Man the Hunter is the name of 1968 book which highlighted the central role of hunting in human evolution. Although ‘Man’ here refers to ‘mankind’ rather than ‘males’, the title embodies the common assumption that hunting is a largely male activity. Indeed, the authors, Richard Lee and Irven DeVore, argued that the sexual division of labour in hunter-gatherer societies is such that men specialise in hunting and women specialise in gathering.
And this makes sense. We know men are both faster and stronger than women – attributes that would obviously give them an advantage in clubbing seals, arrowing wildebeests and spearing woolly mammoths.
Fast forward to 2023. Five female scientists published a paper titled ‘The Myth of Man the Hunter’, which sought to challenge “long-held perceptions of sex-specific gender roles”. Abigail Andersen and colleagues gathered data on 63 hunter-gather societies, and reported that 50 (or 79%) “had documentation of women hunting”. This led them to conclude that “females play an instrumental role in hunting”.
As you can probably guess, the paper received glowing coverage in the media (for heroically debunking a ‘sexist’ myth). “The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong” ran the headline in Scientific American. “Worldwide survey kills the myth of ‘Man the Hunter’” stated Science magazine.
The only problem? Andersen and colleagues’ study appears to be flawed. According to a newly published commentary, “claims that foraging societies lack or have weak gendered divisions of labor are contradicted by empirical evidence”.
Vivek Venkataraman and colleagues scrutinised the methods used by Andersen and colleagues, and found evidence of both coding errors and sample selection bias.
To begin with, Andersen and colleagues claimed they gathered all their data from a particular ethnographic database called D-Place. However, Venkataraman and colleagues discovered that 35% of the societies in their sample did not in fact come from D-Place. These 35% were highly likely to be coded as ones in which women hunt. What’s more, Venkataraman and colleagues identified 18 societies in D-Place that were omitted from Andersen and colleagues’ sample, and none of these showed evidence of female hunters.
When Venkataraman and colleagues examined how individual societies had been coded, they unearthed various inconsistencies with the ethnographic material on which the coding was supposedly based. For example, Andersen and colleagues coded the !Kung as a society in which women hunt. Yet one ethnographic account of this society stated that “women are totally excluded from hunting”.
Of the 50 societies Andersen and colleagues coded as having female hunters, Venkataraman and colleagues determined that women “rarely” or “never” hunted in 16. They also found that Andersen and colleagues overstated the proportion of societies in which women hunt big game by a factor of two. By their count, the proportion of societies in the sample where women “frequently” hunt big game is only 5%.
Venkataraman and colleagues do not dispute that there are societies in which women contribute to hunting, typically of small game like rabbits and quails. But they do uphold the conventional view regarding the sexual division of labour: in most hunter-gatherer societies, men do most of the hunting and women do most of the gathering. ‘Man the hunter’ is not a myth.
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The poppy, the cenotaph etc are a giant con to excuse the fact the powers that be slaughtered 880,000 needlessly in a conflict we had no busines joining. 6% of the adult male population were essentially murdered by their own state. They don’t care about that at all, they never did.
With respect, we honour the young men who went, (men and women, now) and continue to go and risk their lives, not the people who send them.
We should be but it’s actually just a show of loyality to a psychopathic system.
Very few of us would have families that would have been untouched by the needless slaughter of millions. In both world wars and all the rest. And it is them we honour and remember not the system. The system merely expresses its faux concern while arming countries and destabilising our world. THAT is the con trick.
I don’t necessarily disagree but the faux tears of the state are part of the deception. If they cared about human life this thing we call the state wouldn’t have murdered 880,000 young men to profit the armaments trade, and to do their duty to the world order whatever that is.
A large number of soldiers in the first world war believed they were fighting and dying for a worthwhile cause and gave the best years of their lives and often their lives for something they believed in. For this they should be remembered and honoured.
British involvement in WWII hastened the defeat of the Nazis, thus saving the lives of a lot of Holocaust survivors, plus lots of Poles and other Europeans who would of been murdered or allowed to die in occupied countries if the Nazis had retained power any longer than they did. For this reason we should remember and honour those who served and died in that conflict.
You seem to think I dont care about the young men slaughtered one was my great uncle whose picture sits in my study. I’m mad angry he was mown down at the Somme aged 20 it traumatised my grandfather for the rest of his days. Had we not stupidly joined the slaughter most likely ww2 would never have occurred. Every single life was wasted in ww1 and the young men gave their lives for a lie to enrich very evil ppl who profited from industrial scale slaughter. I’m merely pointing out the state’s crocodile tears over what they did, the WEF King lining up to pay tribute with his unearned medals is grotesque.
