Many “progressives” don’t like evolutionary psychology because it posits that there are evolved differences between men and women, and some of these differences are still seen in modern society (sexual behavior, aggressiveness, sexual jealousy, and so on). I’ll have more to say about this when our Big Paper comes out in about ten days. But the objections to evolutionary psychology come largely from the Left, I think, because they put limits on the “infinite malleability” of human behavior posited by Marx and his successors, and also because they imply that some inequities of sex representation in populations may be due not to bigotry but to sex differences in preference.
A lot of objections to evolutionary psychology are based on the misguided criticisms that the discipline comprises only made up “just so stories” that cannot be tested, and that every feature of our behavior was specifically installed by natural selection for that feature. There are no byproducts, no “bugs.” (Masturbation, of course, is a feature with no obvious evolutionary advantage, and is probably a byproduct behavior taking advantage of the existence of orgasms, which evolved to promote the spread of genes. Another example is adoption by infertile couples, which is likely a nonadaptive byproduct of evolved parental instincts.)
While evolutionary psychology and its ancestor sociobiology did have their share of “soft” papers, the field has matured, so that now the hypotheses can be tested in a number of ways (more about that again in the Big Paper), and some hypotheses have been falsified.
What’s ironic about the article below, then, is that it is much weaker than most evolutionary psychology papers—for it is 100% speculation, with some counterevidence, too—and yet it may well be applauded by “progressives” because it proposes that gender roles in early humans may not have existed. In other words, it’s compatible with today’s “blank slate” ideology and notions of flexible gender identity. But I claim that if you criticize evolutionary psychology because it’s purely speculative, made up of scenarios that comport with a scientist’s ideology, then you have to be ESPECIALLY critical of this article.
It’s by an anthropologist and was published in The Conversation. Click the screenshots to read.
Garvey’s hypothesis, which is hers, is that early humans in North America were not really classical “hunter gatherers”. Instead of the men going out to hunt meat and the women staying around home gathering vegetable matter (and taking care of kids), the women went along on the hunt, too, so the classical “men hunt/women gather” division of labor may not have existed at all.
Why does Dr, Garvey think this? Because her calculations show that if humans ate “digesta”—the stomach contents of large mammals like bison—they could ingest enough essential carbohydrates to eliminate the need to gather. And so, presto—no more sex roles.
Here’s the basis of her hypothesis:
The plant material undergoing digestion in the stomachs and intestines of large ruminant herbivores is a not-so-appetizing substance called digesta. This partially digested matter is edible to humans and rich in carbohydrates, which are pretty much absent from animal tissues.
Conversely, animal tissues are rich in protein and, in some seasons, fats – nutrients unavailable in many plants or that occur in such small amounts that a person would need to eat impractically large quantities to meet daily nutritional requirements from plants alone.
If past peoples ate digesta, a big herbivore with a full belly would, in essence, be one-stop shopping for total nutrition.
And so she makes some calculations that, to her, show that women could have hunted, too, for if everyone eats digesta there’s no need to forage:
To explore the potential and implications of digesta as a source of carbohydrates, I recently compared institutional dietary guidelines to person-days of nutrition per animal using a 1,000-pound (450-kilogram) bison as a model. First I compiled available estimates for protein in a bison’s own tissues and for carbohydrates in digesta. Using that data, I found that a group of 25 adults could meet the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recommended daily averages for protein and carbohydrates for three full days eating only bison meat and digesta from one animal.
. . . . 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.
(Of course the model assumes a group size of 25; if it was larger, there might have been a lot more hunting success.
That aside, Garvey’s scenario raises many questions. She admits that “eating digesta may have been a more common practice in the past” and “direct evidence is frustratingly hard to come by”. In fact, the sole evidence adduced for her hypothesis is this:
Ethnographically documented foragers did routinely eat digesta, especially where herbivores were plentiful but plants edible to humans were scarce, as in the Arctic, where prey’s stomach contents was an important source of carbohydrates.
