Perhaps the most respectable conspiracy theory of our time is the assumption of many left-wing academics that other left-wing academics are actually flaming right-wingers hiding the truth, such as that conspiracy among those notorious bigots, cultural anthropologists, to cover up that women are the “dominant” hunters in hunter-gatherer societies.
Of course, they would argue, it’s not a conspiracy, per se, it’s just systemic sexism. It couldn’t possibly be us who are biased?
Many of the woke believe that their ignorance is ignorable because everybody knows that nobody was ever woke until about three weeks ago, so they can just make assumptions about the past without knowing anything. For example, here is a New York Times science section article that is based on the presumption that anthropologists must have been overwhelmingly right-wing male chauvinist bigots until very recently, which is why they never noticed that women hunters “have played a dominant role in bringing home the game” until just now, even though they had thoroughly documented it.
Move Over, Men: Women Were Hunters, Too
Anthropologists are finding that women in modern foraging societies have played a major role in catching game.
By Katrina Miller
Aug. 1, 2023It’s often viewed as a given: Men hunted, women gathered. After all, the anthropological reasoning went, men were naturally more aggressive, whereas the slower pace of gathering was ideal for women, who were mainly focused on caretaking.
“It’s not something I questioned,” said Sophia Chilczuk, a recent graduate of Seattle Pacific University, where she studied applied human biology. “And I think the majority of the public has that assumption.” …
Abigail Anderson, a physiology student who was also in the class, was shocked. “Wait, is this true?” she remembered thinking. On reading the study, Ms. Anderson was struck by the author’s references to the scholarly reluctance to associate women with hunting materials. “Immediately, I was like, is this bias or is this accurate?” she said.
After all, the “Father of American Anthropology,” Franz Boas, was only born 165 years ago, and he never recruited any women anthropologists, well, except for Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and quite a few others.
Ms. Chilczuk and Ms. Anderson joined Cara Wall-Scheffler, a biological anthropologist who taught their course, and two other researchers—also women—to figure this out. Now, the team has published a literature review in PLoS One concluding that in most modern foraging societies, women have played a dominant role in bringing home the game.
Did they really mean “dominant”? Or is this due to the NYT reporter and/or editor having a poor vocabulary, when they meant something much less than “dominant,” such as “surprisingly not insignificant?” Or maybe they really did mean “dominant,” because they are stupid?
Tales of female hunters existed, Dr. Wall-Scheffler noted, “but compiling and showing that it’s not an anecdote, it’s a pattern, was what we were trying to do with this paper.” …
Dr. Wall-Scheffler and her students found evidence of women hunting in 50 of the 63 societies they studied; moreover, 87 percent of that behavior was deliberate.
Who hasn’t accidentally hunted?
In cultures where hunting was the most important means of finding food, women took an active role 100 percent of the time. …
No, they didn’t. I know very little about anthropology, but I can safely say that “women took an active role 100 percent of the time” is an overstatement. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if men didn’t take an active role in hunting 100% of the time.
For decades, I’ve been reading that in some hunter-gatherer tribes, women do some of the hunting.
But “some” isn’t necessarily, or usually, “a dominant role.”
Thinking quantitatively doesn’t come naturally for a lot of people, who’d prefer to think in qualitative yes-no terms.
Even simple arithmetic can be tricky for people to think through. Consider a hypothetical rather egalitarian culture in which 1/3rd as many women as men are hunters. So that’s pretty equal, right? Yes, from one perspective. But what if women hunters only hunt 1/3rd as often as men hunters? Now we are down to women making up only 1/9th of the number of hunts. And what if per hunt, women hunters bring home only 1/3rd as much meat? Now we are down to women being only 1/27 as important in bringing home the bacon.
Now consider a society in which each proportion is 1/6th: now we are down to women provisioning 1/216th as much meat.
What if each proportion is 1/12th, such as one in which 92% of men and 8% of women are hunters? Note that 8% of the female population being hunters isn’t a wholly insignificant number. Yet, that multiplies out to 1/1728th.
Intellectuals have a hard time dealing with proportions. They prefer to think in terms of absolutes, but life is a rather relative game.
… The details about female hunting patterns were not easy to uncover, Ms. Chilczuk said; the reports often prioritized discussions of the male hunters. But the findings, when they emerged, made a certain sense, she added: If hunting was the chief means of survival, why would only men participate? The researchers wondered what other stories have been overlooked by ethnographers. “There might be so many things that we’re missing out on,” Ms. Chilczuk said. …
The dawning appreciation for women as hunters comes as anthropology, like many scientific fields, has begun to diversify its ranks, leading scholars to re-examine how evidence is interpreted.
Uh, anthropology hasn’t “begun” to diversify its ranks. Many of the best-known anthropologists have been women for almost an entire century. The most famous American anthropologist of the mid-20th century was Margaret Mead, whose celebrated Coming of Age in Samoa was published in 1928.
“Who you are shapes the questions you ask,” Dr. Wall-Scheffler said. “It shapes the expectations of what you see.”
She added that, like anyone, anthropologists can be tempted by a simple narrative. “Complexity is relegated to anecdote,” she said. “We just have to be willing to dig a little deeper.”
For Ms. Anderson, it was like taking the blinders off. “I don’t know when I got this ingrained in me as a child,” she said of the male-hunter myth. “And then it spiraled, like a snowball effect: What else do I think is true that isn’t?”
Probably, quite a bit.
Katrina Miller is a science reporting fellow for The Times. She recently earned her Ph.D. in particle physics from the University of Chicago. More about Katrina Miller
Oh, dear.
Vivek Venkataraman of the U. of Calgary debunked it at length here. In Aporia Magazine, somebody calling himself Alexander wrote:
In the study, researchers identified 391 modern hunting-foraging populations. They found data on hunting in 63 of those.
Venkataraman found that the Seattle Pacific U. authors were highly generous in counting 50 of 63 cultures as featuring significant female hunting.
Perhaps the most important misleading methodological decision is to ignore the 328 of 391 cultures for which anthropologists didn’t bother recording tables of the sex of hunters. In all likelihood, in the vast majority virtually all hunters were men, which is why they didn’t bother making up a table.
After all, women hunters are interesting. It’s widely assumed by the Woke that scholars ignore the interesting out of a desire to be boring and not find publishable material, but it’s more likely that academics overemphasize unusual cases.
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