Hunting, Gathering, and the Fluidity of Gender Roles

What makes us human, truly beautiful landscapes. The roads that I use every day. Campus encampments. Eerie sounds of the sky. What makes us human? Division of labor, colonialism. The value of gold. Fun, dance, cultural and social interactions. Hope for a better future. Let's find out. Safety is a podcast for everything human. In recent years, headlines have been buzzing with discoveries that seem to challenge some of the deepest assumptions about human history. The media has framed some of these findings as a revolution in how we understand gender roles between men and women. While these studies highlight how women's contributions have been underestimated, some anthropologists argue that they oversimplify the picture. In this episode, I speak to evolutionary anthropologists, Cecilia Padilla Iglesias, about the complexities of work, gender and power throughout human evolution. We talk about whether dividing labor by sex is as universal as it's often portrayed. And if the assumed inequality created by these divisions is as natural as we've been led to believe. Hey Cecilia. Hello. Can you introduce yourself, please? Yes, so my name is Cecilia Padilla Iglesias. And I'm from Spain. I'm an evolutionary anthropologist, which basically means that I study human evolution. And at the moment, I work at the University of Cambridge in the UK. And I broadly research how humans adapt to the very, very different conditions. They inhabit now, but also in the past. And because for the majority of time, humans lived as hunter-gatherers up until 10,000 years ago, which evolutionary timescales is nothing, I work with both the few communities around the world that still practice this lifestyle, but also with evidence that we have from prehistoric societies. OK. Can you tell me what hunter-gatherer means? Like, what do societies that our hunter-gatherers look like in comparison to maybe the society that you and I live in? So of course, it's a very, very big umbrella term. I mean, and if you go back in time, everywhere from the Arctic to the Amazon rainforest, people were hunter-gatherers, but of course, they live very differently. And it just basically means that you have very little or no storage at all, and that the majority of the food that you consume, you obtain from hunting, gathering, fishing, basically from foraging natural resources. OK, yeah, that makes sense. What made you interested in this topic of division of labor for this episode? I think because research in these communities has been used in debates about things like gender roles, power dynamics, or in general, what we consider as natural behavior or the original behavior of humans. And specifically, last year, there were huge debates, both in the media and also in the anthropological community due to a scientific paper that was published in a journal called Plus 1 by someone called Abigail Anderson and colleagues. And in this paper, they were claiming that women in hunter-gatherer societies were hunting as much as men. And the media picked it up in a way that it interpreted us. Women hunted as much as men, therefore, prehistoric women were empowered. So everything that you thought of about gender roles being natural or so, these evidence of women hunting just completely overthrows that. And to me, that was a weird thing to do first, because I spent a bunch of time working with hunter-gatherer communities around the world. And of course, I'm familiar with the literature and this idea of women hunting as much as men generally didn't seem credible. But also, I didn't understand why women's empowerment hinged on them doing the things that men did. And especially hunting, I mean, the societies that I worked with are super egalitarian. I would say that power is divided very evenly. But I didn't understand why that needed to depend on whether women were hunting or not. So yeah, I think that's what got me interested. Yeah, it seems like a projection, maybe, of what we in non-hunter-gatherer societies think where do women need to get to in order to be empowered? What's the tipping point in apparently it's hunting? I think what's interesting is that this paper generated also a big conversation within the anthropological communities in order to write a response to the original paper and more generally to think about these issues. And I didn't participate there, but there is an anthropologist that is called Karen Kramer that I know from another project. And she was part of the paper and then was part of this big conversation between people doing work in hunter-gatherer communities. And I thought talking to her would be a really nice way to get into the topic. I'm a human behaviorallyologist. And I work with two traditional groups of people of group of hunters and gathers in South America and a group of subsistence farmers in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. Why do you think it's useful to look at contemporary foraging populations when asking questions about evolution or human diversity? Well, I think as anthropologists, we are interested in the range of human variation, either behaviorally or biologically. And we are so specialized just in the last 100 years in terms of our nutritional environment, our epidemiological environment, our energetic environment, our demographic environment, our reproductive environment. It's all a very novel world that we're living in. And if we're to appreciate either our ancestry or the breadth of human diversity, we have to look beyond ourselves. OK, so this is really