UPDATE: Two tweets on the amount of meat procured by male vs. female hunters (see also tweets at bottom of this page):

(The previous numbers of hunters don't quite add up because some records include 1 or more assistants)

Average per hunter per trip:
M: 9.5 kg
F: 1.4 kg

rstats data package: https://t.co/36XbiZqQ1U

From the SI, warning against doing what I did. Caveat emptor. 2/2 pic.twitter.com/IB1mpSKgP5

— Ed Hagen (@ed_hagen) June 30, 2023

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Recently I criticized a speculative paper giving weak data that, in the past, women were hunters along with men, a paper that attacked the division of labor scenario that women gathered and men hunted in early societies. I stand by that criticism, as the paper was weak, but now there’s a paper that shows a larger role for women hunting in hunter-gatherer societies than I envisioned.  While men still do most of the hunting in this sample, women do a considerable amount of hunting too, largely small game but it’s still hunting. And they often go along with men to hunt, and take their babies with them or put them in the hands of other women while they’re foraging.

So, to the extent that I implied that ONLY men hunted in either ancient or modern hunter-gathere societies, though I don’t think I implied that, I retract such an implication.  Although these data hold for modern hunter-gatherer societies, it’s reasonable to assume that they held for earlier societies as well, and the authors cite more archaeological findings of female skeleton buried with weapons.

Click the title below to read (the paper is in PLOS One), and you can find the pdf here.

Some suggestive earlier work (quotes from the paper are indented; I’ve omitted reference numbers):

One of the most prominent discoveries recently includes a 9,000 year old burial located in the Andean highland area of Wilamaya Patjxa in Peru. The burial included an adult female alongside a hunting toolkit consisting of stone projectiles as well as animal processing equipment. Researchers typically presume that stone projectiles buried alongside males are hunting tools but are less persuaded when projectiles are associated with females; the specific assemblage clearly evidenced hunting in this case. In their own review of the literature, Haas et al.  examined burials in the Americas from the Late Pleistocene to the Early Holocene period, identifying eleven females from ten sites who were associated with big-game hunting tools. By using a probability analysis of all twenty-seven sites which had evidence of big-game hunting, Haas et al. determined that females made up a “nontrivial” amount of big-game hunters across the Americas. In fact, their analysis suggested that females represented up to fifty percent of big game hunters from the Americas prehistorically.

In this case, the authors looked at 61 modern hunter-gatherer societies where they could get data from anthropological descriptions about whether women participated in hunts or hunted on their own. Here’s a map with the authors’ caption:

Besides using data from the literature about women hunting, they took data on whether women were purposefully hunting (going out deliberately to hunt) or spontaneously hunting, taking game when they found it on their perambulations. They also categorized game taken as small, medium, or large, and whether women took their children with them when they hunted.

Here are the main results:

Data were compiled from literature on sixty-three different foraging societies across the globe. These included nineteen different foraging societies from North America, six from South America, twelve from Africa, fifteen from Australia, five from Asia and six from the Oceanic region (Fig 1 & Table 1). Of the 63 different foraging societies, 50 (79%) of the groups had documentation on women hunting. Of the 50 societies that had documentation on women hunting, 41 societies had data on whether women hunting was intentional or opportunistic. Of the latter, 36 (87%) of the foraging societies described women’s hunting as intentional, as opposed to the 5 (12%) societies that described hunting as opportunistic. In societies where hunting is considered the most important subsistence activity, women actively participated in hunting 100% of the time

Of the 50 societies that had data on women hunting, then, 79% of them had women sometimes participating in hunts (note, the analysis, using literature data, couldn’t say how often women hunted relative to men). 87% of these, or 69%, showed intentional hunting. Data on game size:

The type of game women hunted was variable based on the society. Of the 50 foraging societies that have documentation on women hunting, 45 (90%) societies had data on the size of game that women hunted. Of these, 21 (46%) hunt small game, 7 (15%) hunt medium game, 15 (33%) hunt large game and 2 (4%) of these societies hunt game of all sizes. In societies where women only hunted opportunistically, small game was hunted 100% of the time. In societies where women were hunting intentionally, all sizes of game were hunted, with large game pursued the most. Of the 36 foraging societies that had documentation of women purposefully hunting, 5 (13%) reported women hunting with dogs and 18 (50%) of the societies included data on women (purposefully) hunting with children. Women hunting with dogs and children also occurred in opportunistic situations as well.

