I heard from an Aboriginal tour guide that in native populations everyone just did the role they wanted / were good at, and it was only from the introduction of Christian missionaries that such a division of labour was encouraged.
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Buffalo bird women (native American) considered it boys work to hunt ,and girls to tend the fields.
Interesting. My source is obviously anecdotal and from another country. Is it verified that Buffalo tribes always thought this vs. being influenced by European colonisers?
(I don't want to fall into the trap of thinking older civilizations didn't have the same gender hang-ups as modern ones.)
It seems likely that every human culture has had some concept of gender and norms related to it. Those roles can be permissive or strictly enforced. They can match the expectations our culture gives us, or they can be surprising to us. Beside average size, and childbearing, there is unlimited flexibility in how a culture might define the roles and how they might enforce them.
While it is a tempting thought, it seems unlikely that we, here and now, have somehow managed to create the absolute worst human culture in the millions of years we have been at this. I agree that we should be watchful of that pitfall. Western self loathing, is in itself another way of assuming that we must be the main characters in the human story.
Many gender norms come from the fact that if your nonmodern society is to survive, all women need to be pregnant or nursing a baby from their late teens until they are 40. (Or more likely until she dies in childbirth). Pregnant and nursing a baby put some restrictions on what a woman can do, which in turn will influence culture .
It is hard to know. 'Buffalo bird women' was the name of a specific person who grew up just before Europeans arrived (but smallpox arrived before she was born, and probabchanged culture). If you google you can find interviews with her as an old Lady. She gives a picture of how things changed over her life ,but not so much before.
Unfortunately north America in general doesn't have easy access to materials that survive for centuries and so there is limited archeological evidence to work off. (Not zero, but we know little about culture because they couldn't leave much evidence of it behind).
It's important to question the beliefs we're raised with, especially when seeking truth as scientists tend to do. I'm glad to see research like this, and especially the bit at the end of the abstract about examining prior conclusions that were influenced by patriarchal cultural bias. There's something about how hard this notion of, "men hunt, women gather and take care of children, in all human societies past and present" is to shake that has me reminded of something:
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
That heuristic is generally taken to be accurate among the scientifically literate, Carl Sagan coined it even, but it is deeply flawed. Cultural notions of ordinary define what is seen as extraordinary. An idea that is normalized in our society needs much less evidence to convince people of it, while one that goes against normality needs much more to even begin to gain traction. The concept is flawed because 'ordinary' is socially defined, so while it can be used to discredit obviously wrong ideas like the existence of ghosts, it can also be used to discredit obviously wrong ideas like the CIA using LSD to (try to) control peoples' minds. Pretty extraordinary claim, but it did happen. Maybe you see the issue with this heuristic, while the idea expressed is intuitive, it hides a sneaky cultural bias.
I think something similar goes on with ideas like the one this study refutes. It seems so clear in our patriarchal society that men and women are different, suited to different roles as we've been told so many times growing up, that the opposite concept is extraordinary. So you get scientists coming up with truly extraordinary explanations of why women are buried with hunting tools to maintain their conception of 'normal', and anyone who wants to refute it needs to go above-and-beyond only to still be met with skepticism.
If persistence hunting was really happening, female bodies might actually be better suited for the task.
Our ancestors probably weren't eating horses in cool climates though. At least not very often! :-)