Category: anthropology

The roles of men and women in hunting, revisited

July 7, 2023 • 12:06 pm

On June 30 I reported on a PLOS One paper whose data showed that, in existing hunter-gatherer societies, women participated in hunting a lot more than most people (well, at least I) thought.  (The original paper is here.) Here’s what I wrote, giving the authors’ conclusions (the authors’ words are doubly indented, my short bit singly indented).

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.

These data got a lot of attention because the paper is supposed to have “busted the myth” that in hunter-gatherer societies, both now and among our ancestors, there was a strict division of labor: men did the hunting and women the gathering.  While most anthropologists who weighed in said that nobody in the field really believed in such a strict division of labor, I’m sure that at least some laypeople did, and the data were valuable in dispelling such a myth.

I am keeping track of the reaction to the original paper, for here we have a case of science in flux: a “paradigm” of sex-specific labor appears to have been overturned (or at least eroded), and others will now analyze the data and weigh in.  One thing that wasn’t clear from the original paper was this: given that women do participate in hunting in most modern hunter-gatherer societies, to what extent do they participate? Do they do half the hunting, or only a little hunting?  I emphasize that any such division of labor has nothing to do with inferiority of one sex over another, but may be a byproduct of the differences in strength and speed of men versus women, characteristics that resulted from natural or sexual selection. But before we go speculating, we need the data.

At any rate, in a poorly titled paper in the Aporia Magazine (female hunting is NOT a “myth”, and the article below shows it isn’t), a somewhat pseudonymous author analyzed the data from 11 African societies (the limit of what could be presented in this short piece) and found that yes, women hunted in many societies—but never to the extent that men did.

Author “Alexander” is described this way:

Alexander is a grad student in behavioral and cognitive research. His research interests are in relationships and attraction. You can follow him on Twitter for interesting research threads and YouTube for evidence-based dating tips.

You can read the paper by clicking on the screenshot below. 

Alexander notes the media attention to the PLOS One paper, but said that although the headlines may have gotten the results wrong, the real “big problems” with the paper are these:

  1. The data do not show it is a “myth” that men are the predominant hunters across these cultures.
  2. The data do not show that women hunt as often as men do.
  3. The data do not show that women have always hunted as much as men.

So the “myth” isn’t that females don’t hunt, it is that they often hunt as much as do men. The title should have made that clear.

Here’s what Alexander said was done in the original paper: a simple binary coding with 0 for “no” (hunting, fishing, gathering) and 1 for “yes”.

Anderson et al. (2023) examined the existing ethnographic literature for documentation of women hunting. This was categorized as a binary variable. If there was any documentation of women hunting, it was recorded as a 1, a simple “yes.” This raises a problem. It does not quantify how much men and women participate in hunting. It didn’t matter if hunting was rare for women or if female hunting practices differed significantly from male hunting practices (e.g., trapping birds versus hunting elephants with spears)

Alexander looked at the 11 societies in Africa, consulting the original sources. He quotes from them; in some there appears to be a strict division of labor with no women hunting, in others women hunt with nets, but in others women do very little hunting.  Alexander divides up the division of labor into four subjective categories, and then plots the category for each society (below):

Based on the description of the cultures in Anderson et al. (2023) and the research cited above, I coded cultures according to the following:

A clear sexual division of hunting labor: a binary yes/no.

The extent to which hunting was segregated overall: a scale of 1-4. A 1 indicates no segregation; men and women perform the same hunting tasks in mixed groups. A 4 indicates nearly total segregation.

Here are the results for the African societies used:

 

Here’s his conclusion:

100% of the societies had a sexual division of labor in hunting. Women may have participated with men in some hunting contexts, typically capturing small game with nets, but participated much less in large game hunting with weapons or by persistence. Even within these contexts, it was usually the case that the role of women during the communal hunt was different. For example, women flushed wild game into nets while men dispatched the game.

These are my subjective ratings based on the papers I read in Anderson et al. (2023) and the supporting literature I cited. You may disagree and assign some different ratings. The point is that there is substantial variation across cultures in sex-based hunting roles. Additionally, none of the societies truly have an absence of these roles.

