Gatherer”. In other words, the roots of Man the Hunter are not in sexism alone. The most obvious motivation has been data of mainstream science, further bolstered by the problematic slip from more to all. Admittedly, mainstream science might have made a serious methodological mistake. But it seems to be a scientific mistake, not a political one. After all, the same “mistake” has been committed by feminists hunter-gatherer scholars in the Woman the Gatherer tradition, as well as many researchers having nothing to do with sex and gender.

PS. For a defence of the mainstream paradigm, see my discussion with Vivek Venkataraman in episode 14 of the podcast.