The reference she gives is a technical report on “Vitamins and minerals in the traditional Greenland diet,” and says this:
Inuit in Greenland and the Canadian Arctic have experienced health problems, including vitamin C deficiency, as their diet in the 20th century shifted from an exclusive reliance on traditional diet to a mixed diet on traditional food and market food use (Bjerregaard and Young 1998). Formerly, when an animal was caught, all the internal organs were exploited by the Inuit, even the stomach content of ptarmigan, seal and caribou was eaten (Rodahl 1949). When leaving the strict traditional diet, Inuit need to balance their diet properly and weigh benefits and contaminant risks of traditional food.
So yes, the Inuit did eat digesta when hunting some animals. But those are Inuit, and these questions remain:
a. Did the ancestors of modern Homo sapiens, presumably hunter-gatherers who lived in plant-rich environments like Africa, also eat digesta?
b. If so, why did they when the plants were available around them?
c. Modern hunter gatherers do not eat digesta because it’s yucky. Why would their ancestors who lived in places like Africa and South America?
d. If the ancestors of modern hunter-gatherers did eat digesta, why did they stop, so that now they’ve reverted to the traditional sex-role division with men hunting and women gathering (there are of course individual exceptions)?
e. If the men hunted and DID bring back digesta, why did women need to participate in the hunt? Did they not have children to take care of (remember, there was no birth control back then). I would suspect that every woman of reproductive age had kids, and women over and under reproductive age wouldn’t be appropriate for hunts. But of course you could say they had crèches, but that just expands the hypothesis.
f. Do women regularly participate in the hunts of modern Inuit? (After all, their consumption of digesta is the only evidence supporting Garvey’s speculation.) The Wikipedia article on Inuit women suggests not:
Jobs in Inuit culture were not considered men’s work or women’s work, but the Inuit did believe in men’s skills and women’s skills. For example, hunting was generally done by men. Sewing clothes, cooking and preparing food, gathering food outside of hunting, and caring for the home were generally done by women. This does not mean that women never hunted, nor that men never helped with other jobs. This was just how the work was traditionally divided.
Of course that doesn’t mean that things were always this way, but one has to then concoct a reason why they weren’t.
I would suggest that this scenario of hunting women and the eating of digesta is in fact motivated by ideology: a desire to efface the traditional division of sex roles between hunting men and gathering women. And, of course, the evidence given (the consumption of digesta, but in societies with traditional hunter-gatherer sex roles) is far thinner than we see in most modern papers on evolutionary psychology. Will we see the evo-psych critics go after Garvey’s speculation, too? For some reason I don’t think so.
In the end, this article is another example of what I call the “reverse appeal to nature”: you see—or in this case, speculate—what exists in nature only insofar as it comports with your predetermined ideology. To put it in short: “what is good for humans is what one finds in nature.”
Oh, and one more point. Right at the start of the article is this bit:
First, I want to note that this article uses “women” to describe people biologically equipped to experience pregnancy, while recognizing that not all people who identify as women are so equipped, and not all people so equipped identify as women.
I am using this definition here because reproduction is at the heart of many hypotheses about when and why subsistence labor became a gendered activity. As the thinking goes, women gathered because it was a low-risk way to provide dependent children with a reliable stream of nutrients. Men hunted either to round out the household diet or to use difficult-to-acquire meat as a way to attract potential mates.
In other words, her hypothesis requires the biological definition of women (based on gamete size, nearly completely correlated with the ability to get pregnant) to buttress the traditional division of labor in hunter-gatherer societies. (By the way, the division of labor might have also been based on differential speed and strength, favoring men as the sex who would best chase down and kill animals.)
But then why is the first paragraph in there, a paragraph in which she claims that trans women can’t get pregnant and some biological women identify as men? This seems to be a nod to gender activists, and for the life of me I can’t see what it has to do with Garvey’s theory. It’s looks like a bit of irrelevant prose stuck into the article to show that the author is virtuous.
h/t: Luana, whose informing me about these things costs me many hours of work and heartache
Bison and other large herbivores are ruminants. Their diet of grass is indigestible to humans, and to the bison until bacteria in the rumen break down the cellulose into glucose that the animal’s small intestine absorbs. It is possible that eaters of digesta could have figured out that only the fermented (if you will) and rechewed material in part of the chambered stomach was useful as human food. But her theory that humans actually did this requires this difficulty to be addressed explicitly. She can’t pretend that bison digesta are like oatmeal porridge.