Much appreciated Aethelred.
The first world war was caused by German and Austrian imperial over reach and arrogance. Our boys did not die in vain. Germany was planning to take control of huge chunks of France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and Poland and Eastern Europe and the Baltics. Witness the terms of the Brest Litovsk treaty with the vile communists once Russia dropped out in 1917
And, the British and commonwealth forces were the best army in Europe by 1917. We smashed rhe Germans in the end. Do not denigrate that army or their generals, who were overwhelmingly pretty good. Even Haigh whose funeral was attended by tens of thousands of ex soldiers. 200 generals were killed in the first war by being too close to the front lines.
And, Kitchener said in 1914, as it started, that this war will take four years. He was almost right on the button.
Do not take your history from leftists of the 1960s. We did a great and selfless thing in both wars. We sacrificed the future of our country to save Europe twice, and the bstards are not grateful. I honour our dead unwaveringly because they stood up and did what was right even though it was hard and dangerous. If only I can muster the same courage when it is needed because it seems it will be required again
This is so silly that it really makes one groan. For starters, in 1914, Poland was a kingdom ruled by the Tsar in personal union and the only reason why an independent Poland exists today is because German troops conquered this area from Russia and decided to recreate an independent Polish state. The Entente war plan was that France would force most of the German army to remain in France while the Russian steam roller was supposed to crush Germany from the east. Had this worked, Poland would have been ruled by Russians until today (or at least, England and France had certainly done exactly nothing to restore it).
In 1918, the Western colonial powers where at the brink of defeat, with Haig ready to abandon France and what saved the day for them was that the politicians finally got their act together and created a joined anglo-french high command under Foch with the butcher of Flanders (Haig) being reduced to a secondary role. Despite the immense numerical superiority of the Entente troops in every respect (soldiers, material, provisions), he didn’t really accomplish anything except drive the Germans slowly (and under immense losses) out of France and accross the border of Belgium. The war ultimatively came to an end because a communist uprising in Germany cut the supply lines of the army and forced it to surrender unconditionally.
Silly nonsense.
Haig stuffed the German army at Amiens using ‘tanks’ developed with funding provided by Churchill’s Admiralty, in combination with close air support, artillery; the first real mature employment of armour within a combined arms tactical envelope.
Who do you think taught Guderian, Manstein and Rommel….
You keep repearting this piece Quatsch (German for bollocks) and I keep telling you the actual story. In this repitition, you also got the general wrong: The British surprise attack at Amiens on 8th of August 1918 was led by Rawlinson and not Haig. It achieved a great effect on the first day but ultimatively, ground to a halt without any strategic consequences. It forced the German OHL to abandon its plans for a final, decisive offensive in Flanders and convinced Ludendorff that the war must be brought to an end with a negotiated peace as soon as possible as the Germans could no longer hope to use military force to decided it in its favour (according to his opinion of the day which was not universally shared on the German side).
Tanks have been used (with varying success) since the battle of the Somme 1916. During the first world war, their purpose was strictly infrantry support and they were usually only effective on the first day of an offensive as most of them would either be destroyed or have broken down due to mechanical failures aftewards.
Detailed (very detailed) description of this attack (in German, unfortunately):
https://digi.landesbibliothek.at/viewer/image/AC00634197/1/LOG_0003
[As evidenced by the title – The Catastrophe of the 8th of August – this was a very serious tactical defeat of the German army.]
Poland wasn’t an independent country in 1914. Parts of what is now Poland were part of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. This is only one fact you’ve got wrong, I’m not going to bother pointing out all the others.
And some of today’s Belarus was part of Poland. Years ago, I used to work with a Polish guy who migrated to England, and he grew up in what is now Belarus. While I was working with him, the USSR still existed; he hated anything to do with it, and had some harrowing tales about his family emigration.
Poland wasn’t an independent country in 1914. Parts of what is now Poland were part of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. This is only one fact you’ve got wrong,
For starters, in 1914, Poland was a kingdom ruled by the Tsar in personal union
Serious reading comprehension problem? This was so-called Kongreßprolen which had been created as kingdom to be ruled in personal union by the Tsar of Russia by the congfess of Vienna in 1815. It obviously didn’t include all the Prussian and Austrian territories later assigned to it with more or less good reason (the city of Danzig was so obviously German that even the Self-determination of the peoples! liars didn’t feel comfortable with declaring it to be Polish and created a semi-indepdenent minature state out of it instead).
Rawlinson worked for Haig, obviously.
