Hunters, Gatherers, Caretakers
What do our ancestors reveal about the gender roles of the modern day?
In our society, a gender binary is instilled in us since birth, restricting us to set paths in life. But has this always been so? In what way did sex and gender identity impact the social and labor duties of our distant ancestors? And how, from these past societies, did we arrive at the gender asymmetries of today?
This article was originally published in Diferencial in Portuguese.
Among the hunter-gatherer peoples of the Arctic, we find the Inuit, whose way of life is radically different from ours. Despite sometimes gathering tubers and berries, the main source of sustenance for these peoples is the consumption of meat — in particular, seal meat. The Inuit survive with this extreme diet since they consume the whole animal, including the organs, thus obtaining all nutrients essential to human life, which are otherwise difficult to find only in meat. [1]
In traditional Inuit society, hunting is a man’s job. Even though women can participate in hunting-adjacent tasks, their primary role is childcare. Thus, since most of the Inuit diet is meat-based, women are entirely dependent on men for their survival. Despite this, the Inuit social structure is relatively egalitarian, and women are not seen as the property of their fathers or husbands — contrary to the cultural norms that prevailed in the “civilized” and stratified societies of our past. [2]
In the present-day, sex-related differences between labor roles do exist in hunter-gatherer societies, but they do not establish a strict dichotomy, much as the differences between the sexes themselves.
This pattern of man-the-hunter and woman-the-caretaker is not exclusive to the Inuit. In the overwhelming majority of the ethnographic records available to us about hunter-gatherer societies — societies similar to that of the ancestors of all present-day humans — we find sexual division of labor. Biologically, it seems intuitive that such a division ought to exist: after all, only female bodies can give birth and breastfeed, whereas male bodies are tendentially bigger and stronger. But this reasoning can lead us to false conclusions. In reality, traditional Inuit society is at the end of a spectrum; in the present-day, sex-related differences between labor roles do exist in hunter-gatherer societies, but they do not establish a strict dichotomy, much as the differences between the sexes themselves.
Gender, Hunters & Gatherers
In a 2020 review study, Lombard & Kyriacou give examples of how we find a large overlap of gender roles in the hunter-gatherer societies of today. Both in Australia and Africa, small animals from birds to shellfish are collected by women, without men’s assistance. Among the Momega of Australia, both men and women participate in fishing. In the Kalahari of southern Africa, Ju/’Hoan men gather plants as they track their prey, a traditionally female role, and Hiwi men of Columbia and Venezuela pick mangos. Also in southern Africa, San women play a vital role in tracking and assessing the condition of possible prey. In the central regions of the continent, women hunt small animals with the aid of traps, and, for the Aka of the Congolese forests, women are the main participants in net hunting, while the men have a nearly equal role in childcare. [3, 4]
Besides this overlap in tasks, in these peoples we also find that women often play a greater role in obtaining food than in Inuit society, although the Inuit are not the only extreme case. For instance, for the !Kung of the Kalahari, plant-based food gathered by women makes up 60 to 80 percent of the total diet, whereas for the Ache of Paraguay and the Hiwi, gathered foodstuffs make up only 27 and 5 percent, respectively. However, even though the sexual division of labor is not a strict dichotomy, among all these societies (except for the Agta people of the Philippines) women are excluded from directly taking part in weapon-assisted hunting of large game. But it might not have always been this way. [3]
Even though we observe this tendency in the modern day, it is possible that it is not indicative of the gender roles of our ancestors. In fact, a recent discovery can lead us to reevaluate the prevalence of this pattern in societies of the past. In an Andean gravesite in modern day Peru dated to 9 thousand years ago, Haas et al. (2020) found what they initially thought was a male hunter of great importance, buried with his hunting tools. However, later analyses revealed that the buried person was, in fact, female. After this discovery, a reevaluation of previously studied Native American gravesites revealed that 30 to 50 percent of large game hunters were female, contradicting what we observe in the hunter-gatherer societies of the modern day, and shaking the current anthropological paradigm. [5]
On the one hand, these gravesites do not allow us to conclusively determine the reason why these individuals were buried with hunting tools. It is possible that the tools did not belong to the people they were buried with, having been placed there due to religious custom instead. [5] However, historically this same reasoning was rarely applied to gravesites containing only male bodies, revealing a bias in past scientific literature to discard evidence of female hunters.