Eating internal organs as Inuit do is not at all the same as eating digesta. Liver is rich in glycogen if the animal eats plants and was not starving. Stomach contents of fish and whales must be mostly krill and other fish, although I haven’t looked.
Besides, carbohydrates in bulk are not essential to life and if thiamine is not abundant in the diet, you’re better off without them.
This type of clarity about what humans need nutritionally is the strongest argument against her theory. Eating digesta- and as you point out, only the “oatmeal porridge” digesta from the correct chamber- is not necessary for life. And as JC pointed out, vegetable matter is available across much of the planet inhabited by humans, so why would this be something people would choose? So anything that follows from this assumption that eating digesta was common and necessary doesn’t even require a response.
“She admits that “eating digesta may have been a more common practice in the past” and “direct evidence is frustratingly hard to come by”.”
If direct evidence is frustratingly hard to come by, then there’s a fair chance it probably doesn’t exist. “I’ve got this crazy theory, but it’s so frustrating that there doesn’t seem to be any evidence for it. Never mind, why should I let that stop me?”.
I’m reminded of something Peter Medawar said: “An experiment not worth doing is not worth doing well.”
Exactly, she realises her ‘theory’ (I’d say speculation) is crazy, to use her own words. Indeed she relies much on the Inuit, a hunter-not-gatherer society living in a very extreme environment, which is not a good model of how our ancestors probably lived. And even the Inuit had a pretty strict labour division. That article is basically ‘white noise’, to be ignored as a crackpot comment.
She wants to use the traditional (biological) definition of ‘woman’ but feels she has to show she knows and accepts the new one (which has never really been defined but we know it has something to do with gender). Awkwardness results. Wouldn’t it help if we had two different words for these two different conceptions of ‘woman’? (But then the mantra ‘transwomen are women’ would lose its force.)
And I’ve never heard of Inuits having genderfluidity, which she surely would have mentioned had it been known.
These arguments about hunting societies needing a non- animal carbohydrate source misses the fact that livers, and more importantly by volume, muscle tissues, contain glycogen, a carbohydrate that stores excess glucose. We would expect far more carbohydrate to be obtained this way than through consumption of rumen. The latter has long been considered a more important source of vitamin C than of carbohydrate in societies of the far north.
If the bison were ambushed during a prolonged period of peaceful grazing, their muscles and livers would be replete with glycogen. But if they were harried for hours over the plains until exhausted, and then stampeded off a butte as at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump (a UNESCO World Heritage site that documents the Plains Indians really did hunt this way), there wouldn’t be much glycogen left.
Or, as Calvin’s stuffed tiger, Hobbes, tells him after pouncing on him from a shelf in the closet, “Tigers like their breakfast scared and running.”
There’s a recent paper that suggests masturbation may in fact confer selective advantages: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2023.0061
I just looked at the abstract and didn’t read the paper, but if the “evidence” for a selective origin is simply that the trait maps to early in the phylogeny, that’s not evidence, because orgasms could map early in the phylogeny too. And if masturbation is a nonadaptive result of learning and also having orgasms, then it WOULD map early in the phylogeny. But I might have missed some more tangible evidence.
Teenage boys the world over will be delighted. ‘What are you doing Johnny?’ ‘I’m reducing host infection by flushing pathogens from the genital tract, while simultaneously aiding the chances of fertilization’.
RE: “h/t: Luana, whose informing me about these things costs me many hours of work and heartache”
In defense of Luana, I say this: The other day, according to the Hily dialogue, she send Jerry an article from the New York Post about some professor from New York who got fired for threatening somebody with a knife. Luana helpfully informed us that we should conclude from this story that threatening somebody with a knife is not protected by academic freedom. Good to know! Not everybody knows that – as attested by the fact that some academics have quite idiosyncratic perceptions of their job duties. See here:
Stanley Fish: Think Again: Contrarian Reflections on Life, Culture, Politics, Religion, Law, and Education. Princeton, 2015
Chapter 8.5: Are academics different? pp. 378-383
RE the criticized article’s passage:
That the article contains this sentence makes sense to me given [bolding added by me]:
So, as an academic, for your own safety and comfort, you want to make sure that your colleagues know that you know that a man can become a woman by identifying as the latter. Plus: anthropology is one of the top academic disciplines as far as the share of academics who are leftists is concerned (which probably also holds for the share of left-wing extremists or woke). (Remember what happened to Carole Hooven at Harvard? How many friends did she have left among her Harvard colleagues when she insisted that sex is real, etc.?)
