Is "Man the Hunter" a Myth?
A new paper debunks an attempted debunking of a well-established sex difference
In this post, I’ll look at a recent debate in the scientific literature about sex differences in hunting in traditional hunter-gatherer societies. Did men really do all or most of it? Or were our female ancestors just as involved in hunting as our male ones?
The Big Picture
A long-standing claim in anthropology is that, in hunter-gatherer societies, men did the bulk of the hunting, whereas women did the bulk of the gathering.
A 2023 paper by Abigail Anderson and colleagues made a big splash by suggesting that this view is basically a myth. In many societies, argued Anderson and co., both sexes hunted, not just men.
The paper attracted a lot of media attention, almost all of it positive. But had anthropologists really overlooked extensive female hunting during the course of more than a century of research on hunter-gatherers?
A new paper by Vivek Venkataraman and 14 other hunter-gatherer experts argues not. In their view, the Anderson paper contains fatal flaws that undermine its challenge to the standard anthropological view. Among other things, Anderson and colleagues overlooked many societies where female hunting is minimal or absent, mistakenly coded societies without female hunting as societies with, and treated female hunting as a binary yes-or-no affair, thus papering over large differences in just how much hunting men and women do.
In addition, the strict focus on hunting and hunting alone downplays the importance of other areas where women contribute much more than men.
Taking on Man the Hunter
How did human beings make a living before we had 9-to-5 jobs, supermarkets, and Uber Eats? Most people, I think, are at least dimly aware that, for most of human prehistory, we lived as hunter-gatherers: We hunted animals, and we gathered plant matter. Most people are also dimly aware, I suspect, that these tasks weren’t evenly distributed within hunter-gatherer groups: For the most part, men did the hunting - especially of big game - while women did the gathering.
Or so we’ve always been told. But is this idea just a sexist myth? Have we vastly understated how much hunting our female ancestors did, and vastly overstated the division of labor by sex among our hunter-gatherer forebears?
According to a paper published in 2023 in PLOS ONE, the answer is an unequivocal yes. The paper, led by the biologist Abigail Anderson, surveyed the anthropological literature, and isolated 63 traditional societies with relevant data on hunting. Running the numbers, the authors concluded that in 79% of societies, both sexes hunted, rather than only the men. And women didn’t just hunt small game; in 33% of societies, they hunted big game as well. So much for Man the Hunter.
Is this little hunter a boy or a girl? It could be either! Ditto adult hunters?
The media loved it. A CNN headline described the paper as “Shattering the myth of men as hunters and women as gatherers.” New Scientist proclaimed that “The myth that men hunt while women stay at home is entirely wrong.” Scientific American tweeted that “The notion that men evolved to hunt and women to tend to children and domestic duties is one of anthropology’s most influential ideas. But the available data do not support it.” Even the prestigious journal Science joined the chorus, announcing that “Worldwide survey kills the myth of ‘Man the Hunter.’” The paper’s message - or rather, an exaggerated version of it - seemed to be one that a lot of people wanted to hear.
The Myth of the Myth of Man the Hunter
But was it true? Had Anderson and colleagues really slain a giant: the myth of Man the Hunter?
Well, it’s certainly true that, in many forager societies, women sometimes hunt. The idea that men always do 100% of the hunting, whereas women always do 0%, is definitely a myth. But it’s also common knowledge in the human sciences. That’s why, in describing the hunter-gatherer lifestyle in my book The Ape That Understood the Universe, I noted that “Both sexes had ‘jobs’ outside the home: Men did most of the hunting, women most of the gathering.” [Emphasis added.] Sure, some laypeople might think that hunting is solely the province of men. But that’s not the standard view in anthropology. The standard view is that, although women sometimes do some hunting, men do considerably more.
Importantly, though, Anderson and colleagues weren’t just challenging the lay view that men do it all; they were challenging the standard anthropological view as well. On their account, women do vastly more hunting than anthropologists had previously assumed - enough, in fact, that traditional notions of a sharp division of labor by sex are misleading.
My immediate hunch when I read the paper was that this probably isn’t true, and that the paper is likely an example of an increasingly common trend in science: the distortion of research by progressive values. Aside from anything else, it struck me as implausible that earlier generations of anthropologists - many of whom were women, incidentally - were so biased by their expectations that they’d simply hallucinated a sharp sexual division of labor out of a nearly equal one. On top of that, we know that among our close relatives the chimpanzees, males hunt more than females, which at least somewhat boosts the plausibility of the idea that the same sex difference evolved in our own species.
But of course, hunches are inadmissible evidence, and these arguments are suggestive rather than conclusive. For that reason, I was happy to see a new paper that carefully and methodically evaluated Anderson and colleagues’ claims. Led by Vivek Venkataraman, and with an impressive cast of expert co-authors, the paper’s title nicely encapsulates its conclusion: “Woman the Hunter? Female foragers sometimes hunt, yet gendered divisions of labor are real.” The paper makes a persuasive case that Anderson and co. greatly overstated the frequency of female hunting, and thus that their paper doesn’t topple the standard anthropological view.
Venkataraman and colleagues leveled four main criticisms at the Anderson paper. Let’s go through each in turn.