The Changing Role of Women in Models of Human Evolution

Abstract

Imagine three anthropologists: A primatologist observes a female chimpanzee fashioning several crude tools from grass stems, which she will use to fish termites from an un­ derground nest over many hours, in the presence of her sometimes intrigued, sometimes impatient offspring. An ethnographer lives with a group of human foragers at one of their campsites on the edge of a waterhole, recording in detail the daily patterns of adult women and men as they go about their lives, obtaining and preparing food, caring for their children, enjoying their leisure, interacting with their neighbors. An archaeologist and a team of bone hunters fan out across an escarpment slowly descending the years, squatting every now and then to peer and scratch carefully at the surface; they walk and look and listen for the call that will signal a find. Probably the primatologist and ethnographer would quite properly deny that the objective of their research was the reconstruction of the lives of our earliest human ancestors. The latter is there first and foremost to understand the lives of these contemporary human beings before their way of living disappears entirely, and the former works to explicate the animal species for itself, another life form in danger of disappearing before we can understand it. Nonetheless, the information obtained from all these studies will be gathered up, if not by the original researchers, then by others, and woven into a scientific story of the origins and evolution of early human behavior. For we have a powerful urge to know our origins-scientists and public alike-allied