Again, all you can do is look at the data he reproduces.  His conclusion is that there is generally some division of labor, but there are no societies that rank 1 (“no segregation”) and four show “total segregation.”

Read this article along with my earlier post and Alexander’s post (especially the text he reproduces from original sources ) as well as the PLOS One paper.  And remember that differences between sex roles, large or small, say nothing about ranking.  Remember, too, that the idea that “women never hunt in hunter gatherer societies” is something that anthropologists rejected a long time ago. Alexander finishes with this reminder:

Why did the perception of “man the hunter” arise? It’s likely because we see many sex-segregated hunting practices, particularly in hunting large game with weapons. Additionally, when you think of hunting, the first thing that comes to mind may not be chasing birds into nets. You probably think of a man with a spear — usually a man, not a woman, with a spear.

Nonetheless, it’s important not to devalue the role of small game hunting and foraging. Ichikawa (2021) noted that small game net hunting produced an equal supply of food in tonnes but was also stable and not sporadic compared with hunting elephants. In agricultural societies, women are not merely sitting at home either. Farming labor is shared and women tend to produce as much food as men. Women work hard across cultures. They are not merely sitting in the cave waiting for you to return the mammoth meat.

For some people, that is not good enough. They are driven by a belief that the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer societies means they have no sex-based roles or divisions. This is not only a belief but an ideological desire. They want to believe that hunter-gatherer egalitarianism means the sameness of the sexes. On that, I will leave you with what Lewis (2014) wrote about gender roles for one pygmy hunter-gatherer group related to those reviewed in this literature:

Mbendjele recognize, cultivate, and celebrate gender differences, but value them equally. To understand egalitarian societies, it is necessary to understand that individual variation and equality coexist, so to understand gender egalitarian societies, it is necessary to recognize that gender difference and equality coexist

[…] Mbendjele men and women spend most of their waking time apart; in the forest women gather and fish together with other women and children, men go looking for honey or hunting in smaller male‐only groups.

New paper: women in hunter gatherer societies hunt more that we thought

June 30, 2023 • 11:45 am

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

***************

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:

Fig 1. World map of the locations of 63 different foraging societies analyzed. The map is in the public domain and can be attributed to Petr Dlouhy,

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

Leakey Foundation scientist: orangutan bones tell us that biological sex is a spectrum, not a binary

June 19, 2023 • 11:00 am

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).

Flanged male
Unflanged male

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

A new (evidence-free) hypothesis that eliminates sex roles in hunter-gatherer societies

June 14, 2023 • 11:45 am

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

Last meal report from Paris

May 15, 2023 • 11:00 am

For some reason I didn’t have time to write about our last meal in Paris, at the esteemed and old fashioned restaurant Sébillon in Neuilly, a small town that’s not in Paris, but might as well be. It was recommended by one of Winnie’s friends, and it turned out to be an excellent recommendation. It’s a little bit out of the way, so although it was jammed for Sunday lunch, we saw no other tourists. Winnie’s friend Nicole joined us for the house specialty, gigot (leg of lamb) served with the traditional white beans. And it’s served according to the two most beautiful words in French: à volonté, or “at your will”.  The proper English tradition is “all you can eat”. And I was prepared to eat plenty of lamb leg, especially if was cooked the right way: pink on the inside, or even rare.

I got off at the wrong Métro stop, but I didn’t know that. Because I was early, I went into a nearby Catholic church (St. Jean-Baptiste) as I heard the sounds of Mass within. I hadn’t been in a Mass since 1989, when I wandered into the midnight Mass at Notre Dame in Paris. What with the singing, the organ, and the swinging censers spewing incense, and the church (before it was burned) that was quite a spectacle.

A few scenes from the Neuilly church:

A kid getting baptized, as per the church’s name. You don’t get dunked like a doughnut any more; this priest simply dipped a hankie in the holy water and wiped the boy’s forehead. That’s baptism on the cheap!