The upshot: 46% of societies with women hunting involved capturing solely small game (presumably rodents and the like), 15% hunt medium game (rabbit-sized creatures?) and 37% hunt either large game or game of all sizes.

And data on women hunting with children:

Of the 36 foraging societies that had documentation of women purposefully hunting, 5 (13%) reported women hunting with dogs and 18 (50%) of the societies included data on women (purposefully) hunting with children. Women hunting with dogs and children also occurred in opportunistic situations as well. [No data are given on the proportion of opportunistic hunting that involved the presence of children.]

The authors’ conclusions:

Here we investigated whether noted trends of non-gendered hunting labor known from the archaeological record continued into more recent, ethnographic periods. The descriptive sample described here is sufficient to warrant the conclusion that women in foraging societies across the world participate in hunting during more recent time periods, a finding that makes sense given women’s general morphology and physiology . The prevalence of data on women hunting directly opposes the common belief that women exclusively gather while men exclusively hunt, and further, that the implicit sexual division of labor of ‘hunter/gatherer’ is misapplied. Given that this bimodal paradigm has influenced the interpretation of archeological evidence, which includes the reluctance to distinguish projectile tools found within female burials as intended for hunting (or fighting) , this paper joins others in urging the necessity to reevaluate archeological evidence, to reassess ethnographic evidence, to question the dichotomous use of ‘hunting and gathering,’ and to deconstruct the general “man the hunter” narrative.

Of the 63 foraging societies with clear descriptions of hunting strategies, 79% of them demonstrated female hunting. The widespread presence of female hunting suggests that females play an instrumental role in hunting, further adding to the data that women contribute disproportionately to the total caloric intake of many foraging groups. Additionally, over 70% of hunting done by females is interpreted as intentional, meaning that females play an active and important role in hunting—and the teaching of hunting—even if they use different tools and employ different acquisition strategies. For example, among the Aka, women’s participation in net-hunting was required, whereas men’s participation was not.

It’s clear from these data that hunter-gatherer societies do not show a strict division of labor, though I’d like to see data on the frequency of hunts in which women participate, not just the frequency of societies in which women hunt.  Men still do most of the hunting and most of the big-game hunting, but this shows only moderate rather than extensive division of labor.

Before I go, I’ll call your attention to a series of tweets by Vivek Venkataraman (start here on Twitter), an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology of the University of Calgary. His university webpage describes his interests:

Dr. Venkataraman is an evolutionary anthropologist who is broadly interested in the evolution of the human diet and food systems, and their relation to life history and behavior. He is assistant director of the Guassa Gelada Research Project ,and also the co-founder and co-PI of the Orang Asli Health and Lifeways Project (OAHeLP)

Venkataraman is somewhat dubious about some of the PLOS One paper’s results, especially the 80% frequency of women hunting among all hunter-gather societies. On the other hand, like me, he applauds any new data that can change our views of biology, and thinks the frequency of hunter-gatherer societies in which women hunt is somewhere between 13% and 80%; but he also thinks that women’s hunting was even more frequent in the past than it is now (see below)

Have a look at these 14 tweets:

The paper to which  Venkataraman refers is here (click on screenshot):

Let no one say, then, that men hunted and women gathered, nor that there was a strict division of sex roles in such societies—either now or in the past!

h/t: Carole Hooven

Any YouTube video with the title “Orangutan skeltons bust the sex binary” is guaranteed to draw me in, and the very title makes me wary. How can skeletons bust the sex binary of any mammal, given that the definition of sex in mammals involves features (reproductive systems evolved to produce two very different kinds of gametes) that can’t be seen in a skeleton? Sure, you can often identify skeletons (especially of sexually dimorphic species like humans) by various bone traits, like hip-and-leg configuration, but such dimorphism is not 100% diagnostic, nor, more important, the definition of the sex binary.

