Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-03T12:47:11.805Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Women in Human Evolution Redux

from Part I - The Strange and the Familiar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2019

By
Dänae G. Khorasani  and
Sang-Hee Lee
Edited by
Cathy Willermet  and
Sang-Hee Lee
Cathy Willermet
Affiliation:
Central Michigan University
Sang-Hee Lee
Affiliation:
University of California, Riverside
Get access

Summary

In the history of paleoanthropology, generations of scholars have interpreted and imagined the role of women in shaping the evolution of humanity. Much of this literature about prehistoric women centers on the biologic differences between males and females, which in turn necessitated different evolutionary subsistence and reproductive strategies. When specialization in economic or subsistence production is differentiated by sex, it is typically referred to as a sexual division of labor. The idea that early humans divided their labor by sex is so influential that many believe the human lineage itself could be defined by the singular division between men hunting and women gathering.

Type
Chapter
Information
Evaluating Evidence in Biological Anthropology
The Strange and the Familiar
 , pp. 11 - 34
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ardrey, R (1961) African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man. Atheneum.Google Scholar
Ardrey, R (1966) The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations. Atheneum.Google Scholar
Ardrey, R (1970) The Social Contract: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder. Atheneum.Google Scholar
Ardrey, R (1971) Aggression and Violence in Man: A Dialogue between Dr. L.S.B. Leakey and Robert Ardrey. L.S.B. Leakey Foundation.Google Scholar
Ardrey, R (1976) The Hunting Hypothesis: A Personal Conclusion Concerning the Evolutionary Nature of Man. Atheneum.Google Scholar
Bailey, RC and Aunger, R Jr (1989) Net hunters vs. archers: variation in women’s subsistence strategies in the Ituri Forest. Human Ecology 17(3):273–297.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ballard, S (2007) Warriors and weavers: constructing Iron Age identities in museums. In Hamilton, S, Whitehouse, RD, and Wright, KI, editors. Archaeology and Women. Left Coast. Pp. 167–182.Google Scholar
Bielert, C and Geary, DC (2017) Is sex a dirty word? Quillette September 19. https://quillette.com/2017/09/19/sex-dirty-word.Google Scholar
Biesele, M and Barclay, S (2001) Ju/’Hoan women’s tracking knowledge and its contribution to their husbands’ hunting success. African Study Monographs 26:67–84.Google Scholar
Bird, DW and Bliege Bird, RL (2005) Mardu children’s hunting strategies in the Western Desert, Australia: foraging and the evolution of human life histories. In Hewlett, BS and Lamb, ME, editors. Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods. Aldine de Gruyter. Pp. 129–146.Google Scholar
Bodenhorn, B (1990) “I’m not the great hunter, my wife is”: Iñupiat and anthropological models of gender. Études/Inuit/Studies 14(1–2):55–74.Google Scholar
Brightman, R (1996) The sexual division of foraging labor: biology, taboo, and gender politics. Comparative Studies in Society and History 38(4):687–729.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clarke, DL (1972) A Provisional Model of an Iron Age Society and Its Settlement System. Methuen.Google Scholar
Conkey, MW and Gero, JM (1991) Tensions, pluralities, and engendering archaeology: an introduction to women and prehistory. In Gero, JM and Conkey, MW, editors. Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory. Blackwell. Pp. 3–30.Google Scholar
Conkey, MW and Spector, JD (1984) Archaeology and the study of gender. In Schiffer, MB, editor. Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory. Academic Press. Pp. 1–38.Google Scholar
Dahlberg, F, editor (1981) Woman the Gatherer. Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Dart, RA (1953) The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man. Brill.Google Scholar
