Sex Roles among Hominins and Early Humans | Early European History And Religion

Home | Category: First Hominins in Europe / Neanderthal Life / First Modern Human Life

EARLY MODERN HUMAN SEX ROLES

Lucy, a Strong Woman

It has long been assumed that prehistoric men were the driving force behind tool invention, cave art and early religion, with women not having much of an impact until they appeared in exaggerated sexual forms in early Venus statues dating back to around 22,000 years ago. In their book “The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory”, archaeologist J.M. Adovasio and anthropologist Olga Soffer argue that many of the greatest achievement of early man could just have easily been accomplished by women as men and the meaning of the Venus statues — often offered as evidence of women’s central role as child bearers — is ambiguous and cold mean all sorts of things.

Based on the observed role of women in developing cultures, they argue that women played a primary role in early agriculture and the development of textiles and basketmaking. In modern hunter-gatherer societies, most of the calories come from the women's work. Men often come home empty-handed, which means that it falls to the women to provide much of the food.

Ideas about the gendered division of labor in prehistory are rooted in patterns anthropologists observed among hunter-gatherers during the 19th and early 20th centuries when virtually all of the large-game hunting they documented was performed by men. In present-day groups like the Hadza of Tanzania and San of southern Africa, men generally hunt large animals, while women gather tubers, fruits and other plant foods, according to Science.

Raven Garvey wrote: It’s an open question whether these ethnographic accounts of labor are truly representative of recent hunter-gatherers’ subsistence behaviors. Regardless, they definitely fueled assumptions that a gendered division of labor arose early in our species’ evolution. Current employment statistics do little to disrupt that thinking; in a recent analysis, just 13 percent of hunters, fishers and trappers in the U.S. were women. [Source: Raven Garvey, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan, The Conversation, May 30, 2023]

Websites and Resources on Neanderthals: Wikipedia: Neanderthals Wikipedia ; Neanderthals Study Guide thoughtco.com ; Neandertals on Trial, from PBS pbs.org/wgbh/nova; The Neanderthal Museum neanderthal.de/en/ ; The Neanderthal Flute, by Bob Fink greenwych.ca. Websites and Resources on Prehistoric Art: Chauvet Cave Paintings archeologie.culture.fr/chauvet ; Cave of Lascaux archeologie.culture.fr/lascaux/en; Trust for African Rock Art (TARA) africanrockart.org; Bradshaw Foundation bradshawfoundation.com; Australian and Asian Palaeoanthropology, by Peter Brown peterbrown-palaeoanthropology.net

Female Early Hominins Wandered While Males Stayed Close to Home

Fossilised remains of Australopithecus africanus and another species suggest 90 percent of males spent their whole lives in the same area while at least half of the females came from outside Ian Sample wrote in The Guardian: “Ancient forerunners of modern humans stayed close to where they were born but paired up with females from far beyond their local stomping grounds, a new study claims. The research provides a rare insight into the social behaviour of primitive "hominins" that appears to match closely that seen in chimpanzees and bonobos today. [Source: Ian Sample, The Guardian, June 1, 2011 |=|]

“Scientists analysed fossilised remains around cave networks near Johannesburg in South Africa and found that while 90 percent of males appeared to have spent their whole lives in the area, at least half the females had come from farther afield. The work suggests that males regularly stayed with the community they were born into, with females roaming into new territories as they reached sexual maturity, the scientists report in the journal, Nature. |=| “The team reached their conclusions after studying remnants of fossilised teeth belonging to two extinct species that lived in the region more than a million years ago. The tests looked at an element called strontium in the tooth enamel, which can identify where an individual lived as the tooth formed. Strontium is found naturally in rocks and soil, but is picked up by plants and animals, and can be detected in trace amounts in mammalian teeth. In this way, strontium levels in teeth are linked to the land where an individual grew up. |=|

