Feminist academics in their quest not for women's rights, but to cancel and eliminate men as objects of cultural and political significance, have set out to challenge anything which might give some dignity to men. The idea of men as the hunters, in primitive societies, and pre-history, is a myth proclaimed one team of feminists in a paper "The Myth of Man the Hunter," which was celebrated in the now ultra-woke Scientific American, really "unscientific unamerican," "The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong" was the headline in Scientific American. This "sexist" myth was allegedly debunked by supposed evidence of 63 hunter-gather societies, where 50 (or 79%) "had documentation of women hunting."
Naturally this astonishing claim was fact checked, and errors, inconsistencies and biases were found. When these errors etc. were corrected, the proportion of societies where women hunted was only 5 percent. This makes sense, because unlike the modern play pen of society, in primitive and pre-modern societies, there was no contraception pill, and women got pregnant, and had babies, which they cared for. It made no sense to send out the majority of the female population to engage in hunting, which is relatively more dangerous than gathering berries.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/11/05/is-man-the-hunter-a-myth/
"Man the Hunter is the name of 1968 book which highlighted the central role of hunting in human evolution. Although 'Man' here refers to 'mankind' rather than 'males', the title embodies the common assumption that hunting is a largely male activity. Indeed, the authors, Richard Lee and Irven DeVore, argued that the sexual division of labour in hunter-gatherer societies is such that men specialise in hunting and women specialise in gathering.
And this makes sense. We know men are both faster and stronger than women – attributes that would obviously give them an advantage in clubbing seals, arrowing wildebeests and spearing woolly mammoths.
Fast forward to 2023. Five female scientists published a paper titled 'The Myth of Man the Hunter', which sought to challenge "long-held perceptions of sex-specific gender roles". Abigail Andersen and colleagues gathered data on 63 hunter-gather societies, and reported that 50 (or 79%) "had documentation of women hunting". This led them to conclude that "females play an instrumental role in hunting".
As you can probably guess, the paper received glowing coverage in the media (for heroically debunking a 'sexist' myth). "The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong" ran the headline in Scientific American. "Worldwide survey kills the myth of 'Man the Hunter'" stated Science magazine.
The only problem? Andersen and colleagues' study appears to be flawed. According to a newly published commentary, "claims that foraging societies lack or have weak gendered divisions of labor are contradicted by empirical evidence".
Vivek Venkataraman and colleagues scrutinised the methods used by Andersen and colleagues, and found evidence of both coding errors and sample selection bias.
To begin with, Andersen and colleagues claimed they gathered all their data from a particular ethnographic database called D-Place. However, Venkataraman and colleagues discovered that 35% of the societies in their sample did not in fact come from D-Place. These 35% were highly likely to be coded as ones in which women hunt. What's more, Venkataraman and colleagues identified 18 societies in D-Place that were omitted from Andersen and colleagues' sample, and none of these showed evidence of female hunters.
When Venkataraman and colleagues examined how individual societies had been coded, they unearthed various inconsistencies with the ethnographic material on which the coding was supposedly based. For example, Andersen and colleagues coded the !Kung as a society in which women hunt. Yet one ethnographic account of this society stated that "women are totally excluded from hunting".
Of the 50 societies Andersen and colleagues coded as having female hunters, Venkataraman and colleagues determined that women "rarely" or "never" hunted in 16. They also found that Andersen and colleagues overstated the proportion of societies in which women hunt big game by a factor of two. By their count, the proportion of societies in the sample where women "frequently" hunt big game is only 5%."