St. John the Baptist:

A memorial to those who died for France in WWI:

. . . and the painting below it:

The Mass:

Suddenly my phone buzzed; it was Winnie telling me I was late. It turns out there are two stops on the Métro like with the name “Neuilly” in them, and I had gotten off at the wrong one. Fortunately, the right one was just two stops down the line, and the Restaurant Sébillon was right by the stop. And so we were only a few minutes late.

Restaurant exterior:

The interior. It’s a panorama, so click to enlarge. It’s an old-fashioned place, lovely and just perfect for Sunday lunch when, according to tradition, adults take their parents and older relatives out to lunch:

I had the prix-fixe menu, which included a choice of oysters for the entrée. My haul:

I had a white wine whose genre I can’t remember (it’s been too long)

Winnie and Nicole had the white asparagus, which was in season. (I almost went for it.) It was served with a butter sauce that both of them eschewed

And then. . . . the GIGOT, brought to the table on carts. I could specify that I wanted rare lamb, and knew that I could get more:

My first plate (I had three). This is how I like my lamb, and this was terrific: juicy and flavorful. The beans were also excellent (the quality of gigot-accompanying beans does vary among restaurants.)

We all had gigot. Nicole, whose appetite is normal, was satisfied with one plate, and I think I even beat Winnie, who had two (she generally can outeat me). But we differed in our desserts. I had the baba au rhum (rum-soaked spongecake), served with a bottle of rum (yo ho ho!) on the side if you want more. This was the rummiest baba au rhum I’ve ever had! I was tipsy after the meal, and I think the rum was largely responsible.

The ladies had a crème caramel and crêpes for dessert:

A selfie of all of us.  The room was filled with locals, with many tables occupied by families as well as and seniors, the latter presumably grandparents.

On the way out, we passed a huge and luscious-looking apple tarte:

I decided to visit the nearby Musée de l’Homme while the ladies went off to nap. It turned out that I should have napped too, as the famous anthropology museum was huge, and I was too full to take it all in. But I wanted to see the exhibit of early human art that had influenced Picasso.

Here’s a reproduction of the Venus of Lespuge, between 26,000 and 24,000 years old,

And a Picasso nude, “Bust of a Woman” (1931) showing a similar style:

Also on view: beach stones that Picasso picked up and sculpted, presumably influenced by “primitive” art. These must be worth a gazillion dollars.

I was too exhausted to peruse the anthropological collections, but did note two things. First, a wall of rubber tongues. When you pull on one, it speaks the language it represents (each tongue connects to a speaker so you can hear the language). Very clever!

And, right outside is a famous Parisian landmark:

Thus endeth my Parisian food jaunt, that included eight restaurants.  As for the Sébeillon, I recommend it highly, but do go for Sunday lunch, and reserve!

Anthropological Wokeism tries to stymie research

July 19, 2022 • 1:15 pm

This article about conflicts in anthropology involving gender and ethnicity comes from the website of Jonathan Turley, whose name I’d heard before but whose work and politics I didn’t know. His Wikipedia bio doesn’t give much clue into his politics (to be truthful, I didn’t look hard for it, since it seemed irrelevant to the story), I wondered simply because he cites a right-wing website below.

But Turley is no weirdo: here’s one bit from his Wikipedia bio:

Turley holds the Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law at The George Washington University Law School, where he teaches torts, criminal procedure, and constitutional law. He is the youngest person to receive an academic chair in the school’s history. He runs the Project for Older Prisoners (POP), the Environmental Law Clinic, and the Environmental Legislation Project.

I am assuming, then, that what he describes and quotes is accurate, and will give my views accordingly.  Here’s the article at hand, which relates to the last article we had about ethnicity (which, of course, reflects ancestry). Click screenshot to read:

I’ll be brief: there is a cadre of anthropologists who want to stop their colleagues from classifying skeletons by sex and by trying to find out their ancestry. The reason? Because it doesn’t comport with today’s “progressive” Leftist views. I’ll quote Turley:

There is an interesting controversy brewing in anthropology departments where professors have called for researchers to stop identifying ancient human remains by biological gender because they cannot gauge how a person identified at that the time. Other scholars are calling for researchers to stop identifying race as a practice because it fuels white supremacy.  One of the academics objecting to this effort to stop gender identifications, San Jose State archaeology Professor Elizabeth Weiss, is currently suing her school. Weiss maintains that she was barred from access to the human remains collection due to her opposition to the repatriation of human remains. The school objected that she posted a picture holding a skull from the collection on social media, expressing how she was “so happy to be back with some old friends.”

