Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (19 page)

Our first field trip lasted twenty months; when we left, people
were continuing to argue about whether or not that young couple should divorce, and there had been many other conflicts in between. During our two field trips, we became aware of four women who made suicide attempts. Two ate arrow poison, very unlikely to be a successful method; one wandered off into the bush for two or three days, until people searched for her and found her; and the fourth rubbed arrow poison into a cut, which would have killed her if the poison had not been old. Like some suicide attempts in all cultures, these may have been calls for help. Each of the four was unhappy about the way her husband was treating her. Yet any attempt has some chance of success.

As for homicide, Richard Lee documented twenty-two cases over several decades in this small population. Men were the only perpetrators and most of the victims, and the cause was usually alleged adultery or a vendetta, although sometimes it was a perceived unfairness in meat distribution. How common was adultery? Genetic studies have estimated that 2 or 3 percent of people did not have the biological fathers they thought they had. This is low for hunter-gatherers, but it is not insignificant; few husbands would like to hear that one in fifty times their wives had sex it was not with them. And Marjorie’s intimate interviews of women showed that in emotional terms, their preoccupation with extramarital affairs could be absorbing and romantic. Not all women had lovers, but some did.

Nisa, the woman who became the focus of the book, had a life with men that was not representative but also was not extreme. She was around fifty years old in 1970 and had grown up in a very traditional setting. She was married by her parents’ arrangement twice before menarche but was allowed to reject these men. She also refused an offer to become a man’s second wife, although she loved him. A third arranged marriage was successful, and she learned to love this husband, Tashay, although both went on to have extramarital lovers. He tried to take a second wife, but Nisa drove the woman away.

During her first pregnancy, Tashay became very jealous and questioned the paternity, but he accepted the baby. She had four children with him, two of whom did not survive early childhood. Her son died of an illness later in childhood. One daughter, who survived to be married, died in the course of a physical fight with her husband, who purportedly had not intended to hurt her seriously. Despite infidelities on both sides, Nisa was grief-stricken when Tashay died. She went on to have other relationships, including a bad marriage to a Bantu man who mistreated her and left her but became possessive (as sometimes happens in all cultures) when she tried to move on. She finally remarried and stayed married into late life, though she continued to have occasional lovers. She said, “A woman has to want her husband and her lover equally.”

Nisa had more infidelities, more violence, and more tragedy in her life than other women, but she also had autonomy and agency. She said, “Women are strong; women are important. Zhun/twa men say that women are the chiefs, the rich ones, the wise ones. Because women possess something very important, something that enables men to live: their genitals.” In Marjorie’s view, “!Kung women themselves refer to, and do not seem to reject, male dominance. The fact that this bias exists is important and should not be minimized—but it should also not be exaggerated. . . . All in all, !Kung women maintain a status that is higher than that in many agricultural and industrial societies around the world. They exercise a striking degree of autonomy and of influence over their own and their children’s lives.”

When I returned with our grown children in 2005, Nisa was alive and welcoming but, in her mid-eighties, poorly sighted and very frail. Yet in a group, she took charge of the conversation, pointing her finger in the air and commanding attention with the fluency of her words and the modulated rise and fall of her still compelling voice. Some of those listening had been children in my original study. One woman, ten years old in 1970, was now a grandmother
and had a baby of her own younger than her granddaughter. Her mother and her mother’s mother were alive and well—five generations of women in one family.

On the eve of our departure, there was a feast. I bought one of their own cows for them to slaughter, attracting visitors from other villages. A trance dance began, but none of the men went into a trance. Two women did—one the lovely grandmother we had known as a charming ten-year-old. She danced and entered a trance with her child on her hip, collapsed as hands reached out to protect her and the baby, and was revived into a state in which she could lay her hands on people sitting around the fire, tremble, shriek, and by doing this, according to !Kung tradition, heal. I was happy to be ministered to; I felt strangely privileged and, in a way, protected.

Four decades ago, early in what would become feminist anthropology, Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere published a book called
Woman, Culture, and Society.
In it they said that male dominance is a cultural universal. This seemed a disappointing way to begin a new era, but as they knew and documented, there are differences in just how dominant males may be. It was clear then and remains clear now that hunter-gatherers on average have less gender asymmetry in power than do other kinds of societies. !Kung men, we have seen, try to throw their weight around, figuratively and literally, but women have sound resources of resistance and evasion, including fighting back, rejecting husbands for themselves or their daughters, rebuffing co-wives, giving or withholding sex, having extramarital liaisons, speaking up in group discussions, forming alliances among themselves through talk, cooperation, and gift exchange, and in general taking advantage of the fact that they supply a large proportion of the food.

Except for the last point, which is variable, all nomadic hunter-gatherer cultures share these areas of relative strength for women. Diets vary from one-fourth to three-fourths animal flesh (including fish), with the
average being around half and half, and the contributions of the men and women vary accordingly. The lowest plant food levels are found in mounted hunters and in Arctic groups like the Eskimo, which are not possible models for most of the history of our species—no ancient hunters had horses, and we did not penetrate the coldest climates until late in human evolution. But there are also high levels of animal flesh (including meat, fowl, reptiles and amphibians, and fish) in the diets of some warm-climate hunter-gatherers. Yet even where male hunting predominates, small group size, low population density, mutual dependence, and a blending of private and public life restrain male dominance.

The division of labor has never been complete. !Kung men, at a minimum, gathered plant foods for themselves while out hunting, especially if they were not successful on the hunt. Women routinely killed small prey like lizards and tortoises and reported on game or tracks they had seen. Hunter-gatherers living in coastal habitats have extensive shellfish collection by women and children. Among the Martu of Australia, women occasionally kill large game such as kangaroos. Forest hunter-gatherers across central Africa drive prey into large nets, a group effort that routinely includes women. And among the Agta of the highland Philippines, women routinely hunt successfully and bring in about a third of the meat. This example is unique, but in most hunter-gatherer cultures a few women have been avid and excellent hunters. Some groups had a formal status for men who assumed female roles, not just in gathering but in dress, marriage, and other ways.

