Focus

– Bella Downey –

Anthropological theories for the sexual division of foraging labor have historically argued that the evidence of hunting as an overwhelmingly male-biased activity in early modern humans can be attributed to female physiology and reproductive constraints that immobilize women to the domestic sphere (Brightman, 1996). Given that men are physically stronger than women, some researchers have argued that they are, therefore, biologically suited to participate in strenuous and dangerous activities such as hunting. Conversely, women are physically weaker and more nurturing and are thus biologically destined for gathering and domestic labor. These theories propose a biological incompatibility between female physiology and hunting. According to this line of reasoning, a lack of female participation in hunting can be explained as a constraint on production, in which women hunt less efficiently than men, or as a constraint on reproduction, in which female participation in hunting negatively affects their reproductive fitness (Brightman, 1996).

This narrative inaccurately presents hunting and gathering as dichotomous, immutable pursuits and overtly dismisses the role of culture and the environment in shaping and selecting human behavior. Although female physiology and reproduction influence the frequency and types of hunting that female foragers partake in, sexual division of foraging labor has developed not as a result of female incapacities but due to cooperative foraging strategies, reproductive strategies, cultural taboos of female hunting, and gendered access to technology. One of the most pervasive arguments for the biological basis for the sexual division of labor in humans derives from women’s reproductive constraints. Scholars such as Karl Marx and Franz Boas have argued that the lack of female hunters in our evolutionary history can be attributed to the constraints of childbearing and childrearing (Brightman, 1996). They believed that hunting evolved as a male-biased activity because it is physically taxing, dangerous, and requires one to travel long distances away from young children, meaning that it would negatively impact female fecundity (Brightman, 1996).

Archaeological evidence has revealed that many early foraging societies employed cooperative hunting strategies with both male and female participation. Indirect female participation in hunting can be seen in ethnographic studies in which women perform rituals, track wounded prey, butcher carcasses, and carry the meat back to camps (Reyes-Garcia et al.,
2020). Among Efe Pygmies, a hunter-gatherer group of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the men often kill a large animal and then return to the camp to fetch women to carry the carcass rather than carry it back to the camp themselves. This association with women and ‘burden carrying’ is predicated on the cultural belief among Efe Pygmies that the female body is naturally adept at carrying, as women carry their child in their womb for nine months. Moreover, the exertion and endurance required to carry these animals significant distances back to the camp often exceed the requirements of big-game hunting (Brightman, 1996).

While hunting without child-backload is more efficient, many women in foraging societies participate in group hunting while carrying infants. This pattern can be seen among Indigenous Cree women who hunt caribou with rifles and Peruvian Matsés women who hunt paca with machetes. Ethnographic accounts indicate that while child backload requires women to move slower than their male counterparts; it does not hinder their success rate or reproductive fitness (Brightman, 1996). Ultimately, theories that naturalize the sexual division of foraging labor inaccurately present women as sedentary rather than mobile, passive rather than active, immobilized by motherhood, and incapable of pursuing labor outside of the domestic sphere.

Another subtle yet equally pernicious myth about the biological inevitability of the lack of female hunting argues that it is only in the modern day, with the advent of mechanization, technology, and birth control, that women are no longer confined to child-rearing and domestic duties (Parker, 1979). This argument reaffirms the theory that the archetypal sexual division of labor in which men hunt and women gather, developed as a result of women’s objective incapacities. Moreover, ethnographic and archaeological data indicate that technology and tool use has been a democratizing and divisive force for women in foraging societies.

For example, among the !Kung people of South Africa, women are denied both access to weapons and knowledge of hunting practices on the basis that their presence weakens the hunters’ prowess and, therefore, would endanger the hunters’ lives and impact the success of the hunt (Brightman, 1996). Within many modern hunter-gatherer societies, laws or social norms often forbid women from using hunting weapons such as arrows, spears, or harpoons. Within these societies, it is often not the act of hunting that is forbidden to women but the weapons. In these communities, women’s hunting does pose a constraint on production as it is often measurably less efficient than men’s, but due to the effects of cultural taboos and gendered access to technology rather than by reproductive and physiological constraints (Tabet, 1979).

