One of the givens of evolutionary theory has been that men went out hunting and women stayed at home, took care of the children and picked berries off trees to go with the meat their menfolk would triumphantly return home with.
You know, the whole hunter-gatherer thing.
Well, according to anthropologist Dr Cara Ocobock, this theory has a fatal flaw: it's wrong.
Cara spoke to Ray D’Arcy about new research that she’s co-authored which claims that there is no evidence that there was division of labour on the basis of gender among our ancestors:
"These groups of people lived in such small groups no one could specialise. Everyone had to be doing everything. And so we still don’t really know – and we might not for a long time, if ever – what the actual rate of women hunting versus men hunting was, but I can tell you, from the archaeological evidence that we don’t see any differences in use patterns between the bones or in injury rates between females and males."
Why has it been commonly thought for decades that men were the hunters and women were the gatherers? It seems that it’s largely down to a book called Man the Hunter by Richard Lee and Irven DeVore, which was published in 1968, but Cara told Ray that she was not willing to lay the blame at their door:
"Part of it was things kind of got blown out of proportion too. It’s one of these things that you have an idea and people grab onto, you know, one kernel of it and run. Because even in their edited volume, it is mentioned that in some of these groups the women hunt, but it was never the focus. The focus was always on males hunting and how evolution was acting upon the males and females were these passive beneficiaries being dragged along the way."
This idea that males are the driving force or evolution goes way beyond Lee and DeVore’s book though. Cara says that it goes all the way back to Darwin, even though it doesn’t actually appear to be the case at all:
"One would even think that the individuals who are birthing those babies and the next generation, evolution might be acting a bit more strongly on them because they’re kind of at a choke point in the success of the species."
All the research was being driven by men at the time, so of course, when you’re the man writing the stories, you want to focus on, well, men. But one of the important parts of the whole story is the practice of persistence hunting. Persistence hunting? Cara explains:
"Persistence hunting is this idea – and we’ve seen it among modern hunter-gatherers as well – that, basically, to hunt large game you kind of chase after them until they become exhausted and very easy to kill at that point. And so you’re running very long distances in order to wear that animal down."
So, it’s not a case of one hunter being stronger than the other, necessarily, it’s all about endurance. And one the key elements humans need for superior endurance – and you may be surprised to hear this – oestrogen.
According to Cara, oestrogen is "the unsung hero of all of life". Although we can’t date how old a hormone is, we can date how old a receptor is – that's the part that picks up the message from the hormone. And guess what? The oestrogen receptor is twice as old as the testosterone receptor.
"Oestrogen is critically important just for normal physiological function in kind of everything, whether you’re male, female or whatever, human or otherwise."
In terms of endurance activity, oestrogen is vital for burning fat in particular and that makes for better fuel for your long runs when you’re chasing an antelope across the plains:
"You get more calories – so more bang for your buck – from a gram of fat than you do from a gram of carbohydrates, more than twice as much energy. It also takes a longer time to metabolise, which means people burning fat are able to go greater distances, they’re able to go longer without hitting that wall, without getting fatigued."
Another surprising – at least to me – revelation from Dr. Ocobock is the fact that meat played a much smaller part in our ancestors’ diets than popular lifestyle fads would suggest. This has a lot to do with the fact that hunting has a low success rate, according to Cara, typically only between 3-5%.
"Our ancestors ate what they could eat. There was no such thing as a single paleo diet. So, for those of you listening wanting to follow a paleo diet – that doesn’t exist. People ate what they had available to them in their environment and that differed from environment to environment."
There’s something new and mind-blowing in almost every part of Cara's discussion with Ray and you can hear the full conversation by clicking above.