interesting. Karen mentioned that we're living in a world that's highly specialized. And then that's something that has come about in the last 100 years or so when compared to the environments that we've evolved in. Can you tell me a bit more about what she means by that? I think it goes back to what we were discussing at the beginning. If we try to think about what ecological factors, what social factors, what natural factors shaped the way in which humans are, we can't really think of the last 100 years where we live in hyper industrialized societies, the way in which we produce foods are heavily artificial, full of machines and things like this. Of course, that's not going to tell us much about what were the things that our ancestors needed to face in order to come up with solutions. Yeah, that makes sense. So it's like saying that hunter gatherer societies help us see a broader picture of human diversity and evolution, right? Yeah, of course, neither Karen or I are the first people to come up with this already back in the 60s, actually, where this whole debate comes from. There was a super big conference called the Mander Hunter Conference, and it was held in Chicago. And the idea was to put together people that had worked in hunter gatherer societies around the world. But then it was estimated even that 1% of the world's population lived still from hunting and gathering. And the idea was to put together the commonalities and the differences between these societies to get insights about what kind of traits or what kind of behaviors emerged in these societies. Of course, in the 60s, I think there were like 67 people and only seven were women, so the interpretations of the behaviors that they observed were also heavily shaped by male perspectives, and of course, many of them have been rethought in recent years. But one of the things that I also asked Karen was specifically about this Mander Hunter term, and why is it that the first ever conference of hunter gatherer societies was called like this. So the man, the hunter, the hunting hypothesis has been around for a long time. First, perhaps articulated by Raymond Dart in the 1920s. And it's changed to become more sophisticated with time. But it basically proposes that the dietary shift to meat in the past was a catalyst for favoring a whole suite of transformative behavioral traits as well as biological traits. So things like the food sharing, the division of labor, pair bonding, male parental care, cooperative breeding, all of those very specialized human behaviors have been tied to hunting and the shift to meat eating. So the historic weight that's been given to meat and to hunting really defines a lot of how we put together the story of human social evolution. And by extension, the primacy of men in that story. So before we continue, you may have heard that Karen mentioned someone called Raymond Dart at the beginning of her response. Yeah, I was wondering who he was. He was paleontropologist that in the 1920s discovered the first ever Australopithecus. An Australopithecus is this human ancestor to which the famous Lucy fossil, for example, belonged. And what's interesting about it is that in this particular species of hominin, males and females are very, very different. And males are much, much bigger than females, which is something that we don't see in order of our ancestors. So I thought it was interesting that, of course, he would come up with something like this idea that everything that makes us human depends on men hunting and women gathering, and that we must have evolved to become very, very different creatures when he saw his one ancestor. And of course, at the time, many of the fossils that we now know did not exist. He probably thought that this specimen that he had discovered was representative of what humans really were somehow. OK, yeah. So the historical context helps here. So you said that the Anderson papers sparked your interest in the topic. What did Karen think of it? So basically, just to give an overview of what this paper was doing. And the authors used a big online database that has just written information from ethnographers that have worked on hunter-gatherers societies. And they said that they looked for explicit mentions of hunting. So from that, they concluded that about 73% of the 60 or so societies that they found mentioned explicitly women hunting. And that in about a third of those, there were mentions of women hunting large game. And from there, they concluded that basically women from hunter-gatherers societies hunted as much as men. So I think reaching that conclusion from that sort of evidence is what surprised both me and Karen, who has done much more work in hunter-gatherer societies than I have. So when I asked her whether she was surprised, she answered this. I don't think anyone who works with hunters and gathers would be particularly surprised or not expect it. So there's a real difference between observing a behavior once, and it gets the tick mark as this society does this behavior and its frequency. It's not unusual that older women will go out with the guys hunting. I mean, we know that those exceptions are certainly out there or whatever we want to call them. Women, perhaps, in some societies when they don't have certain kinds of constraints engage in hunting, that's completely within the frame of thinking about hunting and gathering, that it is so magnificent and so persistent of a way of life for tens of thousands of years because they are so flexible. Karen mentioned something that is staying with me. She said that observing a behavior occasionally isn't the same as that behavior being a regular part of life. Can you tell me why that distinction is so significant? Yeah, that's one of the main things that raised the alarm bell of the people actually doing research in these regard. Going back to this idea that people that live from hunting and gathering are people that need to adapt to changing environments because their day-to-day food shelter depends on whatever it is that is happening on that specific day. So of course, that kind of lifestyle requires you to be very flexible and requires you to adapt to constraints that may be happening in your day, in your life. You may have kids at some points, you may not, at others. You may be feeling physically exhausted at times and not at others. So what she's saying is that it's normal that within this framework someone has written that a woman hunted or, of course, you will hunt when you need to hunt. But that doesn't mean that you're doing it on a regular basis. And I guess that is the core thing to say that hunting is equally important in the lives of women, that in the lives of men would be that is equally likely for them to wake up one morning and go out hunting. And simply that kind of conclusion, you cannot reach from someone writing in a text that they've seen a woman hunt. OK, so it sounds like Karen's issue is with how the paper conflates occasional participation with equality in roles over time. Yeah, exactly. I think for many people who actually work and live closely to hunters and gathers or other kinds of small-scale societies, their analysis just didn't seem to experientially ring true. And then once we started looking under the hood, the whole kind of fabric of evidence started to unravel. I'm hoping that there's really been an emphasis in the last 20 or 30 years to not come up with kind of rules of human behavior or universals, but to try to incorporate the range of variation. It was kind of a surprise that this came back. Because to me, it's a little bit of a throwback that we're polarizing this discussion again. And it was really a surprise that the media picked up on it. Yeah, that was my next thing, because for me, one of the striking things about the Anderson paper is like how widely the media picked up on it. 376 news outlets worldwide, including Scientific American, National Geographic, the CNN, and every single Spanish newspaper had reported on this and they had reported these very, very big overarching claims about human history. And I was wondering, yeah, why do you think that these studies attracted so much media attention? Well, I think it's easier for the media to pick up on arguments that are polarized. This is true, this is not true. And I think it's just simpler to report on it and for maybe people to digest that in a sound bite. No, women have traditionally been characterized as never hunting, but now women do hunt. And it also fits kind of with the times. But I do want to say, I think it is an odd or a funny feminist position that in order for women to have value, they basically have to do what men do, which is usually either hunting or warfare. So much of what is called feminist archaeology or feminist anthropology is trying to prove that women engage in roles equivalent to men. But that seems like flawed as a true feminist perspective because why should putting food on the table day in and day out and taking care of kids be any lesser than hunting or warfare? I mean, this is the reason why I wanted to write this episode because I also thought that it was such a shame that we get caught up on this idea that in order for women to have the same power as men, we have to act in the same way or even. I think that's how we ended up with a double shift. Right, right, right. That's just my opinion. OK, so you said something right at the end that you think we ended up with a double shift. What is the double shift? Well, I think what Karen is also mentioning is that we have this idea that for women to have the same power as men, we need to do the things that they do already. But men are not expected to do the things that we do already in order to attain more power. So I think this dynamic is what makes women in the West. And I think there's a lot of research showing that that on average, they work more in general that they have less leisure time. So I thought that it was very much, yeah, our Western mentality being extrapolated to hunt together with communities. So it sounds like you're saying that the idea that women need to do the same job as men in order to be equal is more a reflection of what our culture thinks than reflecting an actual universal truth. Yeah, I think also, again, as Karen mentioned, we should regard equality as doing the same amount of work and people that have different types of work being valued equally. And actually, if we think about it in many situations, perhaps the only way to distributing work in equal packages is for people to do complementary things. If not, you would never manage to do all the things that you need to do in order to survive. And in the grand scheme of things, also thinking about human evolution, actually, maybe the ability to do complementary roles is what has made humans be able to live in so many different and so many tricky environments, like we live, because we can rely on things like cultural solutions, we can learn from other people and we can take objects that other people make in order to be able to cope with whatever needs that we need to cope with. And the only other