Word: hunters
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...only cure for bad science is more science, and the story of human evolution has been evolving pretty rapidly itself. There were always plenty of prima facie reasons to doubt the Mr. and Mrs. Man-the-Hunter version of our collective biography, such as the little matter of size, or, in science-speak, "sexual dimorphism." If men and women evolved so differently, then why aren't men a whole lot bigger than they are? In fact, humans display a smaller size disparity between the sexes than do many of our ape cousins--suggesting (though not proving) that early...
...established that children did better if Grandma was on the case--and, if not her, then a great-aunt or similar grandma figure. This doesn't prove the grandma hypothesis for all times and all peoples, but it does strongly suggest that in the Stone Age family, Dad-the-hunter was not the only provider. The occasional antelope haunch might be a tasty treat, but as Hawkes and her co-workers conclude about the Hadza, "it is women's foraging, not men's hunting, that differentially affects their own families' nutritional welfare." If the grandma hypothesis holds...
...thinking that led to man-the-hunter was largely inferential: if you bring the women along on the hunt, the children will have to come too, and all that squalling and chattering would surely scare off the game. This inference was based on a particular style of hunting, familiar from Hemingway novels and common to the New England woods in October, in which a small band of men trek off into the wild and patiently stalk their prey, a deer or two at a time. But there is another way to get the job done known as "communal hunting...
...Intrigued to find signs of weaving from this early date, Soffer and her colleagues examined 8,400 more clay fragments from the same and nearby sites, eventually coming across the traces of a likely tool of the communal hunt--a mesh net. The entire theory of man-the-hunter had been based on "durable media," Soffer explains, meaning items like the sharpened stones that can serve as spearheads, rather than softer, biodegradable goods like baskets, fabrics and nets. But in archaeologically well-preserved prehistoric sites, such as those found underwater or in dry caves, the soft goods predominate over...
Furthermore, as Mary Zeiss Stange points out in her 1997 book Woman the Hunter, there's no reason to rule out women's hunting with hard-edged weapons too, perhaps even of their own making. Among the Tiwi Aborigines of Australia, hunting is considered women's work, and until the introduction of steel implements, it was done with handmade stone axes the women fashioned for themselves. By putting women's work back into the record, the new female evolutionary scientists may have helped rewrite the biography of the human race. At least we should prepare to welcome our bold...