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.
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.