species, actually, that manage to live in such widespread environment are perhaps beasts or ants that also have very, very strict, I mean, from a completely different perspective, but that also have very, very strict divisions of work. I do think, however, talking about a gender perspective in this whole debate, that there is a dangerous extension to this kind of reasoning, which is to take this idea of men generally doing more hunting than women, for example, to then say that men evolve to hunt and women evolve to gather or to do domestic labor or whatever else. OK, right, so this is how we get to that thought process that men must just naturally be better at running and have better spatial navigation. And that kind of thing, is that right? Yeah, exactly. So that we take these things as common knowledge, that, of course, men are better at getting around or men are stronger because they were hunters for hundreds and thousands of years. So I also thought it was important to ask Karen in this case, what she thought about this particular extension. So my view is that the human adaptation is complex because we have this very diverse diet that is nutrient dense. And that means that resources are located in different places across our landscape. We are also dependent upon tools. And we also process our food. And that means that the water that I need might be over there, the fire would I need might be over the other direction of a couple of kilometers, the roots that I need or some play cells, then the berries that I need and the fisher, some 10 kilometers that direction and the nuts are 10 kilometers that other direction. I mean, basically, it created a situation that we can't all do everything ourselves in order to survive and reproduce. On top of that, it's taken care of children. And so the simple sort of economy of that is that we cooperate in terms of a division of labor and we share the fruits of that labor. And that is not, I mean, other animals do that. Mostly it's us social insects, but it's not unique to humans. And it is economically efficient. And there's no real value judgment. I mean, I think we have to also be mindful that how we divide up work, what we're going to do just makes logical sense in terms of certain kinds of constraints that we each have, depending upon our age and depending upon our gender. And within those constraints, for someone that has never read anything about hunter-gatherer societies, can you give an idea of how flexible those arrangements can be, like what are we talking about in terms of constraints? Well, for me, what works is the testable expectation that women do work that does not compromise competent maternal care. We would never expect that evolutionarily. You wouldn't survive as a species if you were constantly compromising your maternal care. So in some cases, that might mean that hunting does not conflict with competent maternal care. But in most circumstances, it does if you're a prime aged reproductive aged adult. So if I understand correctly, what Karen is saying is that people evolve to adapt their activities or match their activities to the circumstances around them. Yeah, basically. I think she's just saying that these general patterns that we observe in behavior emerge from recurring constraints, not necessarily because you've evolved to do a particular activity because you're hardwired to it, but because you're regularly faced with the same kind of constraint. And I think the other interesting thing that she says is that it's not just gender. It's also your age, your physical status. It can be many other things that make you act in one way or another. Yeah, it sounds like it's not even really about hunting versus gathering. Like maybe that's what our society is really focused on. But by focusing so much on those two categories or running or jumping or whatever, we think that all ground activity is. It's like we're missing out on the fact that there are a lot of different ways to be flexible and a lot of different activities and tasks that we need to like share or split up or tackle. Yeah, I mean, that's also one of the things that she kept mentioning that there are many other things beyond hunting and gathering that they're taking care of children that there's preparing food, that there is a million other things. So that also raises the question of why it is that we are putting so much focus on hunting to begin with. Other than lithic tools, tools don't endure in the archaeological record of the very peep archaeological record with any kind of persistence. Plant foods don't endure in the archaeological record. And so there's just a huge natural bias to seeing large game lithic tools, especially when we're going way back in time. So there's some natural biases in the archaeological record. There's some biases coming from who is actually studying these people. And I think temporarily, this is the time of the big world wars. We had to have a way to justify that sort of warring bloodthirsty part of ourselves. And the hunting hypothesis fits right into that. But it is a shame, because if you do look archaeologically, even like in the American plains, where there's-- we think of them as being the bison hunters. And if you actually look at the archaeological record, an awful lot of what they're eating are rapids, rodents, lizards. We eat a lot of little game that just does not going to show up in the archaeological record. Even kids are very successful at getting that little stuff. So Karen was talking about historical and archaeological biases that lead to this focus on