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.
You hit the nail on the head when you summarized "Perhaps something as mundane as the tendency of science popularisers, even scientists themselves, to slip from less to none and from more to all."
Nice to read a journalist who has the proper skepticism and background to write about this issue.
A long scholarly piece is being developed that explores the recent spate of articles on women and hunting.
The subtle slip from *less* to *none* was apparent in the interpretation of Man the Hunter. I haven't read that symposium myself, so I'm just going on their interpretation. I couldn't help but notice that Lacy and Ocobock knew very well that the Man the Hunter authors like Hitoshi Watanabe were perfectly aware that women did hunt. Now their criticism of Watanabe, that he didn't deal with this observation appropriately, may have merit. However this observation makes it very clear that from the beginning it has never been controversial among anthropologists that women hunted. That's according to the history L and O described themselves.
There's no denying that sexism was and in many cases still is a problem in the academy as elsewhere. I recall a great paper I read about the positive influence of second wave feminism on our understanding of evolutionary biology, and the way women used new perspectives to enrich our understanding of evolutionary processes. It just doesn't really feel like the Scientific American article was addressed to the scholarly community at all. It mostly seemed to talk past them. Now if their goal was to address the modern day cavemen and their sexist attitudes, I wish them the best of luck. I just wonder if they chose the right publication to reach them.
Great points! My guess is Ocobock and Lacy focus on the way that anthropologists have known about female hunters but turned a blind eye on them in their theories and public writings. But I think you are pointing at the crux of the issue, which is: where exactly is mainstream anthropology mistaken? Do they have the right data but they somehow forget it in their theoretical work? Or do they have the rights data and right theories but they give the wrong impression when talking to the general public? Or are the mainstream anthropologists right about everything, and this is just a problem with the general public? These are all possible interpretations. A fourth possibility is, of course, that there is something wrong about the mainstream anthropologist's data, such as Marlowe's graph. But to make this point Ocobock and Lacy would need to address the exact numbers. Are the numbers wrong? Or should we think that the numbers looked very different in the Pleistocene? Who knows. But a lot of open questions still. Keeps me interested!
You hit the nail on the head when you summarized "Perhaps something as mundane as the tendency of science popularisers, even scientists themselves, to slip from less to none and from more to all."
Nice to read a journalist who has the proper skepticism and background to write about this issue.
A long scholarly piece is being developed that explores the recent spate of articles on women and hunting.
Thanks Raymond! Glad you found this insightful!
The subtle slip from *less* to *none* was apparent in the interpretation of Man the Hunter. I haven't read that symposium myself, so I'm just going on their interpretation. I couldn't help but notice that Lacy and Ocobock knew very well that the Man the Hunter authors like Hitoshi Watanabe were perfectly aware that women did hunt. Now their criticism of Watanabe, that he didn't deal with this observation appropriately, may have merit. However this observation makes it very clear that from the beginning it has never been controversial among anthropologists that women hunted. That's according to the history L and O described themselves.
There's no denying that sexism was and in many cases still is a problem in the academy as elsewhere. I recall a great paper I read about the positive influence of second wave feminism on our understanding of evolutionary biology, and the way women used new perspectives to enrich our understanding of evolutionary processes. It just doesn't really feel like the Scientific American article was addressed to the scholarly community at all. It mostly seemed to talk past them. Now if their goal was to address the modern day cavemen and their sexist attitudes, I wish them the best of luck. I just wonder if they chose the right publication to reach them.
Great points! My guess is Ocobock and Lacy focus on the way that anthropologists have known about female hunters but turned a blind eye on them in their theories and public writings. But I think you are pointing at the crux of the issue, which is: where exactly is mainstream anthropology mistaken? Do they have the right data but they somehow forget it in their theoretical work? Or do they have the rights data and right theories but they give the wrong impression when talking to the general public? Or are the mainstream anthropologists right about everything, and this is just a problem with the general public? These are all possible interpretations. A fourth possibility is, of course, that there is something wrong about the mainstream anthropologist's data, such as Marlowe's graph. But to make this point Ocobock and Lacy would need to address the exact numbers. Are the numbers wrong? Or should we think that the numbers looked very different in the Pleistocene? Who knows. But a lot of open questions still. Keeps me interested!