“The researchers looked at teeth from eight Australopithecus africanus individuals from a site called Swartkrans that dates back to 2.2 million years ago, and 11 Paranthropus robustus individuals from nearby Sterkfontein, estimated to be around 1.8 million years old. While A. africanus might be a direct ancestor of modern humans, P. robustus was a side branch of the family tree that went extinct for reasons unknown. |=|

“The analysis focused on two kinds of teeth: incisors and third molars, both of which develop late and are easily distinguished between males and females. "It is difficult enough to work out the relations between the sexes today, so the challenges in investigating the ways that male and female hominins used the landscape and formed social groups over a million years ago are considerable, to say the least," said co-author Matt Sponheimer at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "Disembodied skulls and teeth are notoriously poor communicators, so the real difficulty with a study like this is finding new ways to make these old bones speak," he added. |=|

“The strontium tests revealed that most of the individuals lived and died in the same area, where the rock is dominated by a limestone called dolomite. But results from the smaller teeth, which most likely came from females, showed many must have spent their youth elsewhere. "Here we have the first direct glimpse of the geographic movements of early hominins, and it appears the females preferentially moved away from their residential groups," said lead author, Sandi Copeland at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. |=|

“A similar situation is seen among modern chimpanzees, where females tend to move out of their groups, in part because males form strong ties that help them protect a troop's territory. "By virtue of the fact that the males choose to remain, the females are indirectly forced to leave their communities in order to avoid close inbreeding. It could be that among these early hominins, female dispersal has some correlation to close cooperative behaviour between males," Copeland added.” |=|

Man the Hunter, Woman the Gatherer Myth

Sarah Lacy and Cara Ocobock wrote: Prehistoric men hunted; prehistoric women gathered. At least this is the standard narrative written by and about men to the exclusion of women. The idea of “Man the Hunter” runs deep within anthropology, convincing people that hunting made us human, only men did the hunting, and therefore evolutionary forces must only have acted upon men. Such depictions are found not only in media, but in museums and introductory anthropology textbooks, too. [Source: Sarah Lacy, University of Delaware and Cara Ocobock, University of Notre Dame, The Conversation, November 18, 2023]

There is a growing body of physiological, anatomical, ethnographic and archaeological evidence to suggest that not only did women hunt in our evolutionary past, but they may well have been better suited for such an endurance-dependent activity. Suggesting that the female body is only designed to gather plants ignores female physiology and the archaeological record. The evidence speaks for itself, though: Gendered labor roles did not exist in the Paleolithic era, which lasted from 3.3 million years ago until 12,000 years ago. The story is written in human bodies, now and in the past. To ignore the evidence perpetuates a myth that only serves to bolster existing power structures.

The myth that female reproductive capabilities somehow render them incapable of gathering any food products beyond those that cannot run away does more than just underestimate Paleolithic women. It feeds into narratives that the contemporary social roles of women and men are inherent and define our evolution. Our Paleolithic ancestors lived in a world where everyone in the band pulled their own weight, performing multiple tasks. It was not a utopia, but it was not a patriarchy. Certainly accommodations must have been made for group members who were sick, recovering from childbirth or otherwise temporarily incapacitated. But pregnancy, lactation, child-rearing and menstruation are not permanently disabling events, as researchers found among the living Agta of the Philippines who continue to hunt during these life periods.

Re-evaluating Man the Hunter Symposium

Vivek Venkataraman wrote: In 1966, 75 anthropologists (70 of whom were men) held a symposium called “Man the Hunter” at the University of Chicago to address one of humanity’s grand questions: How did people live before agriculture? The researchers had lived with and studied contemporary populations of hunting and gathering peoples around the world, from jungle to tundra. [Source: Vivek Venkataraman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary, The Conversation, March 21, 2021]

It was there in Chicago that real-life data confronted the myth of Man the Hunter. Researchers showed that women worked just as hard as men, and plant foods gathered by women were crucially important in hunter-gatherer diets. Hunter-gatherer movement patterns were driven by a variety of ecological factors, not just game. And many hunter-gatherers were quite peaceful and egalitarian. Hunting wasn’t the sole driver or unifying theory of human evolution after all.

