"The 'Man the Hunter' Myth Won't Go Away"

[GrumpyPanda]

Not an entirely new insight, but apparently there's lots of new research revolutionizing our knowledge of prehistoric gender relations. Confirms my long-held view that much of evolutionary psychology is a crock of pseudoscientific bullshit based on a Fred Flintstone view of prehistory. (One of the scholars cited goes in for a bit of gender woo but don't let that distract you.)

https://www.noemamag.com/the-man-the-hunter-myth-wont-go-away/

Similar discussions here https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4919268-how-the-patriarchy-ruined-friday-13th-for-women-what-else-have-they-stolen

and here https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4788786-why-has-it-always-been-a-patriarchy

Thanks @IwantToRetire. Hadn't seen the older thread, will have a look tomorrow.

Interesting, thanks 😊

Well, based on a quick read of the OP they seem like parallel discusions with maybe some overlap!

Not to say the article shouldn't be discussed for its ideas / opinions.

"But who brings in the extra food? Most argue that it’s the fathers, but Kristen Hawkes, another anthropologist at the University of Utah, says it’s the grandmothers. Men may bring in some food from their hunts, but she believes showing off is their primary motive. In her view, mothers and grandmothers do the essential work of gathering plants and trapping small game, and men go after big game to impress the women. Hunting in that view is like a peacock’s tail — showy, good for attracting mates, but perhaps less helpful for survival.
Hawkes says the role of older women is vital in the groups she studies and believes grandmothers’ hunting and gathering was so important in our past that it drove the evolution of menopause in the human lineage after we split off from other apes."

Is there a Grandmother's Day??

One thing about the gathering side of things that isn't mentioned is the necessity for plant knowledge - not only which are good for food, but which are to be avoided, and which are good for healing. I remember a walk with my mum in which she told us about poisonous berries. I don't remember the distinction between black and white bryony, but they're both bad. I do remember that all the iffy ones had a peculiar waxy finish. (We didn't see deadly nightshade, which doesn't.) These things stick. There's a reason potatoes and tomatoes took so long to catch on. Gatherers had far more than one walk to learn on, and the grandmothers would have been vital. I was particularly interested in the groups where the women choose where to go because of the plant availability. Though that might have affected prey as well as they use the same resources. If you go where you can dig up pignuts, you may get a pig as well.

Evolutionary Psychology always seemed a bit mickey mouse to me. A book came out a few years ago with some convoluted theory about women liking pink , something to do with gathering fruit . Blokes like blue , probably from staring at the horizon in the plains of the Serengeti hoping to see some unsuspecting deer.

Contradicted by the Ladies Homes Journal in the 1920s. Pink and red are most unsuitable and a bit vulgar according to them. Well , I bet I could invent some bollox theory about why women actually prefer blue. My gran actually preferred beige , or 'fawn' as she called it. Explain that , you Californian fruitcake.

That's interesting @Treaclewell . An old farmer here told me that wild plants with a livid red or orange colour are telling you : Keep away!
Wish I'd known this as a 3 year old when my sister and I gobbled up some delicious looking orange berries. Finally tracked them down - cuckoo pint. Avoid 😱

I have a pair of Victorian china figures representing a milk maid and her beau, and he is in pinj, and she is in blue. The reversal happened in the 20th century, so nuts to evolutionary explanations! I prefer blue and always have. Pinkishness began after my childhood anyway.
With regard to your cuckoo pint adventure, I think that very early in life children should be taught to avoid anything that is not from a shop. You can modify later if you grow your own veggies and fruit.
I was once taught to identify yellow staining mushrooms, not good, by a person with expertise. Otherwise like shop mushrooms, so confusing, and I couldn't see the yellow at all. One can't always rely on shops. My sister had projectile vomiting from tinned mushrooms! The doctor asked if she had had mushrooms, and that was all she had had.

Yes, the assigning of colours to children by sex happened fairly recently (in the historical time sense). I read that initially there was an attempt to link pink with boys as it was seen as a more energetic colour than the pale blue which was paired for these purposes with it.

Some studies about children's colour preferences show that young children don't seem to have any that would be sex-linked, but children develop them at the age when they first develop interest in which sex they belong to.

One way of interpreting that is that children go from "I am a girl/boy, and girls/boys are supposed to like pink/blue so I will choose the pink/blue ball when given a choice between balls of different colours", rather than the other way round.

I think we sometimes forget how powerful was the re-writing of history and myths by the Victorians.

In that era little boys were dressed in pink as a signifier towards wearing full blooded red as soldiers and huntsmen (ie middle class fashionistaa).

Blue for girls was thought to be older and more related to images of the Virgin Mary. But again as these were mainly recent european interpretations, not real reflections.

Pink and frilly for girls came in after WWII when there was a huge push to get women back into the home and return jobs to men. Hollywood played a huge part in that.

Which was then subverted by the slightly less prim Brigette Bardour in France.

And at that time no "respectable" woman would wear red (tut, tutno better than she ought) so it is about social control.

And now we may not have social control but we do have mass marketing. And I suggest many of these stories about which colours children prefer and so on are just made up stats by advertisers.