The conservative site College Fix quotes various academics in challenging the identification of gender and notes the campaign of the Trans Doe Task Force to “explore ways in which current standards in forensic human identification do a disservice to people who do not clearly fit the gender binary.”

Let’s take sex and ancestry separately. Turley’s prose is indented.

On gender and sex:

University of Kansas Associate Professor Jennifer Raff argued in a paper, “Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas,”  that there are “no neat divisions between physically or genetically ‘male’ or ‘female’ individuals.”  Her best selling book has been featured on various news outlets like MSNBC.

. . . However, Raff is not alone. Graduate students like Emma Palladino have objected  that “the archaeologists who find your bones one day will assign you the same gender as you had at birth, so regardless of whether you transition, you can’t escape your assigned sex.”

Well, given that sex is pretty close to a complete binary in humans, and is reflected and diagnosable in our bones bones—hence “Lucy“, A. afarensis, was female and “Turkana Boy“, H. ergaster was male—you determine biological sex from skeletons, not gender.

Is that a problem? I don’t see how. Even if our hominin relatives or ancestors did have concepts of gender beyond male and female, there are genuine scientific questions to be answered by studying biological sex from ancient remains.  What was the ratio of males to females in various places, and if it differed much from 50:50, why? If someone’s remains are associated with items, like Ötzi the hunter (actually a mummy), one can conclude something about ancient cultures and the possibility of differential sex roles. Is it important for scientists to debate whether Ötzi identified himself as a “they/them” given that we’ll never know the answer? Or are we forbidden to inspect the genitals? (He was a biological male).

Now it is of sociological value to determine whether our ancestors identified as “men and women” and saw only two genders, but if we can’t do that, it’s ludicrous to say that we shouldn’t identify remains on the basis of biological sex—a lot easier to do! I won’t give a list of scientific questions that can be addressed by knowing the sex of a fossil hominin, but there are lots, and yet some anthropologists want to stop all such research because hominins may not have had gender roles that matched their biological sex.

On ancestry and ethnicity:

Likewise for ancestry. It’s sometimes possible to guess one’s ethnicity from skeletal morphology, but it’s much more accurate to do DNA sequencing. (Sequencing of fossil DNA can tell us both biological sex and which group of either ancient or modern humans you most resemble genetically.) Yet some anthropologists want to stop that research, too. Turley:

Professors Elizabeth DiGangi of Binghamton University and Jonathan Bethard of the University of South Florida have also challenged the use of racial classifications in a study, objecting that “[a]ncestry estimation contributes to white supremacy.”  The authors write that “we use critical race theory to interrogate the approaches utilized to estimate ancestry to include a critique of the continued use of morphoscopic traits, and we assert that the practice of ancestry estimation contributes to white supremacy.”

The professors refer to the practice as “dangerous” and wrote in a letter to the editor that such practices must be changed in light of recent racial justice concerns.

“Between the devastating COVID-19 pandemic and the homicides of numerous Black Americans at the hands of law enforcement officials, we have all been reminded about the fragility of life, and the failures of our society to live up to the ideals enshrined in the foundational documents which established the United States of America over two centuries ago. Tackling these failures seems overwhelming at times; however, changes can be enacted with candid and reflexive discussions about the status quo. In writing this letter, we direct our comments to the forensic anthropology community in the United States in hopes of sparking a discussion about the long-standing practice of ancestry estimation and changes that are frankly long overdue.”

Once again, research is supposed to be squelched for ideological reasons. Yet estimating ancestry of remains can answer lots of interesting questions.  One, for example involves DNA sequencing of Neanderthals and modern humans. I would consider these to be different, long-diverged ethnic groups of a single species, not different species, for they could interbreed where they lived in the same area and also produce fertile hybrids.