What Alexandra Kralick has done in the video below, released three days ago,  is show that in orangutans, which have two morphs of males in the wild, give a more or less continuous distribution of bone-size measurements, since one morph of males is intermediate in size between males and females. But a continuous distribution of bone sizes does NOT “bust the sex binary.” What it does do is “break the bone binary”, but that says absolutely nothing about whether sex itself is binary. It’s like showing that the distribution of human heights is not binary and therefore human sexes are not binary!

The video is not only misguided, but is also an embarrassment to the Leakey Foundation, named after Louis Leakey, which sponsors research on human origins and evolution. The Foundation is, in fact, putting its imprimatur on work that purports to show that, in primates (and presumably in humans, since Kralick generalizes her results beyond orangs), sex is not binary. I doubt the Foundation would really agree with that, unless they’re terminally woke (and anti-science).

At any rate, here’s the YouTube introduction to the 48-minute video, which includes Q&A at the end.

Meet Leakey Foundation scientist Alexandra Kralick and learn how orangutan skeletons bust the sex binary in this rebroadcast episode.

Kralick declares that the theme of her work is “casting light on problematic assumptions that permeate scientific narratives of biological sex,” and adds that she’s bringing “a feminist and queer approach to this work to show how biological sex is more complicated than either ‘male’ or ‘female’ but in fact sits on a spectrum.”

One might sense that there’s an ideological motivation behind this work and its conclusion, a motivation that leads to misleading conclusions. One would be right.

Click to listen:

I’ve taken a few screenshots of the slides. The one below argues that “biological sex is not dichotomous” (i.e. “binary”), but she leaves out the one trait that defines sex and shows that it is binary: the reproductive system and the gametes that it makes. To repeat myself, males have a reproductive system evolved to produce small, mobile gametes (sperm), while females have a system evolved to produce large, immobile gametes (eggs). There is no third type of reproductive system, and no other type of gamete. This is the definition of biological sex, not the traits listed on the slide. (Note that the slide depicts humans, not orangutans, showing that Kralick is making a general statement, not one limited to orangs (which of course also fit the sex binary).

In the wild (though Kralick says “not in zoos”), the male orangs have two morphs, “flanged”, with big cheek pads, big vocal sacs, and large body size; and “unflanged”, males who are smaller, though not as small as females, and also lack vocal sacs and don’t have big cheek pads.  Flanged males are behaviorally and sexually dominant over unflanged males.  The two classes of males, of course, are still both male, for both can produce sperm and mate with egg-producing females (the unflanged males in nature may be “female mimics” that deceive females to get mates, but we don’t know).  There are three species of orangs (genus Pongo) that live in different places, and all three have the male size/feature dimorphism. This is what Wikipedia says about them:

Males become sexually mature at around age 15. They may exhibit arrested development by not developing the distinctive cheek pads, pronounced throat pouches, long fur, or long calls until a resident dominant male is absent. The transformation from unflanged to flanged can occur quickly. Flanged males attract females in oestrous with their characteristic long calls, which may also suppress development in younger males.

Unflanged males wander widely in search of oestrous females and upon finding one, will force copulation on her, the occurrence of which is unusually high among mammals. Females prefer to mate with the fitter flanged males, forming pairs with them and benefiting from their protection. Non-ovulating females do not usually resist copulation with unflanged males, as the chance of conception is low.Homosexual behaviour has been recorded in the context of both affiliative and aggressive interactions.

This suggests that the unflanged males are indeed either female mimics or males that are non-dominant or of lower fertility, and have to use force to get offspring. Regardless, they’re still called “males”: they are clearly not a third sex!

Here’s a picture of the two morphs of males taken from Wikipedia. First flanged, then unflanged; the differences in vocal sacs and cheek pads are clear. The unflanged male was at the San Diego Zoo, though Kralick says that unflanged males can’t be found in zoos (27:11).