And even if earlier myths about colour were ridiculous, they were effectively an historical record of which cultures and classes have power at any period.

Though as the vast majority of people would be too poor to every have these concerns, all slightly irrelevant.

Abhannmor · Today 10:51

Cuckoo pint? Blimey, you were lucky, they contain oxalic acid, the same compound as rhubarb leaves. It's very corrosive to the digestive tract.

I would like to add: it would have needed to have been men hunting 'big game' due to the weight of the animals needing to be lugged home.

I don't believe that men just did it to attract women. There is definitely an innate drive within (some) men to hunt. It's not for impressing women, they just enjoy it.

It makes sense to me (though just layperson's common sense, I realise there may be evidence otherwise) that being male (and fully fit) could give you an advantage in some types of hunting - where running speed, throwing a spear harder/faster or physically overpowering a big animal would help you prevail. But there are many other ways to hunt, where other skills count more, like visual accuracy, moving quietly, quick reactions, planned teamwork etc. Plenty of women could have been as good or better at those.

I also wonder if a hunter gatherer society would have been more likely to prioritise gender roles for cultural reasons (eg a male-only hunting party because men do that as a gendered thing) or if a hunting party would be more likely to have been the individuals who did that best, which could have included women on the stronger/bigger/faster end of the bell curve. (Just as some men would have been physically weak, disabled or unsuited to the task and would have ended up being a shaman, tool carver or whatever instead)

I agree, women can be just as effective at hunting by playing to their own strengths and working together.

I remember being fascinated by one series of Bear Grylls 'The Island' where they marooned a group of women and a group of men separately on a tropical island. The women were comparatively better at surviving - they shared jobs, worked together and co-operated much more effectively than the men, who had too many leadership/power struggles going on. The women were first to hunt and kill a pig.

Of course it might have been portrayed that way for the TV programme 😊

there would also be factors like women's menstrual cycles which would play a part in ability to hunt, including menopause. Men just don't have the same variations to their perception like we do.

Living off grid, on the land where we kill animals, forage, collect water, chop wood... It makes absolute sense to me that men would have been hunting more than women. I think anyone theorising that women did instead of men is probably a city dweller.

of course there were exceptions, and I'm sure women caught small animals. But women had alot of other shit on their plate: foraging, child rearing, cloth making, bread making. I know I'd be telling him to get his ass out there and not come back till he brought us something to eat.

I would love to buy into all this but I'm not convinced.

We all agree that men are larger than us on average.

We all agree that, pound for pound, men are stronger than us.

We all agree that men have thicker and denser bones than us.

We all agree that men have faster reaction times than us.

We all agree that men have better hand to eye coordination than us.

Why?

It seems an incredibly inefficient way of achieving the peacock effect.

But I could easily be wrong.

Were not peacocks. a bit like we're not clownfish. Surely if we want to look to the animal kingdom for comparative answers then we would look to the chimp kingdom.

Male chimps hunt.

Yeah I find the article pretty silly to be quite honest .It feels like the author just has a problem with men and is trying to make a point. A competition of the sexes

''Hunting in that view is like a peacock’s tail — showy, good for attracting mates, but perhaps less helpful for survival.''

Killing a large animal so your whole family /tribe can feast on meat is definitely great for survival. Similiarly if you live in a climate that freezes there are no small animals or plants to forage. A giant kill stays frozen and can keep people alive for a winter.

We think big game when taking off hunting but it doesn't need to be.
I watched a documentary(forget which one) following primitive tribes and the men were all off for days hunting bats. Big colonies of bats and almost fishing then in fishing nets.
And they were not rushing home to share with the wife and kids. Rather they were roasting and eating them. Taking some home was an after thought.

In lion prides, the females typically hunt. The males have another way of “peacocking” and displaying their masculinity, the mane. I don’t think you can say they necessarily go together, though they could.

And that's exactly rge Fred Flintstone view of hunting I mentioned earlier. Or if you like, solitary 19th century trappers equipped with firearms. In contrast, a lot of scholars in recent years have argued that ESPECIALLY for big-game hunting, early humans would have needed to go on drives. Which meant including every able-bodied adult if possible. I imagine the same would hold true for the transport argument brought up by pp.

Come to think of it, it strikes me how similar the solitary hunter cliché is to the solitary inventor, which has been totally debunked in modern debates on innovation systems.

It seems likely that hunter gatherer women have typically spent a lot of their adult life pregnant, which would tend to limit what activities were sensible use of their time and energy, particularly in the later months. Any half decent man (or for that matter any man interested only in his own survival!) would try to contribute by doing more of the hunting and gathering. By the time a woman had stopped breastfeeding she would very likely be pregnant again. So roles were dictated by biology much more than they need to be now.

No, it's not a Fred Flintstone view, it's the view of a woman who has lived off grid, and in off grid communities amongst many men and women of different ages. (I have seen the split that occurs accross sexes) I have lived a life where hard physical toil for everyday necessities was a reality and not just something theoretical. That is where my opinion comes from, not a children's cartoon.

I never said it would be solitary male hunters, I also think it would be a group of males. But I definitely think it would be majority males, including some exceptions. But I don't think that those exceptions mean there wouldn't have been a trend.