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I’ve always thought the classic Hunter - Gatherer gender division of labor was bullshit. I think that theory has gone out of fashion but I always thought it seemed like a huge assumption. It seems so much more plausible to me that everybody hunted some days (like during migration patterns) and gathered others. Did they even have the luxury of purely specialized roles before agriculture and cities?
Another reason I think that is because prehistoric hunting was probably way different than we imagine. Like, we imagine tribes of people slaying mammoths with only spears. It was probably more traps and tricks. Eventually, using domesticated dog or a trained falcon or something.
You can read the dawn of everything book which is a very interesting take at a lot of those assumptions which are indeed false. This book goes deep into the ideological bias scientists have when interpreting evidence.
Surprised you didn't get downvoted here. It's like if you tell people science is done by humans and humans arre flawed people flip out and call you a science-denier.
One of the first things you're taught to understand when interpreting data is that you have a bias. It is impossible not to have a bias.
Take for example: 1+1=2. Is it an extremely simple equation, or a decades long mathematical pursuit to establish certainty?
Our bias tells us we can confidently assert such simple statements, but the truth is, unless we spend an agonising length of time understanding the most insignificant and asinine facts, we NEED biases to understand the world.
The point of understanding we have biases is to think more critically about which ones are most obviously wrong.
The scientific term is bias, the layman term is flawed. When interpreting skepticism from others, many are likely to be biased against the layman 😉
The hunter-gatherer gender division is actually proven wrong now.
Also, hunting mammoths was a very rare activity. I would expect it to be some kind of desperate activity in fact. People weren't more crazy than we are, they would rather live than to be trampled by a mammoth.
That makes sense. There were tons of other smaller creatures around, why would you mess with something that's like a boar up sized 30 times.
I always assumed that hunter gatherer division was mostly down to the individual, some traits make some better at hunting than others.
I struggle to locate static objects, I for the fucking life of me just can't see it. I'll be looking for something and either look right over it or walk past it multiple times
But if I go outside and look in the trees I can spot all the squirrels within seconds. Not like that's a talent or anything special, but my point is that I'd starve if I had to look for food in the brush, and likely I imagine these types of traits are what defined who did what job, meaning who was good at what, and likely considering lots of hunting was endurance based and not skill based at all, then most adults probably participated to some degree.
I've also gone shroom hunting and had to come back empty handed because I can't see the god damned things.
Is this why I could never find stuff and then when my mother looked she would just go right to it?
Yeah, exactly that. It's RIGHT FUCKING THERE but I'm not gonna see it.
i'm rather convinced that stuff like ADHD and autism was at least co-opted by evolution (if not outright created by it) because tribes with a certain percentage of it had an advantage.
For example ADHD seems great for foraging, that provides the stimulation that is desired and the ability to completely lose track of time is pretty nice to stave away boredom from trudging through the forest for hours on end;
and autism is pretty obvious in how a defining feature is having special interests that you LOVE doing and get extremely competent in.
I myself have autism and i have no doubt that in a hunter-gatherer tribe i would have been having a blast creating tools and stuff like wicker baskets and trying to improve them as much as i can.
When you start looking at older debunked theories that lasted for a long time you can see the human bias in them. Not just a human bias but a a western bias.
Two that stick out for me:
Trees compete for sunlight - I think it makes sense to us humans because we compete for resources but in truth trees are way more 'community' based
The male alpha wolf - It's how the western world has been organized for centuries so it's easy to see that in a wolf pack even though its not true.
I don't think I ever heard that hunters and gatherers would have been divided by gender.
This has to be a troll comment. I'm utterly bemused.
I am pretty sure that modern archeology agrees with you in at least some ways (know an archeologist, not an archeologist). I don't have any specific evidence for mammoth trapping but there are these really interesting stone funnel traps that were used to trap gazelle herds https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2011/04/ancient-gazelle-killing-zones.html
Also consider how long humans have walked the earth as hunter gatherers. Agriculture goes back to around 10.000 BCE. The entirety of time between 300.000 BCE and 10.000 BCE was likely (mostly) spent as hunter gatherers. Imagine in how many ways local roles and culture could have differed in that time!
Haha, if fucking mammoths were scared of falcons then they deserved to go extinct