Feeling an avalanche of change in the relations between and social roles for genders and sexes, some people are reaching for solid ground in the prehistoric past — when men were supposedly hunters and breadwinners while women stayed home and cared for their kids. Such a view of humanity’s past went out the window in the anthropology community in the 1960s, though in the popular mind, myths associated with our hunter-gatherer past persist.
A batch of new attempts by scientists to skewer what they call the “man the hunter myth” arrived this year. One paper argued that women were as capable as men at hunting, another that the archaeological record showed signs that women hunted, and a third demonstrated that women hunted to some extent in almost 80% of the contemporary hunter-gatherer societies in the study.
