The Women’s History of the World

In earliest times, women’s gathering served not only to keep the tribe alive – it helped to propel the race forward in its faltering passage towards civilization. For successful gathering demanded and developed skills of discrimination, evaluation and memory, and a range of seeds, nut-shells and grasses discovered at primitive sites in Africa indicate that careful and knowledgeable selection, rather than random gleaning, dictated the choice.7 This work also provided the impetus for the first human experiments with technology. Anthropologists’ fixation on man the hunter has designated the first tools as weapons of the hunt.8 But since hunting was a much later development, earlier still would have been the bones, stones or lengths of wood used as aids to gathering for scratching up roots and tubers, or for pulverizing woody vegetation for ease of chewing. All these were women’s tools, and the discovery of digging sticks with fire-hardened points at primitive sites indicates the problem-solving creativity of these female dawn foragers, who had worked out that putting pointed sticks into a low fire to dry and harden would provide them with far more efficient tools for the work they had to do.9

Unlike the worked flint heads of axes, spears and arrows, however, very few of the earlier tools have survived to tell the tale of women’s ingenuity and resourcefulness. Sticks also lacked the grisly glamour of the killing-tools in the eyes of archaeologists, and had no part to play in the unfolding drama of Man the Hunter. Archaeology is likewise silent on the subject of another female invention, the early woman gatherer’s ‘swag bag’, the container she must have devised to carry back to the camp all she had found, foraged, caught or dug up in the course of her day’s hunting.10

For the volume of food needed, and the range of food sources available, make it impossible that the women gatherers could have carried all the provender in their hands or inside their clothing. Their haul would have included not merely grasses, leaves, berries and roots, but also vital protein in the form of lizards, ants, slugs, snails, frogs and grubs. Eggs and fish were rare treats but not unknown, and for shore-dwellers the sea presented a rich and bottomless food store. Whatever presented itself, from dead locust to decomposing snake, the woman gatherer could not afford to pass it up; nor, with the burden of sustaining life for all on her shoulders, could she return to the home site until her bag was full, when she faced the day’s final challenge, that of converting these intimidating raw materials into something resembling a palatable meal.

Woman’s work of gathering would inevitably take on a wider and more urgent dimension when she had infants to feed as well as herself. Her first task as a mother would have been to adapt her gathering bag into a sling to carry her baby, since she had to devise some means of taking it with her when she went out to forage. As most early women did not live beyond their twenties, there would be no pool of older, post-menopausal women to look after the next generation of infants once their own were off their hands. Hominid babies were heavy, and got heavier as brains, and therefore skulls, became larger. Similarly, evolving bodies of mothers presented less and less hair for their infants to cling to. Whether she slung her baby diagonally across her breasts, or on her back in the less common papoose style of the native mothers of the New World, sling her she did. How? If only archaeology could tell us that.

Mothering the young had other implications too, equally crucial both to early women and to the future of the race. Two factors made this work far more demanding than it had been to their primate grandmothers. First, human young take far longer to grow and become self-supporting than baby apes – they consequently need far more care, over an extended period of time, and cannot simply be swatted off the nipple and pointed at the nearest banana. Then again, the mothering of human babies is not just a matter of physical care. Children have to be initiated into a far more complex system of social and intellectual activity than any animal has to deal with, and in the vast majority of all human societies this responsibility for infants has been women’s primary work and theirs alone. How well the first mothers succeeded may be seen from the world history of the success of their descendants.

The prime centrality of this work of mothering in the story of evolution has yet to be acknowledged. A main plank of the importance of Man the Hunter in the history of the human race has always been the undisputed claim that co-operative hunting among males called for more skill in communication and social organization, and hence provided the evolutionary spur to more complex brain development, even the origins of human society. The counter-argument is briskly set out by Sally Slocum:

The need to organize for feeding after weaning, learning to handle the more complex socio-emotional bonds that were developing, the new skills and cultural inventions surrounding more extensive gathering – all would demand larger brains. Too much attention has been given to skills required by hunting, and too little to the skills required for gathering and the raising of dependent young [italics inserted].11

Similarly women’s invention of food-sharing as part of the extended care of their children must have been at least as important a step towards group co-operation and social organization as the work of man the hunter/leader running his band. Women’s work as mothers of human infants who need a long growing space for postnatal development also involves them in numerous other aspects of maternal care (sheltering, comforting, diverting), in play, and in social activity with other mothers and other young. All these are decisively shown by modern psychology to enhance what we call IQ and must have been of critical value in assisting our branching away from the great apes in mental and conceptual ability. Female parents are not the only ones who can comfort, stimulate or play. But all these activities are very far removed from the supposed role of hunting, killing, primitive man.12

