Stone age myths about gender roles have been hard to dispel

livemint.com:

People today continue to be fascinated by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. We’ve long looked to them for clues about ourselves. But it’s always been difficult for us to interpret their lives cleanly, unsullied by our own assumptions.

Consider a study that came out recently, trumpeted in Science as felling the “man the hunter myth"—the idea that stone-age men hunted big game while women peacefully gathered edible berries and roots. This study, published in Plos One, was a re-analysis of past data collected on 391 contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. The authors found 63 of those contained data on gender and hunting.

Of those 63, 50 indicated that women hunted. Over the last several decades, “man the hunter" has been debunked many times. It’s not clear it was ever something scientists had proposed or just one of those ideas kicking around our culture that scientists believed along with everyone else.

The popular understanding has two parts. One is that men and not women hunted, and the second is that hunting was the most important job in our prehistoric past. The assumption was that everyone depended on hunters for food, and that big-game hunting was what drove the evolution of our species as brainy tool-makers.

Most debunking efforts focused on the gender part. In contemporary foraging societies, women sometimes hunt alongside men. In prehistoric societies, women were sometimes buried with hunting knives.

As for the question of whether hunting was really the top job for most of human prehistory, latest evidence shows those assumptions are probably wrong. If people back then were anything like they are today, surely the bloody and violent nature of hunting wouldn’t be for everyone. Wouldn’t some women and men have