By the late 1970s, as anthropologists carried out further research on hunter-gatherers and paid attention to issues of gender, the myth of Man the Hunter fell into disfavor. Even so, subsequent research has affirmed a simple division of labor among hunter-gatherers: men mostly hunt and women mostly gather. When anthropologist Carol Ember surveyed 179 societies, she found only 13 in which women participated in hunting.

But it is a mistake to conflate this pattern of “most hunters are men” among hunter-gatherers with the myth of Man the Hunter. That myth was born of assumptions, not careful empirical research. Through decades of field research, anthropologists have developed a more flexible and capacious view of human labor. According to this view, women are not bound by biology to gather, nor men to hunt. In fact, several accounts of women’s hunting in foraging societies had emerged by the mid-1980s. In this context, ancient female hunters are an expectation, not a surprise. And the focus on Man the Hunter distracts from the more important question of how a society with female big-game hunters might be constructed. After all, women are perfectly capable of hunting, yet in most hunter-gatherer societies they don’t do it very often.

Female Bodies: Adapted for Endurance

Sarah Lacy and Cara Ocobock wrote: One of the key arguments put forth by “Man the Hunter” proponents is that females would not have been physically capable of taking part in the long, arduous hunts of our evolutionary past. But a number of female-associated features, which provide an endurance advantage, tell a different story. [Source: Sarah Lacy, University of Delaware and Cara Ocobock, University of Notre Dame, The Conversation, November 18, 2023]

All human bodies, regardless of sex, have and need both the hormones estrogen and testosterone. On average, females have more estrogen and males more testosterone, though there is a great deal of variation and overlap.

Testosterone often gets all the credit when it comes to athletic success. But estrogen — technically the estrogen receptor — is deeply ancient, originating somewhere between 1.2 billion and 600 million years ago. It predates the existence of sexual reproduction involving egg and sperm. The testosterone receptor originated as a duplicate of the estrogen receptor and is only about half as old. As such, estrogen, in its many forms and pervasive functions, seems necessary for life among both females and males.

Estrogen influences athletic performance, particularly endurance performance. The greater concentrations of estrogen that females tend to have in their bodies likely confer an endurance advantage — an ability to exercise for a longer period of time without becoming exhausted. Estrogen signals the body to burn more fat — beneficial during endurance activity for two key reasons. First, fat has more than twice the calories per gram as carbohydrates do. And it takes longer to metabolize fats than carbs. So, fat provides more bang for the buck overall, and the slow burn provides sustained energy over longer periods of time, which can delay fatigue during endurance activities like running.

In addition to their estrogen advantage, females have a greater proportion of type I muscle fibers relative to males. These are slow oxidative muscle fibers that prefer to metabolize fats. They’re not particularly powerful, but they take awhile to fatigue — unlike the powerful type II fibers that males have more of but that tire rapidly. Doing the same intense exercise, females burn 70 percent more fats than males do, and unsurprisingly, are less likely to fatigue.

Estrogen also appears to be important for post-exercise recovery. Intense exercise or heat exposure can be stressful for the body, eliciting an inflammatory response via the release of heat shock proteins. Estrogen limits this response, which would otherwise inhibit recovery. Estrogen also stabilizes cell membranes that might otherwise be damaged or rupture due to the stress of exercise. Thanks to this hormone, females incur less damage during exercise and are therefore capable of faster recovery.