Darwin, C (1981 [1871]) The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Dobkin de Rios, M (1976) Female odors and the origin of the sexual division of labor in Homo sapiens. Human Ecology 4(3):261–262.Google Scholar
Dyble, M, Salali, GD, Chaudhary, N, et al. (2015) Sex equality can explain the unique social structure of hunter-gatherer bands. Science 348(6236):796–798.Google Scholar
Edwards, B and Pope, R (2012) Gender in British prehistory. In Bolger, D, editor. A Companion to Gender Prehistory. Wiley-Blackwell. Pp. 458–479.Google Scholar
Epstein, CF (1988) Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender, and the Social Order. Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Estioko-Griffin, AA (1985) Women as hunters: the case of an eastern Cagayan Agta group. In Griffin, PB and Estioko-Griffin, AA, editors. The Agta of Northeastern Luzon: Recent Studies. University of San Carlos. Pp. 18–32.Google Scholar
Estioko-Griffin, AA (1986) Daughters of the forest. Natural History 95:36–43.Google Scholar
Estioko-Griffin, AA and Griffin, PB (1981) Woman the hunter: the Agta. In Dahlberg, F, editor. Woman the Gatherer. Yale University Press. Pp. 121–151.Google Scholar
Estioko-Griffin, AA and Griffin, PB (1985) Women hunters: The implications for Pleistocene prehistory and contemporary ethnography. In Goodman, MJ, editor. Women in Asia and the Pacific: Towards an East-West Dialogue. University of Hawaii Press. Pp. 61–81.Google Scholar
Evans, C and Hodder, I (2006) A Woodland Archaeology: Neolithic Sites at Haddenham. McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research, Cambridge University.Google Scholar
Fedigan, LM (1986) The changing role of women in models of human evolution. Annual Review of Anthropology 15:25–66.Google Scholar
Fedigan, LM and Fedigan, L (1989) Gender and the study of primates. In Morgan, S, editor. Gender and Anthropology Critical Reviews for Research and Teaching. American Anthropological Association. Pp. 41–64.Google Scholar
Foley, RA and Lewin, R (2003) Principles of Human Evolution, 2nd edition. Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Gailey, C (2014) Feminist methods. In Bernard, HR and Gravlee, CC, editors. Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, 2nd edition. Rowman and Littlefield. Pp. 151–184.Google Scholar
Gero, JM (1991) Genderlithics: women’s roles in stone tool production. In Gero, JM and Conkey, MW, editors. Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory. Blackwell. Pp. 163–193.Google Scholar
Gero, JM and Scattolin, MC (2002) Beyond complementarity and hierarchy: new definitions for archaeological gender relations. In Nelson, S and Rosen-Ayalon, M, editors. In Pursuit of Gender: Worldwide Archaeological Perspectives. AltaMira Press. Pp. 155–171.Google Scholar
Gifford-Gonzalez, D (1993) You can hide, but you can’t run: representations of women’s work in illustrations of Palaeolithic life. Visual Anthropology Review 9(1):23–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodman, MJ, Griffin, PB, Estioko-Griffin, AA, and Grove, JS (1985) The compatibility of hunting and mothering among the Agta hunter-gatherers of the Philippines. Sex Roles 12(11–12):1199–1209.Google Scholar
Guemple, L (1986) Men and women, husbands and wives: the role of gender in traditional Inuit society. Études/Inuit/Studies 10(1–2):9–24.Google Scholar
Hager, LD (1991) The evidence for sex differences in the hominid fossil record. In Walde, D and Willows, N, editors. The Archaeology of Gender. Archaeological Association, University of Calgary. Pp. 46–49.Google Scholar
Hager, LD, editor (1997) Women in Human Evolution. Routledge.Google Scholar
Harako, R (1981) The cultural ecology of hunting behavior among the Mbuti pygmies in the Ituri Forest, Zaire. In Harding, RSO and Teleki, G, editors. Omnivorous Primates: Gathering and Hunting in Human Evolution. Columbia University Press. Pp. 499–555.Google Scholar
Haraway, DJ (1983) Signs of dominance: from a physiology to a cybernetics of primate society. Studies in History of Biology 6:129–219.Google Scholar
