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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