hunting. How does that influence the way we interpret the past now? I mean, I think it's inevitable, in a sense, the only thing that we have in order to study past societies is what we can find in the archaeological record. And the only thing we can find is hunting tools and remains of big mammals. We almost define these societies by their hunting tools. So we ascribe their identity through whatever it is that they used to hunt. And on top of it, if societally we have the end of these big wars and we tie hunting to narratives about male power and courage and all these values ascribed through fighting, of course, we're going to further reinforce this idea of societies being defined by this kind of behavior. But the deeper they dig, the more we find that the lives of prehistory people, like the life of people today, were way more complex that just based on hunting. We'll be right back with more from this interview after a short break. Did you know that Sapien's magazine offers so much more than a podcast? Every week, we publish articles that explore human worlds through the stories of anthropologists. Have you ever wondered if Neanderthals made art? Or how race can be real, but not biological? Or maybe you want to go deep inside Mexico City surveillance state. We also have poetry, videos, lively social media channels, and even materials for teachers. I'm Sapien's editor-in-chief Chip Colwell. Please be sure to check out [email protected]. Welcome back. Picking up our conversation, I asked Cecilia what she observed during her own field work with hunter-gatherer societies in Central Africa. I've done most of my ethnographic fieldwork in the rainforest of the Republic of Congo. And there, actually, the flexibility is not even between places, but it's across the seasons, because the rain changes a lot from the dry to the wet season and everything changes with it. So in the dry season, people live in kind of villages that are quite large, and they mostly do fish. And whenever they go hunting, actually, men and women go together, and then when the wet season comes again, people go back to the forest in much smaller camps, and he's basically only men hunting with spear. So the entire social world of these people changes with the seasons. So from a scenario like that, how can we conceive of natural doing one thing or another? And Karen, who has worked mostly in South America, her version of this division of labor looks actually completely different. For example, South America, there's just not very much big gain compared to Africa. So certainly, if you bring in something big, that those are shared. And so there are certainly creds that get given to generosity and to sharing. We value that in human societies tremendously. Many hunters and gathers have lots of ethics about men not drawing attention to themselves when they do dispatch something large. So we have a great deal of modesty in many hunters and gathers about not taking credit for that, but everyone knows. Everyone knows that was the hunter. And there certainly is easy to see how you get status and cred for being a good hunter. There's no question about that. But there's also many other ways that hunters and gathers have status and build reputations. The hunters and gathers that I work with, for example, the really good healers, they are known far and wide. You can go to a town that is hundreds of miles away and they have heard of a particularly good healer or singer. They won't have heard of a particularly good hunter. But certainly within one's band, you certainly know who the healers are. You also know who the productive women are. So I would say in the hunters and gathers that I work with, because it is a pretty depopurate terrestrial environment, there's not a lot of really sumptuous game. And they rely heavily on women's foods. And being part of a productive natural line is probably the highest status. - So you would say then that rather than how work is divided, being the thing that determines power, if I'm interpreting you correctly, it would be more, how well do you do whatever task you're doing that makes you have that power? Or there's a mix of the two. - In the hunters and gathers, I don't think it is specific to specific resources. I think it is how much you put into the pot, how hard you work to put what you put into the pot, whatever kind of resources it is. I mean, it's a delicate balance. Everybody needs to pitch in. - Yeah, so then you would say, and again, for people that might not be so familiar with these groups, that in a way that these assumptions of patriarchy and large game hunters, especially in prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies, may have nothing to do with the kind of work that they were doing, or not tied to that, almost that we cannot even infer whether they were more patriarchal or less patriarchal based on the tasks that they were doing. - Yes, I would agree with that. I think there's really no evidence except for our assumptions that patriarchy was the predominant structure in the deep past. I think we can't know that. And from my point of view, it's actually groups of probably related females that really pushed human social organization at the very beginning. - So Cecilia, what do you take of that in terms of power? Do you think that Karen means that power was divided evenly at a certain point time or maybe certain points in time? - Well, I think she means that we can't tell from these evidence that if we look at how power is divided in hunter-gatherer communities, there's a lot of research saying that between