Women and Men in

Prehistory
Have women and men equally
contributed to human evolution?

Dr. Venera R. Khalikova

GENA 2192 Week 3
Agenda

• Warm-up exercise
• Lecture on prehistory
• Group activity

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 Think – pair – share

What is biological determinism?

How is it used to explain gender differences?

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“Prehistory”

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cultural anthropology: contemporary
socities

historians: history, past societies

archaeology: prehistory, early socieites

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Pre-1970s archaeology

• Most archaeologists and

anthropologists are men
• Focused on the activities of men:
• Men as the primary movers of
evolution
• Tool making, warfare, hunting
• Fertility cults, Paleolithic Venuses

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This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC
Pre-1970s archaeology

• Focus on social organization

and the sexual division of
labor (not on similarities)
• Reliance on ethnographic
analogy

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This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND
MAN THE
HUNTER

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND

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 Main ideas
Human society originated in the cooperative activities
of men, who were hunters
• Hunting is risky: women are needed to
reproduction, so only men, excludes women
• Increased neoteny (human infants are less
developed at birth): women stay at “homebase”,
they are dependent on men who bring food = the
origin of nuclear family and monogamy
• Hunting is arduous: requires physical strength,
bigger size, so only men
• Hunting, especially big-game hunting, is
unpredictable: requires coordination, ability to plan,
and cooperation, hence language = turning point in
human evolution

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• gathering (done by women) is of secondary
importance
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“In a very real sense our intellect,
interests, emotions, and basic social
life—all are evolutionary products of
the success of hunting adaptation”

Washburn and …
Lancaster (1968,
Chapter The Evolution of
Hunting) “the biology, psychology, and
customs that separate us from the
apes—all these we owe to the
hunters of time past”
Sally Slocum (1975)
Woman The Gatherer: Male Bias
in Anthropology
• To bring the perspectives of women
archaeologists
• Contemporary assumptions hindered our
understanding of hominid evolution,
especially based on small amount of data
• Male bias in:
• research questions
• Language
• interpretation of data

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Main ideas
• Can’t focus too much on hunting and aggression
• Can’t derive human culture from killing
• Hunting doesn’t deserve the primary place in
human adaptation and evolution
• Women contribute the bulk of diet
• Need to focus on tools for gathering (even if not
preserved)

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Main ideas
• childcare and gathering also require a lot of cooperative
and communicative skills, so women equally were the
drivers of evolution
• The mother-infant bond:
• As neoteny lengthens, mothers have to provide for
their kids longer = strong relationships and the origin
of food sharing
• Women are not dependent on food brought by men
• No nuclear family, no monogamy until much later in
the evolution
• Hunting, especially small-game hunting, is done by all:
men, women and children

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 •Critique of the “erasure of women” and the
androcentric bias
• the role of individual women and women
Feminist as a group in the past
• women as agents and subjects
Archaeology: •Critique of the application of modern-day gender
mid-late ideologies onto the societies of the past
• Women’s participation in the creation of
1970s wealth
• Tool-making as an activity of both men and
women
• Women-warriors, women in politics
•Critique of the discipline of archaeology itself, its
funding and the place of female archaeologists

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 Is theory important?

• Yes, to offer new interpretations of

the existing data
E.g. Fertility figurines or learning
models, or something else?
• Yes, to find new data, to make the
invisible visible, or to make the
implicit salient.
E.g. the role of fiber in human
prehistory
From archaeology of women to
archaeology of gender
Initially the category of “gender” was not addressed explicitly or critically

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 What questions are being asked today?
• How did our ancestors understand variation in sexual anatomy
What was the number of genders in past societies?
Ex. “Two spirits” in Native Americans? Or sex assignment practices?
• When did sex become gendered?
The La Tolita-
Tumaco figurines

• Ecuador, 2500 years

ago
• Figurines seem to blend
gender characteristics
from breasts to
loincloths into a
possible transgender or
nonbinary figure

Museo Nacional del Ecuador, Quito (MUNA). Photograph by Fernanda Ugalde. From
https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/archaeology-biases/
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 What questions are being asked today?
• What was the status of "men" and "women" in the past?
• What were the gender roles? How did they change cross time?
How did the gender division of labor change over time?
Ex.: Inca before and after colonization
• What about sexuality, desires, norms?
Ex.: ancient Greeks and homosexuality
• What were the gendered expectations about family and children?
Methods and techniques
• Contextual analysis: distribution of tools, spatial analysis,
settlement structures
• Cautious ethnographic comparison and historical record
• Skeleton structure evaluation
• Markers on the bones (e.g., markers from bow and arrow on
women’s arms as indication of regular hunting)
• DNA testing
• Dental analysis
• Bone chemistry: diet, diseases; migration
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Difficulties in
methods

• Lack of data
• Expensive, esp. DNA and carbon
dating analysis
• Determining anatomical sex of fossil
hominids (early humans and their
ancestors), based on modern
anatomical difference, is inaccurate
• Bias from modern gendered
assumptions, especially in contextual
analysis

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This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA-NC
Red Lady of Paviland
• 33,000 BP
• South Wales, Britain
• seashell necklaces
and jewelry
• red ochre

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Amesbury
Archer

• Bronze age (2300 BC),

Britain
• Arrowheads
• Wrist guards (braces or
bracelets?)
• Gold objects, including
earrings and a pair of gold
hair ornaments
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Women the warriors

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 Intersectionality

• How did gender intersect with

race, age, and class?
28 • How did class and ethnicity shape
the experiences of women and
men in the past?
• Ex. diet
 Recap

• Anthropology and archaeology of gender: gender-inclusive interpretations of the

present and of the past
• Challenging our values and expectations when interpreting data
• Even sex is cultural
• Not only using new methods, but asking new questions
• Nothing is static: gender roles and gender ideas are changing with time

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