Combined arms tactics were developed by Monash (an Australian considered by Montgomery as the best General of the 1914-18 war on any side) who worked for Rawlinson, together with creeping barrage/ (unregistered for surprise) counter battery techniques perfected by General Uniacke, close air support techniques led by MG Salmond.
It was these tactics, used, initially, at Cambrai, then, successfully, at Hamel that gave Haig the confidence to back Rawlinson in their employment at Amiens.
The stab in the back myth was a construct, inevitably, of national socialist propaganda, set out in that unreadable nonsense: ‘Mein Kampf’ although, of course, the defeated General Hindenberg also used it to justify his poor decision making.
‘On 13 August 1918 the Emperor of Austria appeared at German General Headquarters and discussed the terrible situation of the dual monarchy, which was unable to continue the war. Ludendorff states in his memoirs that after the successful English offensive on the eighth of August, he realized that the front of his armies might be broken at any time. From this day he traces the beginning of the final collapse.’
‘The General Staff by September 28, 1918, came to regard the struggle as hopeless. Ludendorff, fearing that his front would be broken at any moment and the entire army involved in the disaster, suddenly dispatched an ultimatum to Berlin demanding that the civil government of Germany request an immediate armistice of the Allies. On the afternoon of 03 October 1918 Hindenburg appeared before Prince Max and explained the precarious condition of the front. Ludendorff demanded peace because he no longer trusted the powers of resistance of his armies. Frantically the ministers asked for time, but the emphatic answer of the military party was: “No.” Under the pressure of the army solely, the German civil government began the armistice negotiations.’
Kevin Baker
Why do you repeat what I just posted and claim this would contradict it somehow? The Amiens attack occured on 8th of August 1918. Further allied attacks on the next day ended inconclusively, as usual. This forced Ludendorff to abandon his plans of the Hagen offensive in Flanders and he came to the conclusion that
Unser Kampfinstrument war nicht mehr vollwertig …. Der 8. August stellte den Niedergang unserer Kampfkraft fest und nahm mir bei solcher Ersatzlage die Hoffnung, eine strategische Aushilfe zu finden, welche die Lage wieder zu unseren Gunsten festigte … Der Krieg war zu beendigen.
This is roughly
Our tool (the army) wasn’t of full quality anymore … The 8th of August certified the decline of our fighting ability and considering the inability to replace our mounting losses, I lost all hope to come up with a strategic move which could restore our position. The war was to be terminated.
Two months later, ie, after two more months of vain Entente attempts to gain a decisive advantage by force, the German government, much against its own will, was pressured into an exchange of notes with US president Wilson with the intent to start armistice negotations based on the miltary status quo. This never happened because neither the English nor the French government was willing to negotiate about anything (nor was the liar Wilson willing to act in the way he kept hinting at). Fighting thus continued, as sequences of successful rear-guard actions of the slowly retreating German army until the 9th of November. On this day, a communist coup organized by the USPD started in Kiel which rapidly expanded over all of German and Philipp Scheidemann from the SPD announced the German republic in Berlin – in his own words A great victory of the German people! – the field army was then forced to capitulate as its supply lines had been cut.
It’s pointless to speculate about what would have happened hadn’t this occurred. However, something else which had happened mid-October was that Ludendorff had realized that the negotiations were going nowhere because of bad faith on the Entente side and had decided that the only realistic option for the Germans was to continue fighting. The SPD, already sensing itself in the antechambers of power, then forced his immediate dismissal.
Believe what you will; the events speak for themselves:
‘Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, the field marshal commanding the defence in northern France, wrote in his diary on 29 September: “We must absolutely make peace: there’s nothing else for it”.
Rupprecht could not yet know it, but at six o’clock the previous night, Ludendorff and Hindenburg had already come to the same conclusion. In his memoirs Ludendorff pretended that it was news of the imminent collapse of Bulgaria, rather than the military situation in the west, which provoked their decision.
This was a transparent lie, told to deflect blame away from himself: at the time he told his staff officers that he wanted to save the army from total collapse in case it was needed to suppress a Bolshevik uprising back home.
The generals told the Kaiser it was time to approach US president Woodrow Wilson and request a ceasefire. Within a week, a peace note was on its way to Washington.
So began a process that soon ran out of the German high command’s control, with far-reaching and disastrous consequences: by the middle of November, the army had disintegrated, an armistice had been signed, and revolutions had swept crowned heads from thrones all over Germany and central Europe.’
‘In the meantime, the offensive ground bloodily on. By about 8 October, the German army was falling back once more. It was soon fighting a semi-mobile war in much more open country, without trench lines to rally on, improvising defences where it could, in one desperate rear-guard action after another. This kind of combat was far from the trench warfare of earlier years, and the German army began to crumble under the pressure. By 5 November it was thoroughly beaten and retreating towards the German frontier as fast as it could march.’