In the Past Women Likely Did Everything Men Did

Sarah Lacy and Cara Ocobock wrote: Forget the Flintstones’ nuclear family with a stay-at-home wife. There’s no evidence of this social structure or gendered labor roles during the 2 million years of evolution for the genus Homo until the last 12,000 years, with the advent of agriculture. Our Neanderthal cousins, a group of humans who lived across Western and Central Eurasia approximately 250,000 to 40,000 years ago, formed small, highly-nomadic bands. Fossil evidence shows females and males experienced the same bony traumas across their bodies — a signature of a hard life hunting deer, aurochs and wooly mammoths. Tooth wear that results from using the front teeth as a third hand, likely in tasks like tanning hides, is equally evident across females and males. [Source: Sarah Lacy, University of Delaware and Cara Ocobock, University of Notre Dame, The Conversation, November 18, 2023]

This nongendered picture should not be surprising when you imagine small-group living. Everyone needs to contribute to the tasks necessary for group survival — chiefly, producing food and shelter and raising children. Individual mothers are not solely responsible for their children; in foragers, the whole group contributes to child care.

You might imagine this unified labor strategy then changed in early modern humans, but archaeological and anatomical evidence shows it did not. Upper Paleolithic modern humans leaving Africa and entering Europe and Asia show very few sexed differences in trauma and repetitive motion wear. One difference is more evidence of “thrower’s elbow” in males than females, though some females shared these pathologies.

And this was also the time when people were innovating with hunting technologies like atlatls, fishing hooks and nets, and bow and arrows — alleviating some of the wear and tear hunting would take on their bodies. A recent archaeological experiment found that using atlatls decreased sex differences in the speed of spears thrown by contemporary men and women.

Even in death, there are no sexed differences in how Neanderthals or modern humans buried their dead, or the goods affiliated with their graves. These indicators of differential gendered social status do not arrive until agriculture, with its stratified economic system and monopolizable resources. All this evidence suggests paleolithic women and men did not occupy differing roles or social realms.

Critics might point to recent forager populations and suggest that since they are using subsistence strategies similar to our ancient ancestors, their gendered roles are inherent to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. However, there are many flaws in this approach. Foragers are not living fossils, and their social structures and cultural norms have evolved over time and in response to patriarchal agricultural neighbors and colonial administrators. Additionally, ethnographers of the last two centuries brought their sexism with them into the field, and it biased how they understood forager societies. For instance, a recent reanalysis showed that 79 percent of cultures described in ethnographic data included descriptions of women hunting; however, previous interpretations frequently left them out.

Is Hunting Less Risky If Both Men and Women Hunt

Raven Garvey wrote: One of the risks typically associated with large-game hunting is that of failure. According to the evolutionary hypotheses around gendered division of labor, when risk of hunting failure is high — that is, the likelihood of bagging an animal on any given hunting trip is low — women should choose more reliable resources to provision children, even if it means long hours of gathering. The cost of failure is simply too high to do otherwise. [Source: Raven Garvey, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan, The Conversation, May 30, 2023]

However, there is evidence to suggest that large game was much more abundant in North America, for example, before the 19th- and 20th-century ethnographers observed foraging behaviors. If high-yield resources like bison could have been acquired with low risk, and the animals’ digesta was also consumed, women may have been more likely to participate in hunting. Under those circumstances, hunting could have provided total nutrition, eliminating the need to obtain protein and carbohydrates from separate sources that might have been widely spread across a landscape.

And, statistically speaking, women’s participation in hunting would also have helped reduce the risk of failure. My models show that, if all 25 of the people in a hypothetical group participated in the hunt, rather than just the men, and all agreed to share when successful, each hunter would have had to be successful only about five times a year for the group to subsist entirely on bison and digesta. Of course, real life is more complicated than the model suggests, but the exercise illustrates potential benefits of both digesta and female hunting.

Roles and Work in Hunter-Gatherer Societies

Vivek Venkataraman wrote: One prominent explanation, elaborated in 1970 by feminist anthropologist Judith Brown, is that the demands of hunting conflict with the provision of child care. This was supported in a recent review of women’s hunting that surveyed traditional societies around the world; the authors found that pregnant or lactating women do not often hunt, and those with dependents only hunt when child care is available or rich hunting grounds are close to camp. [Source: Vivek Venkataraman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary, The Conversation, March 21, 2021]

These constraints play a role in shaping risk preferences. In hunter-gatherers, men’s hunting is risky, meaning it carries a high chance of failure. Men tend to hunt alone or in small groups and target big game with projectile weapons, which often requires fast-paced, long-distance travel. In contrast, women prefer to hunt in groups and focus on smaller, easier-to-capture prey closer to camps, often with the aid of dogs.