Another important limitation of this result is that the techniques that are available to us only allow for the estimation of the so-called biological sex of the buried. Determining whether an individual was in the intersex spectrum is difficult, given that different methods can give contradictory results — a Y chromosome does not categorically imply a masculine body, and a large pelvis to shoulder width ratio does not categorically imply a female reproductive system. Furthermore, since these societies did not have writing, the gender identity of these individuals remains inaccessible to us. However, if the statistical patterns of the modern day serve as any indication — and if we can in fact take these as being the graves of hunters — then we are forced to conclude that persons of all genders would have participated in weapon assisted hunting of large game in the Americas of prehistory. [5] And this may have also been the case in other continents. But what we find in the hunter-gatherer societies of the present day is a greater separation of roles, not to mention our own society, where a deeply patriarchal past engrained a heteronormative sex binary, which saw women as inferior to men. How did this come to be?
The atlatl would have served as something of an equalizer in the hunting of large game, promoting the participation of men, women, and children. […] The use of the bow and arrow would later have introduced restrictions to participation in hunting, making it into an activity biased primarily towards male-bodied individuals. And so here we may find the origin of the gender asymmetries we see in the hunter-gatherer societies of today.
If we look once again at the gravesite of our presumed Andean hunter, we may find some clues. The main hunting tool of the time was the atlatl, or spear thrower, which facilitates the throwing of projectiles with high velocities. [5] The atlatl has been used by our species for at least 30 thousand years, with evidence of its use being found in Eurasia, in the Americas and in Australia. Learning to use an atlatl is not a complicated process for most people, and, thus, it can be mastered at a young age. Moreover, its efficacy is relatively independent of the anatomy of the thrower. Thus, the atlatl would have served as something of an equalizer in the hunting of large game, promoting the participation of men, women, and children. [5, 6]
One of the hypotheses advanced by Haas et al. is, therefore, that this relative ease in hunting would have allowed it to be an activity absent of substantial sexual division. This would only have changed with the introduction of new technology — namely, the bow and arrow. This weapon is more effective, more precise, and faster to load than an atlatl, but, on the other hand, it demands considerable upper body strength. This being the case, its use would have introduced restrictions to participation in hunting, making it into an activity biased primarily towards male-bodied individuals. [5] And so here we may find the origin of the gender asymmetries we see in the hunter-gatherer societies of today. It is not hard to imagine that, once such a bias was present, cultural norms would have preserved it across generations.
However, we are yet to explain how the mere sexual division of labor led to our patriarchal society.
From Agriculture to the Subjugation of Women
This section is outdated, poorly researched, and no longer endorsed by the writer. For a modern-day look at this question, Please look into The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, the socialist philosopher Friedrich Engels states that it was the rise of class society that subjugated women in favor of men. According to this view, the domestication of animals and plants, which brought with it a large increase in productive capacity, would have introduced a set of social and economic pressures that were the seeds for conflict between and within family groups, thus establishing the nuclear family as a cohesive social unit, and the male as its head. [7, 8]
Contrary to nomads, sedentary societies would tend to see the land they cultivated as their property, gradually undermining the communal and egalitarian tendencies of the societies that preceded them. Their large capacity for food production would have also made possible the surplus of resources, allowing for the specialization of certain members of society in tasks other than food production: artisans, merchants, warriors, priests. These new classes would help to support the placement of families who, due to advantages in productive capacity, accumulated prestige and power among their communities — through law, conquest, and religious belief. Prestigious elders became family chiefs, who became monarchs, who came to rule large swathes of land and oppress ever-growing populations of peasants and slaves. [7, 8]
The sexual division of labor was gradually amplified, turning into a profound inequality between genders, which objectified and commodified the female body, and overwhelmingly placed men in positions of power.
Even though matriarchal societies are not unheard of, these are undoubtedly in the minority in the historical record. Similarly, most of the roles external to food production — merchants, warriors, and such — were, historically, filled by men. And like with the innovation of the bow and arrow, innovation in farming equipment, such as the plow, would have also transformed the cultivation of large lands into an activity that favored male bodies. The establishment of the family unit would then have increased women’s dependence on men, promoting their almost exclusive role as caretakers, and as property of the male head of the family. The sexual division of labor was, therefore, gradually amplified, turning into a profound inequality between genders, which objectified and commodified the female body, and overwhelmingly placed men in positions of power. [7, 8]
Even if women can come to exert positions of power, that, in and of itself, does not eliminate the misogynistic fabric of society. For there to be change it is not enough to include women in the hierarchy of power: we must abolish the hierarchy.
For Engels, then, it becomes clear that the full emancipation of women cannot happen without dismantling the arrangement of society in different classes. [7, 8] This is also the view of many feminist activists, both historically and today. [9, 10] Even if women can come to exert positions of power — in some cases, though not often, in parity with men — that, in and of itself, does not eliminate the misogynistic fabric of society. Much less does it eliminate the oppression of working women, whose underprivileged position owes not only to their gender, but also to their lack of economic power, and to the particular way in which these two factors intersect. For instance, women still bear most of the responsibility for unpaid domestic labor and are often financially dependent on their spouses. This is largely due to lower wages, and to societal expectations that pressure women (and men) to fill specific roles — and confine all of us to a strict gender binary. According to this view, for there to be change it is not enough to include women in the hierarchy of power: we must abolish the hierarchy.
Natural Beings, or Cultural Beings?
In the present-day, some figures still dare to claim that major gender differences, namely in behavior and career preferences, can be said to have a “natural” origin. If that is the case, present-day disparities between men and women could be said to “not need fixing”. But there is no strong evidence for this. Even if we ignore the complexities of the division of labor in hunter-gatherer societies, our evolutionary history does not lead us to this conclusion.
Our closest relatives in the animal kingdom are two ape species, the chimpanzees and the bonobos, from whom we diverged around four million years ago. Chimpanzees, on one hand, organize themselves in male-dominated societies, where conflicts are often resolved through aggression. Bonobos, on the other, live in female-dominated societies, in which conflicts are avoided with recourse to sexual activity — highly promiscuous and without discriminating by neither sex nor age. Since humans are equally related to both species, it is impossible to say at the outset which of the two is most like our ancestors. Are natural hierarchies the ones in which men hold the power, or the ones in which women do?
There have never been “natural” humans, untouched by their environment. It is up to us to decide, then, what importance our gender identity should have in defining our social roles, and to actively upend the outmoded, preconceived notions of the past.
A matter that we must also bear in mind when thinking of a supposed human “natural” state is the impact of culture. For instance, looking once again at bonobos, we find that for them, mothers play an important role in teaching their children social skills. [12] Chimps, in their turn, are also known for teaching tool use to their companions and offspring, namely in fishing for termites. [13] These manifestations of cross-generational learning reflect something that has existed in our evolutionary lineage for millions of years. It is therefore clear that cultural transmission has played — and still plays — a great role in the development of human capacities, even before we could speak. Moreover, with the advent of language, the ability to communicate ideas brought with the ability to engrain biases. Currently, we cannot precisely say when language arose, with estimates varying between the emergence of Homo habilis, around 2.5 million years ago, to the emergence of anatomically modern humans, less than 200 thousand years ago. However, considering either of the two extremes, we can say that language is part of the way of life of modern Homo sapiens since our appearance in this world.
Given the diversity of societies we find in our past and our present, there can be no doubt that culture shapes the way social roles relate to sex and to gender identity. But, if that is the case, and if language and culture are indissociable from being human, then there have never been “natural” humans, untouched by their environment. Even if we may have preferences and predispositions at birth, for the most part, these should not be any “truer to us” than the ones we inherit from society in our infancy. Cultural evolution shaped who we are just as genetic evolution did. It is up to us to decide, then, what importance our gender identity should have in defining our social roles, and to actively upend the outmoded, preconceived notions of the past.
References
[1] Gadsby, P. 2004. “The Inuit Paradox”. In Discover Magazine.
[2] Nussbaumer, C. 2018. “The tension between tradition and change — gender roles in Inuit communities and the ‘double burden’”. In Stand.
[3] Lombard, M. & Kyriacou, K. 2020. “Hunter-Gatherer Women”. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology.
[4] Hewlett, B. 2005. “Are the men of the African Aka tribe the best fathers in the world?”. In The Guardian.
[5] Haas, R. et al. 2020. “Female hunters of the early Americas”. In Science Advances.
[6] Milks, A. 2020. “Did prehistoric women hunt? New research suggests so”. In The Conversation.
[7] Engels, F. 1884. Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats.
[8] “Engels and women’s liberation”. In Socialism Today.
[9] Hyde Park Chapter, Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. 1972. “Socialist Feminism: A Strategy for the Women’s Movement”.
[10] Brenner, J. 2014. “Socialist Feminism in the 21st Century”. In Against the Current.
[11] De Waal, F. 2006. “Bonobo Sex and Society”. In Scientific American.
[12] Litchfield, C. “For primates, having a mother helps them learn social skills”. In The Conversation.
[13] Washington University in St. Louis. 2019. “Chimpanzees more likely to share tools, teach skills when task is complex”. In Science Daily.