Take it from the academic guru Judith Butler:
@1:24 of Stop letting activists REDEFINE words to suit their political purposes [Fascists are everywhere] | Andrew Doyle, Jan 30, 2022, 5 mins
Many years ago I fed my dog a raw diet, and one of the things we gave her was “green” tripe, which is uncleaned of digesta. It gave off the foulest smell I’ve ever come across. It’s very hard to imagine humans willingly eating it. Of course, that doesn’t mean that pre-agricultural wouldn’t have, but even they would have had a taste for cooked flesh so surely it must repulse them, too.
In agriculture school (University of Wyoming), one of my labs involved testing the contents of ruminants’ digestive tract.
Through surgery, researchers had put small plexiglass-type “windows” on cattle rumens and reticuli (not very nice, but to all appearances, these Holstein cows appeared not to care or notice, just fyi).
Occasionally, the contents of those two chambers (and, I assume, also the omasum and abomasum, though I can’t recall for sure) were tested, requiring exposure of young undergrads’ olfactory nerves to ***truly*** horrific odors.
So I agree that, while humans have been known to eat and enjoy some pretty odiferous items (keep “fish sauce” away from me, thanks!), it’s hard to imagine anyone salivating over “green” ruminant stomach.
“.. when and why subsistence labor became a gendered activity. ”
That begs the question (assumes the premise … I think that’s right) that “labor” – as opposed to sacred _work_, one wonders (Marx) – “became gendered”.
… as in, does this assertion assume there can be no other reason – especially a material, observable reason – other than “gendering”?
Isn’t “gendering” what users do on Twitter?
Professor Coyne’s knockdown is strong. I’ll add this:
… fueling on carbohydrates is not an advancement for Homo — it is a downgrade. Fueling on ketones derived from animal fat, marrow, brain, and organs is the 2.6 million year baseline. Seeking digesta to get carbs is not a happy strategy. Just kill another giant sloth.
In the total absence of evidence for man/woman hunting over the 2.6 million years, and the current day observation of the incredibly strong division of hunter culture still practiced on earth today, and challenge this even rises to the level of hypothesis.
“… fueling on carbohydrates is not an advancement for Homo – it is a downgrade. ”
I think it was farming (mainly involving the production of carbohydrates) that made civilisation possible. Some have claimed that the introduction of the potato to Europe had world changing effects. The potato produced 3x as many calories per acre as wheat.
The best you can say about agriculture—and it’s a lot, because it did allow civilization— is that it allowed abundance and easy storage of a foodstuff that by itself is nutritionally inferior to meat. (If you can become a herdsman, too, much the advantage.) The argument is that 100 poorly nourished farmers can drive off 10 better nourished hunters, and the farmers have a greater motive to win that fight. If the farmers lose, they lose their lands and they starve. If the hunters lose, they can go hunt somewhere else.
I like “reverse appeal to nature “. Can you get a copyright on that?
indeed
I muse over whether this is a result of circular reasoning – if an argument looks the same from either direction, it might be because of circular reasoning…
I’m reminded of the gender equality paradox
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617741719
In societies where sexism is reduced and opportunities for women are more equal, sex differences in STEM education & career choices are greater.
Garvey’s hypothesis is similar: in some hunter-gatherer societies the availability & consumption of digesta would free women from the gatherer sex role. She argues that women would then choose to hunt with men. That idea seems to ignore the evidence that when resources become abundant and people are freed from the need to gather & grow their own food lots of them (women & men) find something else to do. Isn’t this how societies end up with specialist classes like artists, craftsmen, storytellers, & healers? And on the downside I guess this is also how they end up with parasitic classes like priests and royalty. But I don’t really know much about those ideas about cultural evolution & technology.