the sexist, but also between ages, that every person has the same say in terms of where to sleep, what to do, who gets the share of whatever food has been harvested or hunted that day. And again, this idea that actually people do tend to enjoy the same amount of free time than other people. And that's, I think, something very particular about these kind of societies that research in the Western world or even in agricultural communities hasn't shown where you actually see huge disparities into how much free time different people have. Think about the West, whether we have the same amount of free time that someone that is super, super rich. And of course, I think the other point that Karani is saying is again, highlighting this idea of diversity that probably in the past, there was a lot of flexibility and diversity and there were societies where power was more evenly divided than in others. - Yeah, but I guess the point is that knowing whether women hunted or not is not gonna get us closer to the answer, right? - Yeah, I think it's just looking at the completely wrong type of evidence. I do think there are things that we can learn about human diversity and human evolution from working in a diverse array of communities, including hunter-gatherer societies. And I did ask Karani what she thought this type of research could tell us about the evolution of perhaps gender roles in human societies. - Well, I think hunting and gathering is incredibly flexible and hunters and gathers know that. And so once you double down on any one thing, like a division of labor, you've boxed yourself into a corner and hunters and gathers I think are fully aware of that. That that would be curtains to them to not maintain their flexibility. So they do everything they can to maintain the broadest set of options, including things like backup foods, alternative strategies. And men know how to do women's stuff and women know how to do men's stuff. But just most of the time makes sense to take on particular roles. - And you said before which makes a lot of sense that this big conference, man the hunter came at the time of the Second World War, when we needed a certain way of explaining certain human tendencies, which I agree, like I'm sure there's this feedback between political ideologies and what we think of people in the past. And I was wondering, where do you think anthropology or human behavior ecology falls into that? What can we do as a field to prevent our research to end up as a stereotype? Or is it just something that the media picks up and there's nothing we can do? - Well, I do think that the onus is now on us to basically convince the media that we're capable of much more nuance than these black and white debates. That to understand what we are as humans, we have to be far more nuanced. And that really what we're all trying to do is solve this basic time allocation problem, which is that our lives are too complex for us to do everything even more so in today's world. We can only divide and conquer in terms of doing what we need to do to survive and to reproduce. So I think we are poised as a field, and I think we've been there for a while actually to further theoretic development and empirical studies that basically push beyond these polarized ways of thinking and these polarized debates. - So Cecilia, I mean Karen is a very strong convincing speaker, but I would love to know what your thoughts are, what are your final thoughts on this debate and this session with our society, this war figuring out what it is that tells us about ourselves, what we can glean from hunter-gatherer societies about who we are. - I mean, I think in general, we are struggling societally to cope with diversity in many ways, like we're trying to simplify things to make things one way or another. And that's one of the reasons why I like working on evolutionary anthropology, because actually most of the time to understand something, you need to understand that there are many, many different ways in which things can be done in different places and at different times. So for me, it's just a lesson into how actually even us with all the technology in the world need to take a step back when we interpret really basic pieces of evidence or of stories. - Yeah, and more free time. I think we need to spend more time thinking about our free time and how we can get more of it. All about it. - Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that also the media picked up a lot about hunter-gatherer societies that in basically all of the ones that they had studies, they had much more free time than in any other Western society. - I mean, I feel like that's the real lesson. - Maybe, yeah. - Cecilia, thank you so much for sharing your work with me and for talking to me. - Thank you, S.H.I. - Cecilia Padilla Iglesias is a post-doctoral researcher in evolutionary anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her work combines genetic, ecological and archaeological analyses with ethnographic fieldwork in the Republic of Congo. - Sapiens is hosted by me, Asha Lewis. The show is a written and air production. Dennis Spunk is our program teacher and editor. Mixing and sound design are provided by Dennis Spunk and Rebecca Nolan. Christine Weaver is our copy editor. Our executive producers are Dennis Spunk and Chip Kolo. This episode is part of the Sapiens Public Scholars Training Fellowship Program, which provides in depth training for anthropologists in the craft of science, communication, and public scholarship and is funded by the John Templeton Foundation.