Scientific American: Theory that Man is the Hunter
Take a moment to appreciate the difficulties faced by a biologist. Retain your integrity and possibly lose your job, or advocate for Gender Identity Theory and try to act like the most obvious facts about humans and every other mammal are not true.
It’s much easier for anthropologists. They aren’t a hard science and their integrity was never cherished. They can sleep at night knowing that when this fetish goes out of favor, they will never be called to retract anything.
This piece in Scientific American is a transparent manipulation, but a once prestigious magazine is happy to publish it.
Even if you’re not an anthropologist, you’ve probably encountered one of this field’s most influential notions, known as Man the Hunter. The theory proposes that hunting was a major driver of human evolution and that men carried this activity out to the exclusion of women.
That statement implies that hunting was THE major driver of evolution and that women never hunted. Nobody really believes that. It’s a straw man argument.
It holds that human ancestors had a division of labor, rooted in biological differences between males and females, in which males evolved to hunt and provide, and females tended to children and domestic duties. It assumes that males are physically superior to females and that pregnancy and child-rearing reduce or eliminate a female’s ability to hunt.
Except for the word “superior”, that statement is almost entirely true.
On average, men are physically stronger than women. Argue against that fact. If a society is going to have a division of labor, it makes the most sense to have the physically stronger sex do the hunting. Women are superior to men in that they can bear children and nurse them. There are other physical abilities in which women excel, but that isn’t relevant to this article.
That is just the first paragraph, and the authors are already deep in the weeds.
Man the Hunter has dominated the study of human evolution for nearly half a century and pervaded popular culture. It is represented in museum dioramas and textbook figures, Saturday morning cartoons and feature films. The thing is, it’s wrong.
For the Man the Hunter to be wrong, then women should be hunting maybe 40% of the time. Not that somewhere at some time, women have hunted.
Mounting evidence from exercise science indicates that women are physiologically better suited than men to endurance efforts such as running marathons.
Before Bill Nye the Science Guy turned into a Progressive, he used to say, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” The record for the Boston Marathon for men is 2:03:02, for women, it is 2:19:59. A similar time difference for men and women has always been true of the Boston Marathon and the other marathons all over the world. The mounting evidence for women being better at running marathons had better be extraordinary. We aren’t going to accept some bullshit sophistry.
Because men were supposedly the ones hunting, proponents of the Man the Hunter theory assumed evolution was acting primarily on men, and women were merely passive beneficiaries of both the meat supply and evolutionary progress.
If the Man the Hunter theory assumed that evolution doesn’t work on women, then, no, nobody believes that. At this point, the authors are conflating a popular notion of man as the hunter, with a book written in 1968 titled Man the Hunter by anthropologists Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore. The authors are not being honest and are attempting to deliberately confuse the public.
Today these biased assumptions persist in both the scientific literature and the public consciousness. Granted, women have recently been shown hunting in movies such as Prey, the most recent installment of the popular Predator franchise, and on cable programs such as Naked and Afraid and Women Who Hunt. But social media trolls have viciously critiqued and labeled these depictions as part of a politically correct feminist agenda.
This is a photo of Raquel Welch from the movie, One Million Years B.C.. It came out in 1966, two years before the book, Man the Hunter. Movies and TV shows have always shown women capable of hunting.
With guns and winch-equipped crossbows, women are at no disadvantage to conventional hunting. Physical strength is not the determining factor. Humping a deer out of the woods is difficult for anyone.
The statement about “social media trolls” should have been enough to bar this article from publication in an allegedly legit magazine like Scientific American. There are almost 5 billion people on social media. Someone in the world will post nearly any opinion imaginable. Controversial opinions are amplified.
Before getting into the evidence, we need to first talk about sex and gender. “Sex” typically refers to biological sex, which can be defined by myriad characteristics such as chromosomes, hormone levels, gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. The terms “female” and “male” are often used in relation to biological sex. “Gender” refers to how an individual identifies—woman, man, nonbinary, and so forth.
Up to a point, that makes sense. Nobody should be required to participate in another individual’s fantasy or delusion, so the default setting is to consider a person’s sex and gender to be compatible. A man is a male human.
The distinction between sex and gender provided by the authors gives away the game and negates their entire premise.
If a man is defined by the person’s self image, then we have no way to determine what the gender of a person is if they haven’t told us. Finding a male human skeleton with a spear doesn’t give us any indication at all of whether or not it was a man doing the hunting. It isn’t likely that the authors of Man the Hunter, in 1968 used the same definitions for man and woman.
Much of the scientific literature confuses and conflates female/male and woman/man terminology without providing definitions to clarify what it is referring to and why those terms were chosen.
An interesting anthropological question is why people who study the physical world and have an extensive education would confuse the terminology for two distinctly different terms.
The trans-confusion fad can’t end fast enough.