‘Germany’s defeat was total. Its allies had fallen away and sued for peace after defeats in Italy, the Balkans and Palestine. Mutiny in the German navy sparked a revolution, which flashed across the country, overthrowing the imperial regime and sweeping the kaiser and other German royals from their thrones.
Rupprecht’s father fled into exile, while the prince himself, with the help of the Spanish ambassador, was smuggled into neutral Netherlands under a false name (‘Mr Landsberg’). It was more than a year before he was able to settle back in Bavaria; he never did ascend his throne.
The myth that the German army had been stabbed in the back on the home front, while remaining unbeaten in the field, was a dangerous lie, designed to shift blame for defeat from the military, which it suited first the politicians of Weimar and then the Nazis to perpetuate.’
Jonathan Boff, History Today
JFTR: The first combined-arms attack with tanks, air support, artillery and infrantry was at Cambrai in 1917. The English army managed to surprise the Germans and achieved massive (for the standards of the day) territorial gains on the first day. A German counter-attack then drove them out of most of the conquered territoy and gained some ground which had never before been occupied by German troops. This was before the large and tactically very successful but strategically futile German offensives from spring to summer 1918 had exhausted the German troops and terminally depleted the Ersatz pool (so-far untrained German men who were supposed to be drafted into the military to replace losses).
The innovation of the French attack of 18th of July 1918 (copied by the Brits on 8th of August) was that they did away with preparatory bombardement altogether but set tanks and infantry marching the moment the artillery had opened fire. An additional factor on the 8th was that dense fog rendered the German artillery incapable of making out any targets.
CAMBRAI
‘The new tactical way of combining airpower, artillery, infantry and armour by using infantry infiltration tactics, predicted artillery fire, sound ranging, battlefield intelligence and infantry-tank co-ordination. This new tactic was called ‘combined-arms warfare’.
The initial attack was a success because the enemy were taken by surprise. This was achieved through night-time transportation of supplies, men, tanks and guns to the front line to avoid detection and not following the traditional tactic of using artillery to ‘soften up’ enemy trenches days before the actual attack went forward. Predicted artillery fire….
The artillery needed good maps. By 1917 the British Army’s Field Survey Companies, with the help of old maps and aerial photographs, were able to produce accurate maps of the front line and beyond, deep into enemy territory.
The British had learnt from their mistakes. Tanks cannot successfully cross a waterlogged landscape cratered by artillery shells.
The use of a new type of shell with a No. 106 shell fuse was introduced. It was designed to deliver high explosive shrapnel-filled shells to the target but without leaving a deep crater.
‘The Royal Flying Corps pilots helped keep enemy reconnaissance flights away from British lines. They provided the artillery with aerial photographs, accurate information on enemy battery locations, the fall of shells and the current location of friendly forces.’
The brilliant victory at Amiens started the previous year at Cambrai
‘the Battle of Cambrai. This battle should be remembered for the first use of ‘combined-arms warfare’
‘In March 1918, a conference of British and French commanders and diplomats appointed Foch Generalissime, or Supreme Commander of Allied Armies, in order to facilitate better coordination between all forces on the Western Front. Foch, with British Field Marshal Douglas Haig, was responsible for planning the Grand Offensive, a series of overlapping offensive waves on the German lines, during the Hundred Days Offensive. This ultimately led to the breaking of the German Hindenburg Line and the Armistice on November 11, 1918.’
‘Between September and November 1918, Haig’s BEF achieved a series of key victories against the German army, ultimately breaking the German Hindenburg Line and prompting the Armistice on November 11, 1918.’
Craig Moore
They did die in vain completely. 880 thousand men needed to die because Germany might have dominion over France? Not that it would have been that easy for Germany to rule over France anyway. We should have stayed out of it entirely. Lest we forget the idiotic peace the French imposed cause hyperinflation in Germany resulting in ww2 over the understandable anger of the German middle class being totally routed.
The Germans were willing to guarantee the territorial integrity of France and all of its colonies in exchange for England remaining neutral in 1914.
As with COVID I’m sure much of the history will be full of what ifs and maybes. In the end ww1 was pointless slaughter for profit bank rolled by various nefarious parties.
The point I was trying to make was that the Germans never planned to dominate France. They expected a combined French-Russian attack with overwhelming numerical superiority on the Russian side and a French army only a little smaller than the German one and were making (somewhat frantic) plans to defend themselves against this.