So despite the fairly reliable division of labor by sex, boundaries have been somewhat fluid and often crossed. This appears to have been the case for a very long time. In a fascinating study called “What’s a Mother to Do?” archaeologists Steven Kuhn and Mary Stiner summarized evidence that Neanderthals and the modern humans who replaced them differed in their dietary options, suggesting that Neanderthals were more dependent on large game.
Since Neanderthal females and children (like males) had very robust skeletons, women and children probably joined in the hunt, perhaps driving game toward the hunters. More recent discoveries, however (for example by Amanda Henry, Alison Brooks, and Dolores Piperno), have shown that Neanderthals ground, cooked, and ate barley and other grains; they may even have eaten quite a bit of barley porridge. Women would almost certainly have been involved in this processing, and they may also have made clothing.

Our species, however, shows an even broader dietary range, including more small game, fish, shellfish, and plant foods. This would have led to a division of labor by sex resembling that in recent hunter-gatherers, with women concentrating on plant foods and shellfish. Kuhn and Stiner trace this back at least fifty thousand years, and growing evidence in Africa reaching many thousands of years before that suggests a deep origin of both the dietary breadth and the division of labor.

Hunting of large game is not incompatible with women’s roles as mothers; the Agta are proof of that. But their case is unusual. Hunter-gatherers have more involved fathers than other cultures, and the most caring fathers on record are the Aka hunter-gatherers of the central African forest. Even they, however, spend much less time with infants and children than mothers do—aside from mothers’ already massive biological investment in pregnancy, birth, and milk. So the need to reproduce meant that women would not commonly hunt large game. Their work produced more reliable returns and helped guarantee their influence and autonomy. Men’s more erratic contribution of large kills no doubt generated excitement—as we saw, Kristen Hawkes proposed that its main purpose was showing off—but it did not lead to strong male dominance in any recent hunter-gatherer setting.

The same can’t be said of the phases of history that followed. In some parts of the world, at the culmination of the hunting-gathering era, populations became denser, settlements grew more elaborate, and men
began to assemble in all-male groups. These groups differed markedly from the nomadic, “classical” foragers that had dominated the planet for almost a hundred millennia. Public and private life could for the first time be separated, and women could be edged into purely domestic roles. Men vied with one another ever more intensely for power, because power now really mattered. The world was no longer egalitarian, either among men or between men and women. Most dangerously, it was no longer possible to resolve conflicts by moving away from your enemies. You had too much at stake in what you and your friends and kin had already built. And not long after that, when you were planting and harvesting, you owned the land in a new way, and you were not going to walk away from it. In fact, you were going to defend it with your life.

Chapter 6

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Cultivating Dominance

S
o violence was not uncommon in hunter-gatherers, but as long as population densities were low and people sparsely distributed and nomadic across landscapes, it did not often lead to war and certainly not to an ideology of constant preparation for war. Men could try to exclude women from influential decisions and assert dominance over them through brute strength, but there were narrow limits to how far this could go. As we will see, this began to change in the last few thousand years of the hunting-and-gathering age, as settlements grew and intensified, but a watershed was coming.

Archaeologist Patricia Lambert, reviewing all the voluminous relevant evidence, showed that the native peoples of North America had violent fights when they were simple hunters and gatherers, and perhaps some group conflict, but warfare emerged with much greater intensity as populations settled down and grew, and especially after agriculture began to exhaust the land’s resources. This began in some regions and spilled over to others through conquest; ultimately, the ripples spread throughout regions like the Eastern Woodlands and the Pacific Northwest. The same pattern repeated
itself in every part of the continent, with the most war-torn period being the last millennium
before
Europeans arrived.

Brian Ferguson, another archaeologist, showed in 2013 that a very similar process had occurred much earlier in most parts of Europe and the northern half of the Near East: the transition to agriculture, population growth, pressure on resources, organized violence, and war. It is easy to see how a great intensification of warfare provides opportunities for men to dominate women. But the transformation associated with agriculture was not just an intensification of war; it was a complete change in the human way of life.

We can see an instance of that momentous shift in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in Iran, where archaeologists have unearthed one of the earliest transitions from hunting and gathering to agriculture. In a 2013 study, Simone Riehl and her colleagues showed that by 11,700 years ago, the wild ancestors of barley, wheat, lentils, and grass peas were being gathered in abundance. Large, stable groups began to become farmers. They went on hunting wild boar, gazelles, cows, goats, hares, birds, lizards, and turtles and also feasted on fish, mussels, and freshwater crabs. But the abundance of wild grains they ate increased, so they built bins to store seeds and used grindstones to make flour. Turning seeds into bread or meal was almost certainly women’s work, as it has always been in grain-
growing
cultures throughout the world. This was when the women weren’t collecting mussels and crabs or gathering wild plant foods. And all of it was while they were nursing babies and tending kids—that is, growing the future.

Around 9,800 years ago, their grains lost the ability to propagate their own seeds—a trustworthy signature of farming, since this means people had to have done the propagating. At this basic level of agriculture, women may have been in charge of sowing, tending, and harvesting gardens; it could easily have been women who invented cultivation. They or their men also tamed the goats they had once hunted; it's easy to imagine a woman adopting a kid whose
mother had been killed. For two thousand years, there had been gradually improving blades and other stone and bone tools, as well as stone vessels, and there were clay figurines of animals and people that could have been art, toys, or gods.