Nor does the significance of the mother-child bond end there. In the myth of Man the Hunter, he invents the family. By impregnating his mate and stashing her away in the cave to mind the fire, he creates the basic human social unit which he then maintains by his hunting/killing. The American journalist Robert Ardrey, chief exponent of the hunting hypothesis, naively pictures the sexual division of the average primeval working day: ‘the males to their hunting range, the females to their home-site (we think of it today as the office and the home).’13 But in contradiction to this Big Daddy scenario, a mass of evidence shows that the earliest families consisted of females and their children, since all tribal hunting societies were centred on and organized through the mother. The young males either left or were driven out, while the females stayed close to their mothers and the original home-site, attaching their males to them. In the woman-centred family, males were casual and peripheral, while both nucleus and any networks developing from it remained female. These arrangements continue to operate in a number of still-existing Stone Age tribes worldwide, the so-called ‘living fossils’. As anthropologist W. I. Thomas stresses, ‘Children therefore were the women’s and remained members of her group. The germ of social organization was always the woman and her children and her children’s children.’14

In fact the human debt to the first women goes on and on, the more we unravel the biological evidence. It is to early woman that we owe the fact that most of us are right-handed, for instance. As Nigel Calder explains, ‘handedness, the typical right-handedness of modern humans, is a female phenomenon’.15 From time immemorial woman has made a custom of carrying her baby on the left side of the body, where it can be comforted by the beating of her heart. This frees the right hand for action, and would have been the spur towards the evolution of predominant right-handedness in later human beings. Support for the ‘femaleness of handedness’, Calder shows, comes in the fact that to this day infant girls develop handedness, like speech, very much more quickly and decisively than boys.

One last biological legacy of woman to man deserves more gratitude than it seems to have received. At primate level, the male penis is an unimpressive organ. So far from terrorizing any female, the average King Kong can only provoke sympathy for his meagre endowment in relation to this vast bulk. Man, however, developed something disproportionately large in this line, and can truly afford to feel himself lord of creation in the penile particular. And he owes it to woman. Quite simply, when femina aspiring to be erecta hoisted herself on to her hind legs and walked, the angle of the vagina swung forward and down, and the vagina itself moved deeper into the body. The male penis then echoed the vagina’s steady progress, following the same evolutionary principle as the giraffe’s neck: it grew in order to get to something it could not otherwise reach.16 This need also dictated the uniquely human experimentation with frontal sex. The future of the species demanded that man gained entry somehow. But the ease with which most couples move between frontal and rear-entry positions during intercourse is a constant reminder of the impact of woman’s evolutionary biology.

The biology of woman in fact holds the key to the story of the human race. The triumph of evolution occurred in the female body, in one critical development that secured the future of the species. This was the biological shift from primate oestrus, when the female comes on heat, to full human menstruation. Although generally unsung, indeed unmentioned, female monthly menstruation was the evolutionary adaptation that preserved the human species from extinction and ensured its survival and success.

For female oestrus in the higher primates is a highly inefficient mechanism. The great female primates, chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans, come on heat rarely, and produce one infant every five or six years. This puts the whole species dangerously at risk of extinction, and the great apes today survive only in small numbers and in the most favourable environments. With twelve chances of conceiving in every year, instead of one every five years, the human female has a reproductive capacity sixty times higher than that of her primate sisters. Menstruation, not hunting, was the great evolutionary leap forward. It was through a female adaptation, not a male one, that ‘man’ throve, multiplied and conquered the globe.

And female menstruation was not merely a physical phenomenon like eating or defecation. Recent commentators have argued that women’s so-called curse operated to cure not only man’s shortage of offspring, but also his primeval mental darkness. In their pioneering work on menstruation, The Wise Wound, Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrave stress the connection made in primitive societies between the lunar and menstrual cycles, suggesting that woman first awakened in humankind the capacity to recognize abstracts, to make connections and to think symbolically. For Elise Boulding, these mental functions arise from an earlier stage in which women taught men the principles of number, calendar organization and counting: ‘Every woman had a “body calendar” – her monthly menstrual cycle. She would be the first to notice the relationship between her own body cycle and the lunar cycle.’17 Other female authorities have expressed their amusement at the naïvety of one professor, the celebrated Jacob Bronowski, who on the TV series ‘The Ascent of Man’ solemnly described a prehistoric reindeer bone with thirty-one scratches on it as ‘obviously a record of the lunar month’. Commenting on ‘The Ascent of You Know Who’, Vonda McIntyre demurred: ‘Do tell. A thirty-one-day lunar month? I think it a good deal more likely that the bone was a record of a woman’s menstrual cycle.’18

Objectively this carefully notated silent witness of an irretrievably lost transaction could have been either of these; or both; or neither. But in the routine, unconscious denial of women’s actions, experiences, rhythms, even of their ability to count, the possibility that it could have been a woman’s record of her own intimate personal life was not even considered.