“If high-yield resources like bison could have been acquired with low risk, and the animals’ digesta was also consumed..”
She connects the abundance of game with the ease of hunting, using the very neutral word “acquired”.
She might be surprised how little enthusiasm animals like that have for being acquired, by a person or group of people on foot, at most wielding spears or an atlatl.
The strategy employed by bison and elk is to flee at the first sign of a predator, and counterattack if cornered. They do this in groups. You can either drive them into a hazard like off a cliff or into a closed valley, or run them until stragglers fall back and you can outnumber them.
You can drive through some of our National Parks, and such animals will ignore you or even approach you for treats. This is not how they behave in the wild.
What it comes down to, is getting close enough to one that you can kill it with a ranged weapon, while staying far enough away that the animal and it’s buddies do not have the opportunity to poke holes in you and stamp you into the mud. In other words, range is the key, and is closely related to the hunter’s strength and endurance.
It is also dangerous for other reasons. The paleolithic humans were competing with other predators that also follow the herds.
I don’t think we know exactly what percentage of a paleolithic woman’s life was spent pregnant, lactating, of caring for one or more helpless children. I am thinking it was a pretty significant percentage.
The critical job of bearing children and lactating is not only very difficult to do when chasing down or fighting enraged 2000 pound beasts, it requires a pretty high nutritional intake.
“This partially digested matter is edible to humans…”
This is a statement that can be proven through practical experimentation. One can absolutely obtain the fresh stomach contents of elk or bison who have subsisted on native grasses and other plants.
Anyway, this looks like another all too common episode of someone wanting history to be a certain way for ideological reasons, and constructing a tenuous argument to sort of support the conclusion.
To this vivid account I can only add that womb-owners, no matter how tough and strong some might be, are too valuable to be risked hunting enraged, desperate beasts when expendable testicle-owners are available and eager, and can demonstrate their reproductive fitness by coming home ungored. Heaven knows you will lose enough irreplaceable women in childbirth as it is. Our bipedal posture and large-headed babies condemns women to difficult and dangerous labour. Don’t make them hunt, too.
Exactly. I would also question the entire implicit premise that hunting is somehow “better” than the alternative “jobs” that needed doing. Is it just that because men were doing it, it must have been better? It seems to me like a simple division of labour that plays to everyone’s strengths and has proven effective for survival.
In my view, 80% of human problems are related to people who hate or envy others because of how they imagine life is like for the other group.
Good point. It seems a peculiarly macho idea that hunting is superior to foraging for food. At least one account I’ve seen of an observed hunter gatherer tribe suggests the bulk of the food comes from gathering (presumably by males and females).
My eyebrows went up watching a two-fold highly unbalanced mutuality in a recent documentary on contemporary hunter society …
a) Men find the honey, and as a result eat as much as they want first. Not all, however — women smile when the bees are found.
b) When there is a big kill, women stop grubbing for root vegetables, which require outsized quantity of labor to even get to the mush stage. The men cook the meat, and the women therefor get the afternoon off.
All have a feast on fat. This can last several days.
The doc quietly made the point that there is a surprisingly magnanimous amount of time for sex in hunter society.
“First, I want to note that this article uses “women” to describe people biologically equipped to experience pregnancy, while recognizing that not all people who identify as women are so equipped, and not all people so equipped identify as women.”
Thanks, I’ll stop reading now. When will this idiotic necessity for inclusion end…so damn stupid. When I was taught how to write a convincing essay, I was told the first paragraph was supposed to summarize the argument, and the rest was to provide the details of why said argument was sound. Now we get first paragraph caveats, depressing.
I can conceive of the possibility that digesta might have been eaten when times were hard. For example, I suppose that not all of the bison eaten by early hunter gatherers would have been killed by their own hands – they would also have scavenged the kills of other predators and eaten any found dead from other causes. In those circumstances they may have been reluctant to waste anything and might therefore have been prepared to eat parts considered too yucky in times of abundance. This doesn’t seem to have any particular implications for gender roles.
The other point that occurs to me is that if, as the article suggests, only a handful of bison would need to be killed per year to supply all of a groups needs, this then brings about a need for storage. We know that the meat could be dried and stored as pemmican but it seems improbable to me that the digesta could be effectively stored for more than a couple of days at most. It seems improbable that, faced with a sudden glut of choice fatty meat, the group would have gorged themselves on digesta.
I fully anticipate that this paper and the author’s hypothesis will shortly become part of the accepted canon of anthropological knowledge. So much so that I also anticipate having it cited to me in a debate in the not-too-distant future as “settled science.”
“Another example is adoption by infertile couples, which is likely a non-adaptive byproduct of evolved parental instincts”
Is this true? Adoption could be highly adaptive. My guess is that in traditional societies, adoption would occur only within a tribe and would improve survival chances. That would make adoption adaptive.
It’s a guess. There is a fair amount of “evidence” from literature (diplomatic cuneiform tablets, for example) that “out-group” adoption was a common thing between tribes and societies as a way of consciously tieing groups together. Swapping children for “fostering” by your counterpart in the other group could be viewed as literal “hostages to fortune” – or as being a way of binding together two groups in only intermittent contact.
If it was happening at the diplomatic level, I’d suspect it was also happening at more “street-level” interactions too. Such relations went on a lot in “apprenticeship” relationships in the Middle Ages, and I would suspect a lot earlier.
One of the proposed reasons for the presence of several percent of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans (non-Sub-Saharan African ones) has been the adoption of infants into a tribe – whether accompanied by their parents or not – after some sort of interaction between the two groups.
I’m moderately surprised that the Hadza of Tanzania haven’t reared their communal heads in the comments so far. A few years ago there was a flurry of work on their diet, energy sources, etc. It made uncomfortable – stomach-turning, even, for the “palaeodiet” cultists – reading for some. The idea of eating handfuls of part-fermented gut contents seems to disturb some people who think their Neanderthal heritage involves ripping the heart out of a mammoth with their teeth and eating it raw.
The Hadza are an indigenous tribe of Tanzania, still living (largely) as hunter-gatherers. As such, you probably can’t get near them without tripping over a note-taking anthropologist. I picked up a bit of the work on their diet while the drilling rig was broken down in Tanzania. Fascinating stuff.
To this day, they do still consume some of the gut contents of their prey. Unsurprisingly, this has an effect on their gut biota (ISTR I was suffering from such “symptoms” myself, prompting my interest, but that turned out to be a reaction to my malaria prophylaxis) https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4654
Which is well and good. But the other aspect of the Hadza diet I recall (I don’t have a reference for this, but it was also reported in the 2010s research results ; my gut was behaving itself better before I noted the details) is that including the products of hunting, eating gut contents, etc, well over half the nutritional energy of the average tribe member came from tubers, fruits, grains etc gathered by the women and children of the tribe while the men buggered off hunting. In terms of fat, protein, micronutrients, the balance of contributions was more complex, but essentially, keeping milk in the mouth of the babies from day to day (fairly fundamental to species survival for a mammal) depended on the gathered (and cooked) plant material, and the products of hunting were an intermittent, unreliable nice-to-have extra.
I’ve been concentrating on other things – did this topic get posted before, during or after the flurry of news stories about the quartet of Columbian children (one under 1yo) lost in the Amazonian jungle for over a month. That essentially one girl (IIRC, ~14yo) could keep her three siblings alive in “hunter gatherer” mode (I think random airdrops of water and foods were made, before the soldiers finally found them) is quite pertinent to questions about what human nutritional needs actually are.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-65915078
I was actually considering sending PCC(E) that link a few days ago, but I had other things to do. While H.sap. probably evolved in a savannah setting rather than a jungle setting, there’s something significant about the way a single juvenile human could (just) keep three juniors (one old enough to be some help) going for over a month. That’s some quite substantial over-capability. Or maybe it was a necessary level for pre-agriculture humans because the juveniles and infants had to be significantly self-sufficient for large parts of their life (while the parents/ extended family were off ripping the hearts out of mammoths bare-toothed.