Haraway, DJ (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. Routledge.Google Scholar
Hawkes, K and Bliege Bird, RL (2002) Showing off, handicap signaling, and the evolution of men’s work. Evolutionary Anthropology 11(2):58–67.Google Scholar
Hawkes, K, O’Connell, JF, and Blurton Jones, NG (1997) Hadza women’s time allocation, offspring provisioning, and the evolution of long postmenopausal life spans. Current Anthropology 38(4):551–577.Google Scholar
Hayden, B (1981) Subsistence and ecological adaptations in modern hunter/gatherers. In Harding, RSO and Teleki, G, editors. Omnivorous Primates: Gathering and Hunting in Human Evolution. Columbia University Press. Pp. 191–214.Google Scholar
Hodder, I (1990) The Domestication of Europe. Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hrdy, SB (1999) The Woman that Never Evolved. Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hurtado, AM, Hawkes, K, Hill, K, and Kaplan, H (1985) Female subsistence strategies among Ache hunter-gatherers of eastern Paraguay. Human Ecology 13:1–28.Google Scholar
Kessler, S and McKenna, WM (1978) Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach. Wiley.Google Scholar
Larsen, CS (2016) Essentials of Physical Anthropology: Discovering Our Origins, 3rd edition. W.W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Lasker, GW (1999) Happenings and Hearsay: Reflections of a Biological Anthropologist. Savoyard Books.Google Scholar
Leacock, EB (1983) Interpreting the origins of gender inequality: conceptual and historical problems. Dialectical Anthropology 7(4):263–284.Google Scholar
Leakey, RE and Lewin, R (1992) Origins Reconsidered. Bantam Doubleday Dell.Google Scholar
Lee, RB and DeVore, I, editors (1968) Man the Hunter. Aldine de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Leibowitz, L (1983) Origins of the sexual division of labor. In Lowe, M and Hubbard, R, editors. Woman’s Nature: Rationalizations of Inequality. Pergamon Press. Pp. 123–147.Google Scholar
Lovejoy, CO (1981) The origin of man. Science 211(4480):341–350.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lovejoy, CO (1993) Modeling human origins: are we sexy because we’re smart, or smart because we’re sexy? In Rasmussen, DT, editor. The Origin and Evolution of Humans and Humanness. Jones and Bartlett. Pp. 1–28.Google Scholar
Machin, R (2010) Gender representation in the natural history galleries at the Manchester Museum. In Levin, AK, editor. Gender, Sexuality and Museums. Routledge. Pp. 187–200.Google Scholar
Milton, K (1979) Male bias in anthropology. Man 14(1):40–54.Google Scholar
Morgan, E (1972) The Descent of Woman. Stein and Day.Google Scholar
Morgan, E (1982) The Aquatic Ape. Stein and Day.Google Scholar
Morris, D (1967) The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal. Jonathan Cape.Google Scholar
Moser, S (1998) Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins. Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Murdock, GP (1937) Comparative data on the division of labor by sex. Social Forces 15(4):551–553.Google Scholar
Murdock, GP (1949) Social Structure. Macmillan.Google Scholar
Nelson, SM and Rosen-Ayalon, M, editors (2002) In Pursuit of Gender: Worldwide Archaeological Approaches. AltaMira Press.Google Scholar
Noss, AJ and Hewlett, BS (2001) The contexts of female hunting in central Africa. American Anthropologist 103:1024–1040.Google Scholar
O’Connell, JF, Hawkes, K, and Blurton Jones, NG (1999) Grandmothering and the evolution of Homo erectus. Journal of Human Evolution 36(5):461–485.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ortner, SB (1972) Is female to male as nature is to culture? Feminist Studies 1(2):5–31.Google Scholar
Page, L, Brin, S, Motwani, R, and Winograd, T (1999) The Pagerank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web. Stanford InfoLab.Google Scholar