Women are often crucial to the hunting success of others, whether through logistical or ritual assistance. Husbands and wives sometimes work collaboratively; in these instances women may help trap an animal, then club it to death and carry the meat home. And in big-game hunting societies, women provide support to hunters by manufacturing clothing, weaponry and transportation equipment. They may also participate in hunting directly by locating, then surrounding and driving game toward a killing location, as seen among high-latitude reindeer hunters and Plains bison hunters. As the authors of the new paper speculate, this is likely how the Peruvian female hunters killed game.

Updated views on plant gathering provide insight into why women may choose not to hunt altogether. No one questioned that hunting is hard, but early anthropologists often assumed women’s gathering was simple and easy. This turns out to be wrong. Like hunting, gathering demands extensive ecological knowledge and skill that is socially learned and cultivated over a lifetime.

As a result, hunter-gatherers face tough choices about how to divide difficult labor in a 24-hour day. In this context, economic considerations show that it pays to specialize: modest comparative advantages — speed and strength, and the incompatibilities posed by child care — can lead to divisions of labor that increase overall food acquisition by the group. From this perspective, women’s decisions to hunt less than men may be a rational decision about allocating effort.

Role of Women Among the Batek Hunter-Gatherers

Many have assumed that by not hunting, women are relegated to lower status. But is that true? Vivek Venkataraman wrote: I conduct my work among the Batek people, hunter-gatherers from the rainforests of Malaysia who are widely considered one of the most gender-egalitarian societies in the world. They have little material inequality, share food widely, abhor violence and emphasize individual autonomy. [Source: Vivek Venkataraman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary, The Conversation, March 21, 2021]

When day breaks at camp, Batek men trek far, usually alone, to hunt monkeys with blowpipes. The women gather tubers or fruit in small groups closer to camp. Nothing prohibits women from hunting, as is the case with some hunter-gatherers where, for example, touching hunting weapons is forbidden. Batek women sometimes join in group hunts of bamboo rats, but it is otherwise rare. However, there are exceptions. Some teenage girls establish an interest in blowpipe hunting that carries into adulthood.

The Batek people say this division of labor comes down to strength differences, incompatibility with child care and differences in knowledge specialization. Hunting has great cultural significance, but women’s knowledge of plant distributions is crucial for collective decisions like moving camp. The Batek conceive of themselves as a co-operative and interdependent group in which each person makes a unique and important contribution toward a communal goal.

Examples of Female Hunters

Evidence from Peru indicates some ancient big-game hunters were, in fact, women. Livia Gershon wrote in Smithsonian online: Archaeologists in Peru have found the 9,000-year-old skeleton of a young woman who appears to have been a big-game hunter. Combined with other evidence, the researchers argue in the journal Science Advances, the discovery points to greater involvement of hunter-gatherer women in bringing down large animals than previously believed. The team found the grave at Wilamaya Patjxa, a high-altitude site in Peru, in 2018. Lead author Randall Haas, an archaeologist at the University of California, Davis, told the New York Times Gorman, he and his colleagues were excited to find numerous projectile points and stone tools buried alongside the skeletal remains they first thought was a man. [Source: Livia Gershon, Smithsonian online, November 5, 2020]

But subsequent study showed that the bones were lighter than those of a typical male, and an analysis of proteins in the person’s dental enamel confirmed that the bones belonged to a woman who was probably between 17 and 19 years old. According to the paper, the hunter was not a unique, gender nonconforming individual, or even a member of an unusually egalitarian society. Looking at published records of 429 burials across the Americas in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene epochs, the team identified 27 individuals buried with big-game hunting tools. Of these, 11 were female and 15 were male. The breakdown, the authors write, suggests that “female participation in big-game hunting was likely non-trivial.”