That’s just a guess, but without sequencing their DNA, we wouldn’t know not only that they hybridized, but also that many of us still carry some ancient DNA from Neanderthals.  Where did the Denisovans belong? (We don’t know whether they were a different species of hominin from modern humans or simply an “ethnic group.”) What about H. erectus? Did they die out without issue, or are they related to any modern populations?  Do any of their genes still hang around in H. sapiens? (I don’t think we’ll answer these questions.)

It is the sequencing of DNA of people from different geographic areas (“races” if you will, but call them whatever you want) that has helped us unravel the story of human migration, how many times we left Africa and when, and when different groups established themselves in places like Australia and Polynesia, or crossed the Bering Strait into North America. DNA and estimation of ancestry has immensely enriched the story of human evolution and migration. That’s all from “ancestry estimation”, and you don’t even need a concept of “race” to answer these questions—only a concept of “ancestry” and “relatedness”. Nor does this research contribute to white supremacy, though of course some racists may coopt it.

In the interests of woke ideology, in other words, some anthropologists want to shut down two promising lines of research. I call that misguided and, indeed, crazy. If you despise white supremacy like most of us do, you don’t get rid of it it by banning anthropological genetics. If you want sympathy for people whose gender doesn’t match their biological sex, you don’t get it by stopping researchers from determining the biological sex of ancient human remains.

As the Wicked Witch of the West said, “Oh, what a world! What a world!”

Two questions about human history

December 26, 2021 • 9:30 am

I’m sure that historians have pondered the first question at length, but I haven’t read their lucubrations. According to Wikipedia, the first definitive use of the wheel on transportation was in Mesopotamia around 3500 B.C. We don’t know how many times it was invented independently, but probably more than once (see below):

So, my first question is this: Why was the wheel not devised in the New World? The Americas had plenty of civilizations, including many Native American groups, and the Aztecs, Incas, and Maya as well as many other groups, but none of them had the wheel, with one exception (see below). Why? Further, the Diquis culture had stone spheres beginning about 300 A.D., so they certainly knew that something round could roll. But this wasn’t adapted for carts or other rolling entities. Yet the Incas are said to have used wooden rollers to roll large stones for their walls and cities. Why no wheels, then?

According to The Straight Dope (I just looked this up), there was one exception:

The wheel evidently was familiar to the ancient Mexicans, the only known instance of its having been invented independently of the Sumerian version. Unfortunately, it apparently never occurred to anyone at the time that wheels had any practical application, and their use was confined to little clay gadgets that are thought to be either toys or cult objects.

That link also gives you an explanation that Cecil Adams considers definitive, but I don’t know. See for yourself.  I am guessing that Jared Diamond pondered this question in Guns, Germs, and Steel but I read it so long ago I can’t recall. Go to the link, read “the” answer to my question above, and see if you agree with Cecil.

My second question is this:  How did our ancestors keep their fingernails and toenails at reasonable length?

I thought of this question while clipping my nails the other day, and thought, “Scissors and nail clippers, and even steel knives were not invented in fairly late in human history. But yet our ancestors did without them for millions of years.  How did they keep their nails short?

Now you might say, “They didn’t need to: their nails wore down from hunting, gathering, and walking barefoot.” But I am not sure this is the case. How would walking barefoot wear down your toenails? And we know that, at least in modern society, if you don’t trim your fingernails and toenails, they get ungodly long (see below).  Did the ancients use flint? And what did they do before they had flint implements? Or did they bite their fingernails?

Now we could surely answer this question by observing what hunter-gatherers do, if anything, to keep their nails short. But I am not going to look it up; I’d rather have readers speculate or, if they know the answer, tell me.

Below: a video showing what happens if you don’t trim your nails: here’s a man who didn’t trim the nails on one hand for 66 years. (He explains why.) He has, on that hand, the longest known fingernails in history.

Of course he had to cut his nails on his right hand so he could do stuff (and I’m betting he’s a rightie). Nobody would marry him, and you can imagine the trouble he had just living from day to day. It’s all in the video

At the end they cut his nails: