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Man the Hunter
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<h2 id="critiques">Critiques</h2> <p class="note">Further information: <a href="/facts/Women_in_prehistory/Gd0yfu4G">Women in prehistory</a></p> <p>In the decades after its publication, <i>Man the Hunter</i> was critiqued by both sociocultural anthropologists and archaeologists. While conference attendees had stressed their studies of hunters and gatherers as a link to a Pleistocene past, historical particularists like Edwin Wilmsen and James Denbow critiqued this approach in what became known as the <a href="/facts/Kalahari_Debate/0lB9gQLH">Kalahari Debate</a>.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:2" href="#fn:2"><sup>2</sup></a> Another response from feminists like Jane F. Collier and <a href="/facts/Michelle_Rosaldo/5lcWKP3U">Michelle Rosaldo</a> critiqued the gendered assumptions in <i>Man the Hunter</i>, highlighting how masculine-coded activities like hunting were considered central to human development, whereas so-called women's work was devalued and considered evolutionarily unimportant.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:3" href="#fn:3"><sup>3</sup></a> Finally, a strain of critiques focused on the ways that hunter-gatherer societies have been considered 'passive' landscape managers. Using archaeological evidence to show how landscape management strategies like fire shaped the landscape at a large scale, archaeologists like Kent Lightfoot, Rob Cuthrell, Chuck Striplen, and Mark Hylkema have shown how indigenous hunter-gatherers changed landscape ecology.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:4" href="#fn:4"><sup>4</sup></a> </p><p>According to Cara Ocobock and Sarah Lacy, contrary to the <i>Man the Hunter</i> theory "79 percent of the 63 foraging societies with clear descriptions of their hunting strategies feature women hunters" and that women participated in hunting irrespective of their childbearing status.<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:5" href="#fn:5"><sup>5</sup></a> However, an attempted verification of this study found "that multiple methodological failures all bias their results in the same direction...their analysis does not contradict the wide body of empirical evidence for gendered divisions of labor in foraging societies".<a class="footnote-ref" id="fnref:6" href="#fn:6"><sup>6</sup></a> </p> <h2 id="literature">Literature</h2> <ul><li><a href="/facts/Richard_Borshay_Lee/fGlRdk16">Lee, R. B.</a>, <a href="/facts/Irven_DeVore/jJoUJc1E">DeVore, I.</a> (eds) (1968): <i>Man the Hunter. The First Intensive Survey of a Single, Crucial Stage of Human Development—Man's Once Universal Hunting Way of Life</i>, Chicago, Aldine</li> <li><a href="/facts/Thomas_Hylland_Eriksen/8Rs1qFug">Eriksen, T. H.</a>, Nielsen, F.S. (2001): <i>A History of Anthropology</i>, Pluto Press</li> <li>Wilmsen, Edwin N. 1989. <i>Land Filled with Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari.</i> Chicago: University of Chicago Press.</li> <li>Dahlberg, Frances, ed. 1981. <i>Woman the Gatherer</i>. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.</li> <li>Collier, Jane F., and Michelle Z. Rosaldo. 1981. “Politics and Gender in Simple Societies.” In Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender, edited by Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead, 275–329. New York: Cambridge University Press.</li> <li>Lightfoot, Kent G., Rob Q. Cuthrell, Chuck J. Striplen, and Mark G. Hylkema. 2013. “Rethinking the Study of Landscape Management Practices among Hunter-Gatherers in North America.” American Antiquity 78, no. 2: 285–301.</li></ul> <h2 id="references">References</h2> <ol> <li id="fn:1"><p>Eriksen, Nielsen (2001), p. 82 <a href="/wiki/Thomas_Hylland_Eriksen" target="_blank">/wiki/Thomas_Hylland_Eriksen</a> <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:2"><p>Wilmsen 1989 <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:3"><p>Jane F. Collier, Michelle Rosaldo (1981) <a href="/w/index.php?title=Jane_F._Collier&action=edit&redlink=1" target="_blank">/w/index.php?title=Jane_F._Collier&action=edit&redlink=1</a> <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:4"><p>Lightfoot et al (2013) <a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:5"><p>Lacy, Cara Ocobock, Sarah (2023-11-01). "The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong". Scientific American. Retrieved 2024-02-23.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-theory-that-men-evolved-to-hunt-and-women-evolved-to-gather-is-wrong1/" target="_blank">https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-theory-that-men-evolved-to-hunt-and-women-evolved-to-gather-is-wrong1/</a> <a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> <li id="fn:6"><p>Venkataraman, et al. (May 7, 2024). "Female foragers sometimes hunt, yet gendered divisions of labor are real: a comment on Anderson et al. (2023) The Myth of Man the Hunter". Evolution and Human Behavior. 45 (4). Bibcode:2024EHumB..4506586V. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2024.04.014. <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513824000497" target="_blank">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513824000497</a> <a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-back-ref">↩</a></p></li> </ol>