Is "Man the Hunter" a Myth?
A new preprint 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 preprint 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, released last week as a preprint, that carefully and methodically evaluated Anderson and colleagues’ claims. Led by Vivek Venkataraman, and with an impressive cast of expert co-authors, the preprint’s title nicely encapsulates its conclusion: “Woman the Hunter? Female foragers sometimes hunt, yet gendered divisions of labor are real.” The preprint 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.
Criticism #1: Biased Sampling
The first criticism is that the paper left out many societies where data on hunting were available. Importantly, many of those it left out - most of them, in fact - had little or no female hunting. This means that societies with female hunting were overrepresented in Anderson and colleagues’ sample, and thus that their estimate of the frequency of female hunting was almost certainly an overestimate.
To be clear, Venkataraman and co. weren’t suggesting - and nor am I - that Anderson et al. deliberately cherry picked societies to reach their preferred conclusion. Aside from anything else, they presumably knew that the paper might receive a lot of attention, and thus that any errors would soon be detected. Still, the fact remains that their sample appears to be biased toward societies with female hunting.
Criticism #2: Miscoding
The second criticism is that many of Anderson’s 63 societies were incorrectly coded. Most often, this involved classifying societies without female hunting as societies where females hunted. The !Kung San of the Kalahari desert, for instance, were classified as a society with female hunting, despite the fact that ethnographies of the !Kung include statements such as “women are totally excluded from hunting. Women never participate in a !Kung hunt.”
As with the biased sampling, these coding errors meant that the frequency of female hunting was overstated.
Criticism #3: Treating Hunting as a Binary
The third criticism is that female hunting was treated as a simple binary: Either it was present or it wasn’t. This means that, even if women in a given society did close-to-zero hunting, as long as they didn’t literally do zero, the society was counted as having hunting by both sexes. Inevitably, such a policy minimizes any differences. When you look instead at how much hunting men and women do, the picture radically shifts.
This was nicely captured in a series of tweets by one of the co-authors on the new preprint, the anthropologist Edward Hagen. Referring to a paper by Koster et al., Hagen first tweeted the following.
Then, several months later, Hagen tweeted a graph that he’d put together based on data from the Koster paper. As you can see, in societies where women hunt, they do considerably less hunting than men.
Criticism #4: Devaluing Women’s Contributions
The fourth and final criticism of the Anderson paper is that its exclusive focus on hunting downplays the importance of the many areas in which women contribute more than men. As Venkataraman and colleagues put it,
Anthropologists have long recognized that the nature of cooperation in foragers is complex and multi-faceted, and women’s and men’s subsistence activities play important and often complementary roles… [T]o focus on hunting at the expense of other critical activities - from gathering and food processing, to water and firewood collection, to the manufacture of clothing, shelters, and tools, to pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, childcare, and healthcare, to education, marriages, rituals, politics, and conflict resolution - is to downplay the complexity, and thereby the importance of women’s roles in the foraging lifeway.
In her thought-provoking book The Sexual Paradox, Susan Pinker made the astute observation that we too often treat any area where men predominate as the default, the ideal, the yardstick against which everyone should be judged. As a result, we often end up evaluating women by male-centric standards. When we resist the idea that women did less hunting than men, but don’t see any problem with the idea that men did less gathering than women - or less of any of the other important contributions made by women - we’re tacitly assuming that the areas where men predominate are more important than the ones where women do. And the great irony of this assumption is that, when you think about it, it’s really quite sexist!1
Parting Thoughts
In summary, Venkataraman and colleagues make a persuasive case that the Anderson paper is riddled with errors, and that it greatly exaggerates the extent of female hunting. If that’s right, then it raises a question: How did the authors get it so wrong?
Early in their paper, Anderson and co. observe that “researcher bias shapes science’s interpretation of data, and it behooves each generation of scientists to ensure that paradigms fit the existing data.” This is, of course, absolutely true. The problem, though, is that researcher bias doesn’t just go in one direction. As I argue in the new book I’m writing, some people have a clear bias toward exaggerating traditional sex differences. At the same time, however, others have an equally clear bias toward minimizing or even denying them. The latter is considerably more common in academia than the former - and as a result, we less often guard against it.
In fact, not only do we not guard against it, but in our effort to fight traditional biases, we sometimes inadvertently foster anti-traditional ones. Many modern academics have what I suspect is an exaggerated view of just how biased their counterparts in earlier generations were, and just how much this distorted their science. As a result, in their efforts to set the record straight (as they see it), they ironically sometimes end up producing research that’s biased in the opposite direction.
To be fair, some laypeople doubtlessly assume that men did all of the hunting, thus underestimating women’s abilities and contributions in this domain. But the solution to such misconceptions isn’t biased research that errs the other way. On the contrary, biased research is likely to backfire, persuading people that science can no longer be trusted on politically contentious issues. As Venkataraman and colleagues note,
To build a more complete picture of the lives of foragers in the present and the past, it serves no one to misrepresent reality. In correcting the misapprehension that women do not hunt, we should not replace one myth with another.
You can read Anderson and colleagues’ paper here, and Venkataraman and colleagues’ rebuttal here.
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Further Reading
Melanie Martin and colleagues have a new paper with the informative title “Can women hunt? Yes. Did women contribute much to human evolution through endurance hunting? Probably not.” The paper is a response to another paper arguing that, contrary to the consensus view in anthropology, ancestral women did much of the hunting in hunter-gatherer societies. Among other things, Martin and co. make this ironic point:
[The paper is] rooted in assumptions that hunting is a superior, more-desirable activity, even explicitly stating that women are “relegated to mothering and gathering”... While Westernized individualistic perspectives may position mothering and women’s domestic labor as relatively less-skilled or important activities compared to other (often male) economic contributions, this view is not shared by most contemporary scholars of foraging societies, nor by many women in foraging societies themselves.
Certainly, there are complications here, not least of which is that men have sometimes excluded women from desirable, high-status areas. Still, we shouldn’t automatically assume that anything that tilts male is superior.
Nicely done.
I have long sensed a similar bias, which I call crappy programmer / great teacher. Why do crappy programmers straight out of school make so much more than great teachers straight out of school, an effect that increases over time, even though they both require similar cognitive loads and skills. I believe the literal devaluation of professions which women dominate because the default profession salary standard is male is what contributes to the well-known net aggregate difference between female and male wages. I haven’t refined the idea to a one-liner but reading works like this help me.