Below is a plot of the “long bone length” of adult (A) and juvenile (J) orangs: flanged male (FL), unflanged male (UFL), and female (F). Note that in each of the five long bones, the unflanged males are intermediate in length between big males and smaller females. Importantly, note that the orangs are classified as either MALE or FEMALE, which Kralick apparently got from the museum specimens that she studied. (The sample sizes were quite small: there were, for example, only three specimens of unflanged males.)

Here are data for the ulna (arm bone), again clearly showing the intermediacy of the unflanged MALES between flanged MALES and normal FEMALES.  But if sex is not a binary, how did they identify the specimens? No doubt the collectors used the presence of a penis or vagina (almost 100% correlated with biological sex in humans) as the identifer of males vs. females, though presence or size of penis is not the definition of “a male”.

You get the same kind of distribution from cross-sectional area of the long bones. Kralick says “These are the results that support the notion that biological sex is a spectrum.” (32:44).

Now where does all this come from? Whence the conflation of sexual dimorphism with the definition and dichotomy of sex itself? You might have already guessed based on the lecture and the fact that at the beginning it’s announced that the Leakey Foundation is collaborating on this with “the American Association for Biological Anthropologists LGBTQIAA group.”

Below is a slide from the talk asserting that these data “subvert the idea of the sex binary as natural and biological, thus altering the discourse that places value on biological causes for gendered social order.” Well, I get the part about subverting the sex binary, but to say that the sex binary is not “natural and biological” is simply wrong.  You know this from the immense irony that although Kralick finds a “spectrum” using bone dimensions, she sees this only by dividing the data by sex: males (two types) and females.  Here she recognizes that there are two classes, and not an intersex. As for its connection with gender, it’s opaque.

Note, though that in the talk Kralick does quote the outdated figure that “17 our of 1000 babies born are intersex” (1.7%), “the same proportion of individuals with red hair”. The intersex figure came from a flawed claim by Anne Fausto-Sterling in 2000, who used a very wonky way to decide who was “intersex.”  (Fausto-Sterling later retracted this claim, but you still see it everywhere).

In fact, developmental variants are very rare, constituting only about one in 5,600 people (0.018 percent), and also don’t represent “other sexes.” This is the same proportion of the time that a tossed nickel will land on its edge rather than on “heads” or “tails”, yet nobody thinks that the results of coin-tossing are “non-binary.” Further, just like coins that land on edge are neither heads nor tails, so an intersex individual, rare as they are, are not “other sexes”, but the results of development gone awry. After all, natural selection has created two endpoints for animal sexes, male and female, though the developmental paths to those endpoints can involve chromosomes, temperature (in turtles), the social environment (yes, clownfish) , or genes. Indeed, the paths are many but there are only two endpoints (males and females); and a deviation from those two goals represents a very rare straying from the path.

Towards the end, Kralick says explicitly that one of her aims is to deconstruct the narrative that unflanged males are “deviant,” which I guess a couple of anthropologists have said (but I bet few would say that today!). The language of “deconstructing”, “subverting”, “undermining”, and “busting” supposedly conventional science is straight out of postmodern discourse.

This slide, which conflates sex and gender again, supposedly gives us lessons about humans, the only species, Kralick asserts, that do have gender.

The goal in this research is apparently to read into nature the spectrum of gender we see in human society, another example of what I call the “reverse naturalistic fallacy”—the idea that “what we consider good in humans must be observed in nature.” It’s a logically unsound way to valorize human identities. The double irony, though, is that Kralick not only affirms the sex binary, or at least accepts it, but also studies something in orangs that has nothing to do with gender.  Unflanged males are variants, apparently frequent, and may represent an evolved reproductive strategy.  Their existence raises a number of interesting and unanswered questions, but this study doesn’t go after any of them. Instead, it tells us what we already know from humans: males and females are of different but overlapping size, i.e., human height falls along a spectrum.

But human sex doesn’t.

h/t: Christopher

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