In contrast, the atlatl, a spear commonly used among hunter-gatherers in Peru during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, would have served as a democratizing force that encouraged communal participation in hunting from both men and women. Given that atlatls had relatively low accuracy and long reloading times, hunting teams would have helped mitigate the potential dangers of exposing oneself to other animals (Haas et al., 2020). Moreover, the discovery of eleven female graves at a 9,000-year-old Andean highland burial site that were buried with hunting toolkits and projectile points similar to those of early male hunters strengthened this theory of collaborative hunting necessitated by the atlatl spear. Furthermore, models of mobility and fertility among Early Paleoindian women have demonstrated that the residentially mobile lifestyle necessitated by big-game hunting was conducive rather than a hindrance to female reproduction (Surovell, 2000).

While foraging societies are not monolithic, there are several cultural and environmental similarities that are found among small-scale societies that allow female hunting. First, in all of these societies, the manner in which women and men hunt are different in regards to the frequency of hunting trips, the techniques used, the species targeted, and the distance traveled (Bird and Bird, 2008). While men often partake in solo hunting trips, female hunters, such as the Agta foragers of the Philippines, nearly always favor group hunting, which offers them protection and assistance (Bird and Bird, 2008). On average, women hunt less often and pursue smaller, more abundant, and less mobile prey than men, trading off large harvests for greater reliability (Reyes-Garcia et al., 2020). Even among more egalitarian foraging societies with a less rigid sexual division of labor, ‘big hunts’ or long expeditions targeting large mammals are often described as a male activity and discourage female participation (Noss and Hewlett, 2001).

Among societies that prohibit female hunting, males tend to control both resources and political power (Noss and Hewlett, 2001). This aligns with anthropological theories for why men in foraging societies traditionally hunt such as the ‘show off’ hypothesis. Proposed by Anthropologist Kristen Hawkes, this hypothesis argues that men hunt to gain social status and mating benefits through widely sharing game (Hawkes, 1991). According to this line of reasoning, men are motivated to exclude women from hunting through the implementation of taboos, norms, and laws as hunting is important for their ability to attract mates. In contrast, female hunting is most likely to occur when the risk of pursuit failure is low, alloparenting is practiced, women have access to efficient hunting technology, and male ideological and political control over women is minimal (Noss and Hewlett, 2001).

When anthropological literature becomes diffused throughout the public, there is a tendency for nuanced and complex evidence to become reduced and overly generalized. While men and women in foraging societies often specialize in different forms of resource acquisition to maximize consumption benefits in a manner that aligns with child rearing, to attribute sexual division of labor among foraging societies exclusively to immutable physiology and reproduction would be reductive as it ignores the diverse range of human behaviors and life strategies that are the result of a society’s unique cultural, economic, and ecological context. It is imperative to challenge theories that naturalize the ‘man the hunter, woman the gatherer’ narrative because they have lasting consequences in the present day. By applying contemporary gender roles to ancient societies, ideologies of male superiority become strengthened through an overly simplified biological and evolutionary framework. Ultimately, these theories treat women’s role in our evolutionary history as secondary, passive, and as a result of their physiological and reproductive constraints rather than their active choices.

References

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Parker, S., & Parker, H. (1979). The Myth of Male Superiority: Rise and Demise. American Anthropologist, 81(2), 289–309. http://www.jstor.org/stable/675662

Reyes-García, V., Díaz-Reviriego, I., Duda, R., Fernández-Llamazares, Á., & Gallois, S. (2020). “Hunting Otherwise” : Women’s Hunting in Two Contemporary Forager-Horticulturalist Societies. Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.), 31(3), 203–221. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-020-09375-4

Surovell, T. A. (2000). Early Paleoindian Women, Children, Mobility, and Fertility. American Antiquity, 65(3), 493–508. https://doi.org/10.2307/2694532

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