Man the hunter. It's a phrase burned into the cultural consciousness of our time. It ushers in conceptions of virility and male prowess. And, for some men, it provides an ancient justification for the sacred, central duty of manhood: to provide.
It's well-known in anthropology that males were the designated 'hunters' of the tribe. Women helped out to some degree with small game and insects, securing their role in hunting, but it was the men who felled the mightiest beasts. As Richard Leakey writes,
“The loss of the child to the hungry jaws of a carnivorous cat would be a serious blow to a woman's reproductive career. To put the child at risk would therefore not be biologically sensible, either for the woman or her mate... for these and other reasons, women only rarely hunt.”So hunting was indeed the work of men. Many early anthropological ideas and popular ideas today point to this particular gender role leading to power in the social group, since food won hunting was a form of resources.
In academia there lives a valid rebuttal to this idea, that the 'man the hunter' concept is simply fueling patriarchal ideals by highlighting the male penchant for resource acquisition in the ancestral environment. This rebuttal is summed up in The Gathering Hypothesis, which states that women played an important role in resource acquisition too, because women gathered. Proponents of this hypothesis posit that 'man the hunter' glorifies male contributions while belittling female ones (1).
Food was certainly a resource, but was hunting a road to power? We know that early human tribal formations were surprisingly egalitarian among its members, both among men (2) and between men and women (3). Whether hunting back then was glorified business, we can only guess.
Of course, the feminist critique is highlighting the modern patriarchal view that honors male contribution by glorifying the gender role of hunting.
To unravel this assertion, consider the lion, where females do the hunting -- and nearly everything else -- leaving the males with little responsibility. To boot, after females lions have made a kill, sometimes the male takes the carcass, rarely sharing with the lionesses that did all the hard work. To many, this is clearly unfair and even demeaning that the females must take on an unequal burden of responsibility.
The lion represents a phenomenon in nature that can only truly be understood by evolution and the ethological pressures that govern the sexual division of labor. Lion prides usually have but one male, who protects the pride from other males. This leads to females hunting together cooperatively in order to feed their cubs. Physically, the females are more capable hunters. Together, these facts dictate how and why females are the ones who do the dangerous work of bringing down prey.
In this objective context, is there really anything apparently glorious about hunting? Do we see the females or the males as the ones with power in this scenario?
It appears that males in the lion kingdom have retained a lazy kingship, one enabled by domination and monopoly. Their physical dominance allows them to take from the females. And with only one male around, the females have little choice but to concede to his rule. In this environment, the situational pressures dictate the females as the unlucky ones who are left to do the hard work of providing food for their pride in addition to birthing and rearing young.
In this light, hunting, as the anthro-feminists rightly point out, may not simply be a glorified acquisition of resources. Nor is it necessarily one that leads to power. Instead, is it possible that hunting can be seen as the lowly work performed by the less fortunate gender -- a natural consequence of the species' evolved traits, environment, and social formation?
Human social formations are far different from those of lions. In humans, it is the males who hunt, despite their physical dominance. There are equal numbers of males and females within a tribe, providing a different dynamic for the sexual division of labor. If women primarily gather food and take care of the children, and men go off on long hunting journeys, then which gender seems to have the favorable position in this social formation? Can a favorable position in the social formation predict that gender's power?
Men evolved to hunt for various reasons. Physically, they are more capable hunters. There are social rewards for providing food. Hunting is a useful arena where men compete for status and simultaneously cooperate for survival. Like lions, humans were required to hunt in order to survive.
Men today find joy and meaning in the hunt, but this does not discount the objective role of hunting in a natural social formation. Evolution teaches us that mechanisms must have arisen that supported males in hunting, such as the evolved traits of pride, status seeking, or a thirst for adventure, even glory. These traits, which are the basis for the meaning and joy that men today find in the hunt, only confirm the evolutionary perspective.
It's an open question: are hunting males the lowly workhorses, or the glorious breadwinners we revere? Can objectivity exist in a realm so ancient, sacred, and primal?
SOURCES
1. Buss, David. Evolutionary Psychology: the New Science of the Mind. Pearson, 2008
2. Boehm, Christopher. Hierarchy in the Forest: the Evolution of Egalitarinism. Harvard, 2001.
3. Gowdy, John. Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: a reader on Hunter-Gatherer Economics and the Environment. Island Press, 1997.