Not everyone is convinced of the new paper’s thesis. Robert Kelly, an anthropologist at the University of Wyoming told Science that though he believes the newly discovered skeleton belongs to a female hunter the discovery of hunting tools at a gravesite does not necessarily indicate that the person buried there was a hunter. In fact, he says, two of the burials found at Upward Sun River in Alaska contained female infants. In some cases, male hunters may have buried loved ones with their own hunting tools as an expression of grief.

According to Katie Hunt of CNN, recent research suggests that hunting in at least some hunter-gatherer societies was community-based. Around the time the newly discovered individual lived, the hunting tool of choice was the atlatl, a light spear-thrower used to bring down alpaca-like animals called vicuña. Because the device was relatively unreliable, communities “encouraged broad participation in big-game hunting,” working together to “mitigate risks associated with … low accuracy and long reloading times,” per the study. Even children wielded the weapon, perfecting their technique from a young age.

“This study should help convince people that women participated in big-game hunts,” Sterling tells Live Science’s Yasemin Saplakoglu. “Most older children and adults would have been needed to drive herds over cliffs or into traps, or to fire projectiles at herds moving in the same direction.”

Annemieke Milks, an archaeologist at University College London wrote in The Conversation; that researchers are increasingly calling into question aspects of the “man-the-hunter” model. In the Agata society of the Philippines, for example, women take part in hunting. And among present-day hunter-gatherers who use atlatls, women and children often take part in competitive throwing events.

Does a 10,000 Year Old Burial of a One-Month-Old Girl Show High Status of Females

In December 2021, in an article in Scientific Reports, researchers announced the discovery of 10,000-year-old burial of a one-month-old infant girl in the Liguria region of northwestern in Italy. Known as Neve the child’s remains were were found in the back of a cave adorned with 60 shell beads, four pendants and an eagle-owl talon. She represent the oldest documented burial of an infant female in European archaeology. [Source:Rachel Elbaum, NBC News, December 15, 2021]

Rachel Elbaum of NBC News wrote: “The discovery gives insight into the funeral practices of the Mesolithic era, also known as the middle period of the Stone Age, from which there are few recorded burials. And experts say that the richly decorated remains may also help illuminate how the period's hunter-gatherer society viewed its young and female members. “The burial of such a young female subject indicates first of all the importance that was given to young individuals and also to females within the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer groups,” Fabio Negrino, an associate professor of prehistoric archaeology at the University of Genoa, told NBC News. “The presence of perforated shells with traces of prolonged use means that these have been worn for a long time by the adults. These shells were perhaps sewn to her dress.”

The cave where Neve was found is known as Arma Veirana. Negrino described the cave as having the shape of a hut with a sloping roof, measuring around 130 feet deep, with a 33-foot-high entrance. “It is well recognizable even from a long distance,” Negrino said. “Now vegetation covers most of the entrance and the area in front of it, but during the Pleistocene and the Early Holocene it must have been very visible and represented an essential landmark for the groups of hunter-gatherers who ventured along Neva valley.”

“The excavation team was made of up of researchers from the University of Colorado and Washington University, as well as from universities in Italy, Germany and Canada. They discovered the burial site itself in 2017, and fully excavated the infant’s remains in July 2018. Neve's skeleton was heavily damaged and missing significant portions, including most of the mid-abdominal region, according to the journal article. The researchers used cutting edge technology to examine the remains and were able to date the infant’s teeth, showing that she died 40 to 50 days after she was born. It also showed that she experienced stress that briefly halted the growth of her teeth 47 days and 28 days before she was born.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Ancient Foods ancientfoods.wordpress.com ; Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP, and various books and other publications.

Last updated May 2024