Don’t you think it is a wild assumption with very little evidence to suggest that only men hunted?
I used to think archeologists were cool, but over time it has become readily apparent that something is only considered evidence until it doesn’t fit preconceived notions based on sexist attitudes (and racist for that matter) in most cases. On the plus side, there has been a lot of progress in the last couple of decades to at least admit that there is bias, which is a step needed to be able to better understand how much bias influences discoveries.
I think it’s a very difficult task to try and interpret findings without being influenced by contemporary stereotypes. As you mention, there have been voices in the past decades of archeologists, anthropologists, etc who do a dissent job in trying to just examine the findings.
Others -unfortunately- try to fit the findings into a preconceived narrative. To my understanding “man the hunter hypothesis” is one of those, because as it is mentioned in the article:
the idea that all hunters were male has been bolstered by studies of the few present-day groups of hunter gatherers such as the Hadza of Tanzania and San of southern Africa.
And I would argue that it was a very limited research based on a few (not the few) of those hunter-gatherer groups that are/were considered contemporary.
I used to think archeologists were cool, but over time it has become readily apparent that something is only considered evidence until it doesn’t fit preconceived notions based on sexist attitudes (and racist for that matter) in most cases. On the plus side, there has been a lot of progress in the last couple of decades to at least admit that there is bias, which is a step needed to be able to better understand how much bias influences discoveries.
I think it’s a very difficult task to try and interpret findings without being influenced by contemporary stereotypes. As you mention, there have been voices in the past decades of archeologists, anthropologists, etc who do a dissent job in trying to just examine the findings.
Others -unfortunately- try to fit the findings into a preconceived narrative. To my understanding “man the hunter hypothesis” is one of those, because as it is mentioned in the article:
And I would argue that it was a very limited research based on a few (not the few) of those hunter-gatherer groups that are/were considered contemporary.