No attention at all, in fact, has been given to the implication for women when light and infrequent oestrus gave way to full menstruation, with bleeding in varying but substantial amounts for one week in every four. What did early woman do? Did she simply squat on a pile of leaves and leak? This is uncomfortably close to the passive female fire-watcher of the Man the Hunter myth – and it is out of the question that the tribal food-gatherers, so vital to survival, could have been out of action for twenty-five per cent of their time. But if the women moved around at all, an unchecked menstrual flow would have resulted in badly chapped and painful inner thighs, especially in colder or windy weather, with the added risk of infection in hot climates. Skin scabbing so caused would hardly have had a chance to heal before the menstrual flow was on again.

A number of indicators point to the solution. In the wild, female monkeys are observed to bunch up pads of leaves to wipe off oestrus spotting. From still-surviving Stone Age cultures it is recorded that the women weave or fashion clothes, slings for their babies, and rough bags to carry what they scavenge or garner. The first women must have devised menstrual slings or belts, with some kind of pad to absorb the heaviest flow. Even today both Maori and Eskimo women contrive pads of a fine soft moss, while Indonesian women make tampon-type balls of a soft vegetable fibre. The Azimba women of Central Africa use the same fibre as pads, which are held in place by an oval sling of soft goatskin fastened to a belt of twisted thong.19 It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the women capable of bringing the infant human race forward into the future could also have found the way to deal efficiently with their own bodies.

But one thing is certain: that any such object, along with other examples of early woman’s technology, would not have survived. Even if it had, would it have been deemed worthy of attention? Wide-ranging consideration at every level from academic investigation to wild surmise has been devoted to all aspects of the life of early man. But no attention in either scholarly or popular work has been given to what anthropologist Donald Johanson, discoverer of the early female hominid ‘Lucy’, dismissed as ‘the oestrus argument’ – that is, the importance of the female’s biological shift to menstruation. As Johanson explained, ‘I don’t believe anything I can’t measure, and I’ve never seen an oestrus fossil.’20 Well, he wouldn’t, would he?

Like Johanson, generations of male commentators have blinded themselves both to the facts and the significant implications of the evolution of early woman. They have insisted instead on rewriting primitive woman as no more than a sexual vehicle for man. ‘They were fatted for marriage, were these Stone Age squaws,’ wrote H. G. Wells. ‘The females were the protected slaves of the old male, the master of all the women’ – a wistful Wellsian fantasy of women on tap.21 For Robert Ardrey, menstruation only evolved as a bonanza for the boys. When a female primate came on heat, burbled Ardrey, she ‘hit the sexual jackpot’, providing ‘fun for all . . . and for herself a maximum of male attention.’22 But oestrus episodes are brief and infrequent – there had to be something more to bring the hunter home from the hill. Accordingly, the first woman learned to convert primate heat into menstruation. This made her sexually available and receptive to man all the year round, as a reward for her share of his kill, in history’s first known example of the time-honoured convention of quim pro quo.

The ‘fun for all’ theory of women’s early sexual evolution also accounts for the physical arrangement of the modern woman’s body. When Man the Hunter began to walk upright, he naturally wanted frontal sex. As Desmond ‘Naked Ape’ Morris so engagingly explains, woman obliged this desire ‘to make sex sexier’ by growing breasts. Realizing that her ‘pair of fleshy hemispherical buttocks’ were now quite passé as a means of attracting men’s attention, she ‘had to do something to make the frontal region more stimulating’.23 Any connection between the increase in woman’s breast size and the increasing size of the human baby at birth must have been purely coincidental.

For in this androcentric account of woman’s evolution, every aspect of her bodily development took place for man’s benefit, not her own. For him she evolved the female orgasm, as a well-earned bonus for the trail-wearied meat-provider at the end of the day. ‘So female invention went on,’ rejoices Ardrey. ‘The male might be tired; female desire would refresh him.’24 In the last of his evolutionary incarnations Man the Hunter now becomes sexual athlete and rutting ape while woman, receptive and responsive for 365 days of the year, awaits his return to display her new-found repertoire of fun tricks with breasts and clitoris, the Pleistocene Playmate of the Month.

In the light of all the evidence, from a wealth of scientific sources, of the centrality of woman, how do we explain the dominance and persistence of the myth of Man the Hunter? Charles Darwin’s concept of the origins of the human race included no such creature – his early man was a social animal working within ‘the corporate body’ of the tribe, without which he would not survive. But later Darwinians like Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer (‘the greatest ass in Christendom’, according to Carlyle) re-interpreted the evolutionary battle for survival as taking place not between genes, but individuals. By 1925 academics were treating this idea as fact, Professor Carveth Read of London University excitedly proposing that early man should be re-named Lycopithecu for his wolvish savagery, a suggestion enthusiastically taken up by another thriller-writer manqué, the South African professor Raymond Dart:

Man’s predecessors differed from living apes in being confirmed killers; carnivorous creatures, that seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of their victims and greedily devouring living, writhing flesh.25

As this suggests, the notion of Man the Hunter unpacks to reveal a number of other elements that feed and flatter male fantasies of violence and destruction. ‘We are Cain’s children,’ droned Ardrey. ‘Man is a predator whose natural instinct is to kill with a weapon.’ Lots of the boys have got off on this one, from Konrad Lorenz to Anthony Storr: ‘The simple fact is that we [who we?] are the cruellest and most ruthless species that has ever walked the earth.’26 Man’s natural aggression found its natural outlet in subordinating those around him: ‘women, boys and girls,’ wrote H. G. Wells, ‘all go in fear of the old male.’ For Ardrey, ‘dominance, a revolutionary social necessity even in the carefree forest life, became a day-to-day survival institution in the lives of the hunters.’27 Man’s ‘hunting pedigree’ can thus be used to justify every act of male aggression from business chicanery to wife-battering and rape, while the ‘right to dominate’ of ‘early boss man’ has proved far too serviceable to his successors to be cast aside.

In fact there is almost no aspect of modern human society, no self-flattering delusion about man’s ‘natural’ instinct to dominate and destroy, that ‘Man the Hunter’ cannot be said to originate and explain. Generations of academics have joined their respectful voices to the paean of praise for him and his pals: ‘our intellects, interests, emotions and basic social life,’ chirped American professors Washburn and Lancaster, ‘all these we owe to the hunters of time past.’ Needless to say, man the hunter did not carry all before him: Donald Johanson has described the hunting hypothesis as the product of Ardrey’s ‘vivid imagination’, and ‘an embarrassment to anthropologists’. In professional circles now the whole theory has been consigned to the wasteland between revision and derision, and psychologist Dr John Nicholson is not the only academic to admit to being ‘still annoyed that I was once taken in by it.’28

But once up and running through the great open spaces of popular belief, man the hunter has proved a hard quarry to bring down, and few seem to have noticed that for millennia he has travelled on through the generations entirely alone. For woman is nowhere in this story. Aside from her burgeoning sexual apparatus, early woman is taken to have missed out completely on the evolutionary bonanza. ‘The evolving male increased in body size, muscular strength and speed, as well as in intelligence, imagination and knowledge,’ pronounced a leading French authority, ‘in all of which the female hardly shared.’29 Countless other historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and biologists worldwide all make the same claim in different ways. Man, it seems, singlehandedly performed all the evolving for the rest of the human race. Meanwhile early woman, idle and dependent, lounged about the home base, the primordial airhead and fully evolved bimbo.

Yet in celebrating the achievement of early woman, and dismissing the farrago of flattering fictions that make up the myth of hunting man, it is essential not to substitute a denial of his real activities for the historic denial of hers. Man’s part in the survival of the species becomes more normal, more natural, and paradoxically more admirable once the essentially co-operative nature of early human life is reasserted.

Hunting was a whole-group activity, not a heroic solo adventure.

As Myra Shackley explains, ‘successful hunting, especially of large animals travelling in herds such as reindeer, horses, mammoth, bison and woolly rhinoceros meant co-operation in bands’.30 To this day, all members of hunting societies, including women and children, join in hunting/beating activities as a matter of course. In their own right, too, women have long been known to hunt smaller, slower or safer animals. An eighteenth-century trader of the Hudson Bay Company in Canada discovered an Eskimo woman who had kept herself alive for seven months on the mid-winter icecap by her own hunting and snaring ‘when there was nothing but desolation for 1000 miles around’.31

Hunting did not mean fighting.

On the contrary, the whole purpose of group organization was to ensure that primitive man did not have to face and do battle with his prey. The first humans, as Shackley shows, worked together to avoid this, ‘driving animals over cliffs to their deaths (as certainly happened at the Upper Paleolithic site of Solutre) or using fire to stampede them into boggy ground (the method used at Torralba and Ambrona)’.32 Cro-Magnon cave paintings from the Dordogne region of France vividly depict a mammoth impaled on stakes in a pit, a practice known worldwide. This method of hunting did not even involve killing, as the animal could be left to die. Most forms of hunting did not in fact involve direct aggression, personal combat or a struggle to the death, but involved preying on slow-moving creatures like turtles, on wounded or sick animals, on females about to give birth or on carcasses killed and abandoned by other, fiercer predators.

Men and women relied on each others’ skills, before, during and after the hunt.

The anthropologist Constable cites the Stone Age Yukaghir of Siberia, whose men formed an advance party to check out the traps for prey, while the women came up behind to take charge of dismembering the carcass and transporting it to the home-site.33 Since carcasses were used for food, clothes, shelter, bone tools and bead ornaments, most of which the women would be producing, they had a vested interest in the dismemberment. As Myra Shackley reminds us: