3 ms·

Men provide most of the calories in most societies. Most hunter-gatherer societies get more than 50% of their calories from meat -- it's not supplemental protei

Men provide most of the calories in most societies. Most hunter-gatherer societies get more than 50% of their calories from meat -- it's not supplemental protein. https://escholarship.org/content/qt4wc9g8g4/qt4wc9g8g4.pdf https://escholarship.org/content/qt4wc9g8g4/qt4wc9g8g4.pdf Cross-culturally, men provide about 60% of the calories. This makes sense when we consider how humans are different from most other primates. We have relatively long term pair bonding, which is unusual in great apes -- but very common in species, like many bird species, where males make a significant contribution to feeding the offspring. The idea that men's contribution to food stuffs and the general welfare is a sort of supplement or entertainment, while "women do most of the work", is an early modern feminist myth, a product of a time when a lot of comparative anthropology had been considered but very little had actually been done. It's not dissimilar to how we discuss the wage gap, where the most basic number -- of hours worked -- tells a very different, more gritty story than the one characteristically told by feminists.

ggm 5y ago
ok, I'll take the correction. but, 60/40 is still a huge distance from a historical perspective which weights mens activity in the record a lot more toward 80/20 or better. To me, the laphams article is a re-balance which probably understates, more than overstates the contribution of womens literacy in the scribe records. Thats the point here, not the hunter-gatherer story.
Retric 5y ago
That’s cultures not percentage of population. It’s very dependent on location, with far northern cultures being significantly more dependent on meat due to long winters. However population density isn’t uniform across cultures, most prehistoric people lived in warm climates. Also, that link provides zero mention of the breakdown between calories gathered by men, women, or children. Hunting and fishing was far from an exclusively adult male activity in prehistoric cultures. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd0310 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd0310
- solidsnack9000 5y ago
  An older discussion of the more general observation about caloric production was published in 2000: https://www.unm.edu/~hkaplan/KaplanHillLancasterHurtado_2000_LHEvolution.pdf https://www.unm.edu/~hkaplan/KaplanHillLancasterHurtado_2000... The cultures surveyed are in Africa, Australia, India... The article you link is an analysis of a burial mound in the Andean highlands and surveys a few other excavations in the Americas. It concludes "The sample is sufficient to warrant the conclusion that female participation in early big-game hunting was likely nontrivial—greater than the trace levels of participation observed among ethnographic hunter-gatherers and contemporary societies.". This leaves several questions open -- their survey is of the Americas, and we do have to acknowledge that widespread female participation in hunting is very unusual to find in hunter-gatherer societies today. Which one represents the ancestral state? At present, it seems that in most societies, males contribute most of the calories.
  - Retric 5y ago
    That study is looking at a very different population than primitive hunter gathering. Food acquisition data have been collected since the early 1980s among the Northern Ache of eastern Paraguay, shortly after peaceful contact. All ethnographic evidence suggests that the Northern Ache were hunter-gatherers without horticulture before contact in the 1970s (Hill & Hurtado, 1996; Clastres, 1998). Since then the Ache fre- quently trek into the forest with family groups and return to a permanent reser- vation settlement after several days to a month. The Ache have exclusive use rights to the Mbaracayu Reserve where they are allowed to hunt with hands, machetes, and bows and arrows but not using firearms or dogs. In 1998, the Ache at the Arroyo Bandera settlement, where most of the data in this study were collected, spent 14% of all person days (range 0–50% for individuals) on trek (McMillan, 2001). During the pre-contact period (i.e., prior to the mid 1970s), hunters spent almost every healthy day of their lives hunting, with the exception of bad weather days. On the reservation today, school and then horticul- tural activities and wage labor compete with hunting for a young man’s time. Thus, by the year 2000, most young men had very little hunting experience. In May 2000, a selected group of 11 men, ages 14–37, who were relatively inexperienced at hunting, agreed to participate in a hunting experi- ment. https://www.unm.edu/~robwal/achehunt.pdf https://www.unm.edu/~robwal/achehunt.pdf

ggm 5y ago

ok, I'll take the correction. but, 60/40 is still a huge distance from a historical perspective which weights mens activity in the record a lot more toward 80/20 or better. To me, the laphams article is a re-balance which probably understates, more than overstates the contribution of womens literacy in the scribe records. Thats the point here, not the hunter-gatherer story.

Retric 5y ago

That’s cultures not percentage of population. It’s very dependent on location, with far northern cultures being significantly more dependent on meat due to long winters. However population density isn’t uniform across cultures, most prehistoric people lived in warm climates. Also, that link provides zero mention of the breakdown between calories gathered by men, women, or children. Hunting and fishing was far from an exclusively adult male activity in prehistoric cultures. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd0310 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd0310

solidsnack9000 5y ago
An older discussion of the more general observation about caloric production was published in 2000: https://www.unm.edu/~hkaplan/KaplanHillLancasterHurtado_2000_LHEvolution.pdf https://www.unm.edu/~hkaplan/KaplanHillLancasterHurtado_2000... The cultures surveyed are in Africa, Australia, India... The article you link is an analysis of a burial mound in the Andean highlands and surveys a few other excavations in the Americas. It concludes "The sample is sufficient to warrant the conclusion that female participation in early big-game hunting was likely nontrivial—greater than the trace levels of participation observed among ethnographic hunter-gatherers and contemporary societies.". This leaves several questions open -- their survey is of the Americas, and we do have to acknowledge that widespread female participation in hunting is very unusual to find in hunter-gatherer societies today. Which one represents the ancestral state? At present, it seems that in most societies, males contribute most of the calories.
- Retric 5y ago
  That study is looking at a very different population than primitive hunter gathering. Food acquisition data have been collected since the early 1980s among the Northern Ache of eastern Paraguay, shortly after peaceful contact. All ethnographic evidence suggests that the Northern Ache were hunter-gatherers without horticulture before contact in the 1970s (Hill & Hurtado, 1996; Clastres, 1998). Since then the Ache fre- quently trek into the forest with family groups and return to a permanent reser- vation settlement after several days to a month. The Ache have exclusive use rights to the Mbaracayu Reserve where they are allowed to hunt with hands, machetes, and bows and arrows but not using firearms or dogs. In 1998, the Ache at the Arroyo Bandera settlement, where most of the data in this study were collected, spent 14% of all person days (range 0–50% for individuals) on trek (McMillan, 2001). During the pre-contact period (i.e., prior to the mid 1970s), hunters spent almost every healthy day of their lives hunting, with the exception of bad weather days. On the reservation today, school and then horticul- tural activities and wage labor compete with hunting for a young man’s time. Thus, by the year 2000, most young men had very little hunting experience. In May 2000, a selected group of 11 men, ages 14–37, who were relatively inexperienced at hunting, agreed to participate in a hunting experi- ment. https://www.unm.edu/~robwal/achehunt.pdf https://www.unm.edu/~robwal/achehunt.pdf