But, clearly, it’s not “what we do.” If it’s “what we do” more of us would have been doing it. In our town of 25,000 we’re lucky if 250 turn out, most of those either elderly or from ‘service’ families.
It’s like Morris dancing, Baptistism, Methodism, The Masons or The WI, unlikely to survive long into the next generation.
Massive turn out here.
Very well written. Thank you.
A great deal of the unrest in this country is, in fact, created by ‘claques’ paid for by overseas money.
Green protests are paid for by hedge fund managers with offshore companies.
Iran funds pro Palestinian protests and, no doubt, others.
Putin funds the far right.
We are back to the days of Mosley and the ‘black shirts’ memorably lampooned by P.G. Wodehouse as ‘swanking about in footer bags’.
Mosley probably had as much money then as a hedge fund manager has today.
We keep trying to throw away everything previous generations fought for but their legacy is too strong.
So we must, as you imply, in the words of the great man, just ‘keep beggaring on’.
Given the numbers flocking to these shores, things, plainly, could be so much worse.
Imagine that you had a time machine and you travelled back to London on the evening of VE Day and told people that in only a lifetime only around a quarter of the population of London would be English.
That they would be de facto and increasingly de jure second class citizens.
That Islam would be the preferred religion of the state.
That black people would be hugely overrepresented in advertising and reported history.
That those opposing the mutilation and sterilisation of tomboys would be the ones treated by the state as extremists rather than those supporting such evil.
They’d regard you as utterly deranged, wouldn’t they? After all, we won the war, didn’t we?
“We’ included large numbers of ‘Imperial’ troops.
We owed, still owe, them a debt and are immeasurably enriched, in so many different ways, as a consequence.
Or that a virus Fascism would eviscerate all of our freedoms over a plandemic for profit and power.
Why does everyone forget the greatest crime in history?
“For those of us whose lives were not broken in major ways by the effects of lockdown, sometimes it seems as though the experiences of that time are shrinking to a speck in the rearview mirror”
My life was certainly not broken in major ways by the effects of lockdown, but the experiences of that time are certainly not shrinking to a speck. Au contraire, I see the malaise and the machinations that made lockdowns possible everywhere, all the time, more and more clearly. “lockdown times” were not some aberration, they were a logical continuation of what had gone before, and continue in different forms. Lockdowns for me will not be over until there has been a general recognition of the scale of folly and evil – so for me they will continue for the rest of my life. But I was not “broken” – I would not give the bastards the satisfaction.
Nice article.
A critical remark: Did it ever occur to you that this living-in-the-glorious-past isn’t exactly a healthy attitude wrt mastering the future? Worded in a somewhat loaded way, while the English go, groundhog day like, through an endless ritual of gloomily mourning the same dead over and over again, the present pretty much looks like Nearhorburian wrote in another comment.
Remember the fallen, obviously, and hold their sacrifices in high esteem, but as something to look forward from into the future.
[This is a poor man’s version of the text I had liked to write, but I couldn’t do it better in English ATM]
Thank you for a very moving piece of work. I agree there is no jingoism attached to Rememberance Sunday, it is for me at least a way to remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice. The question I always ask myself is “would I have been able to do the same?”
So, there is a “reason to step up our game, in defending what’s left and restoring (if we can) what’s lost.” Armistice Day and Rememberance Sunday are part of the national psyche still and should be protected. Looking back at this weekend perhaps the disrespectful, ignorant jihadi protesters did us all a favour and pushed the importance of our remembering into the consciousness of others in this country.
I attended our local service and the turnout was very good. The local brass band played the hymns, the cadet force marched proudly and the local school children had attached small posters to lamp posts with the name and regiment and where known the local address of local men who fell. That was grim reading:
Private…age 18…1918
Private…age 23….1918
…and on the posters went. In some cases we walked the street where these young men had lived. Eighteen, god above. The ages brought a lump to the throat, not much past children.
Nobody in their right mind should ever seek to denigrate these days of Rememberance and quite honestly those who seek to defile these days should be locked up for a week or two. Those not of our heritage deported.
Lest we forget.
A perfect echo of my experience in Golders Green. I met a Dutch lady whose father lived two doors down from Anne Frank.
It was a wonderfully genuine act of Remembrance for all the dead of all wars.
Apologies for disrupting this sensitive thread but this off-topic lead from Dr Mike Yeadon is important.
https://truth613.substack.com/p/urgent-warning-regarding-flu-vaccine
Suspicions are being aroused that ‘flu vaccines are being tampered with and children are dying.
Thanks for this link. Very sad and disturbing.