New Study Confirms ‘Man the Hunter’ Is Just One Big Patriarchal Lie
Yet another myth bites the dust, and its implications could be massive
For a long time, we’ve assumed that the life of our hunter-gatherer ancestors looked a lot like The Flinstones.
Men hunted and brought the bacon home, while women gathered and cared for their children.
This standard narrative of prehistory — also known as ‘Man the Hunter’ — then implies that patriarchy and gender roles are essentially as old as humanity itself. And it’s still sometimes used today to justify why women and men can never be truly equal and why we should stick to the supposedly ‘natural’ roles that even early human society reveals.
Well, ‘Man the Hunter’ theory is certainly a convenient one for some people — which explains why it’s been largely taken for granted — but it’s nothing more than a mere myth born of many bold assumptions and not careful empirical research.
And a new study compiling records from around the world and spanning the past century confirms what many scientists have been suspecting all along: the vision of early men as the exclusive hunters is simply wrong.
Men weren’t the only ones who hunted.