Richards, G (1991) The refutation that never was: the reception of the Aquatic Ape theory, 1972–1987. In Roede, M, Wind, J, Patrick, J, and Reynolds, V, editors. The Aquatic Ape, Fact or Fiction? The First Scientific Evaluation of a Controversial Theory of Human Evolution. Souvenir Press. Pp. 115–126.Google Scholar
Romanoff, S (1983) Women as hunters among the Matses of the Peruvian Amazon. Human Ecology 11:339–343.Google Scholar
Rosaldo, M (1974) Culture and society. In Rosaldo, M and Lamphere, L, editors. Woman, Culture and Society. Stanford University Press. Pp. 17–42.Google Scholar
Rosse, SV (1990) Female-Friendly Science: Applying Women’s Studies Methods and Theories to Attract Students. Pergamon.Google Scholar
Schiebinger, LL (1999) Has Feminism Changed Science? Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Sergel, K (1948) “I just like to kill things”. Outdoor Life 109:29.Google Scholar
Slocum, S (1975) Woman the gatherer: male bias in anthropology. In Reiter, RR, editor. Toward an Anthropology of Women. Monthly Review Press. Pp. 36–50.Google Scholar
Smalley, AL (2005) “I just like to kill things”: women, men and the gender of sport hunting in the United States, 1940–1973. Gender & History 17(1):183–209.Google Scholar
Sørensen, MLS (1999) Archaeology, gender and the museum. In Merriman, N, editor. Making Early Histories in Museums. Leicester University Press. Pp. 136–150.Google Scholar
Sørensen, MLS (2013) Gender Archaeology. Wiley.Google Scholar
Stange, MZ (1997) Woman the Hunter. Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Tanner, N (1981) On Becoming Human. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tanner, N and Zihlman, A (1976) Women in evolution. Part I: innovation and selection in human origins. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1(3, Part 1):585–608.Google Scholar
Tiger, L (1969) Men in Groups. Random House.Google Scholar
Washburn, SL and DeVore, I (1961) Social behavior of baboons and early hominids. In Washburn, SL, editor. Social Life of Early Man. Aldine de Gruyter. Pp. 91–105.Google Scholar
Washburn, SL and Lancaster, CS (1968) The evolution of hunting. In Lee, RB and DeVore, I, editors. Man the Hunter. Aldine de Gruyter. Pp. 293–303.Google Scholar
Watanabe, H (1968) Subsistence and ecology of northern food gatherers with special reference to the Ainu. In Lee, RB and DeVore, I, editors. Man the Hunter. Aldine de Gruyter. Pp. 69–77.Google Scholar
Wiber, MG (1997) Erect Men/Undulating Women: The Visual Imagery of Gender, “Race” and Progress in Reconstructive Illustrations of Human Evolution. Wilfrid Laurier University Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, EO (1975) Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Belknap Press.Google Scholar
Woodburn, J (1968) Stability and flexibility in Hadza residential groupings. In Lee, RB and DeVore, I, editors. Man the Hunter. Aldine de Gruyter. Pp. 103–110.Google Scholar
Workman, L and Reader, W (2004) Evolutionary Psychology: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wrangham, R and Peterson, D (1996) Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.Google Scholar
Zihlman, A (1981) Women as shapers of the human adaptation. In Dahlberg, F, editor. Woman the Gatherer. Yale University Press. Pp. 75–120.Google Scholar
Zihlman, AL (1985) Australopithecus afarensis: two sexes or two species? In Tobias, PV, editor. Hominid Evolution: Past, Present, and Future. Proceedings of the Taung Diamond Jubilee International Symposium. Alan R. Liss. Pp. 213–220.Google Scholar
Zihlman, AL (1989) Woman the gatherer: the role of women in early hominid evolution. In Morgan, S, editor. Gender and Anthropology: Critical Reviews for Research and Teaching. American Anthropological Association. Pp. 21–40.Google Scholar
Zihlman, AL (1997) The Paleolithic glass ceiling: women in human evolution. In Hager, LD, editor. Women in Human Evolution. Routledge. Pp. 91–113.Google Scholar
Zihlman, A and Tanner, N (1978) Gathering and the hominid adaptation. In Tiger, L and Fowler, HT, editors. Female Hierarchies. Beresford Book Service. Pp. 163–194.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×