The Real Truth About The Female Body

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PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE MCNALLY--LIFE

STRENGTH -- Men's bodies are bigger and more powerful, but women like Jackie Joyner-Kersee, pictured here, are closing the gap in athletic achievement. The top women stars can run, swim and skate faster than any man of a few decades ago

Beginning in the '70s, women began to elbow their way into the field and develop serious alternatives to the old, male-centered theory of human evolution. It shouldn't matter, of course, what sex the scientist is, but women had their own reasons for being suspicious of the dominant paradigm. The first revisionist blow came in the mid-'70s, when anthropologists Adrienne Zihlman and Nancy Tanner pointed out that among surviving "hunting" peoples, most of the community's calories--up to 70%--come from plant food patiently gathered by women, not meat heroically captured by men. The evidence for Stone Age consumption of plant foods has mounted since then. In 1994 paleobotanist Sarah Mason concluded that a variety of plant material discovered at the Paleolithic site of Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic was in fact edible roots and seeds. At the very least, it seems, the Paleolithic dinner was potluck, and it was probably the women who provided most of the starches, salad and raspberry-mousse desserts. The mother-of-us-all was beginning to look a little peppier and more self-reliant.

Not that even the most efficient gatherer gal doesn't need a little help now and then, especially when she's lactating. Nursing a baby may look pretty effortless, but it can burn up 500 calories a day--the equivalent of running about five miles. Where was the help coming from? Was the female completely dependent on her male significant other, as the prevailing theory has always implied? An alternative possibility lay buried in the mystery of menopause. Nature is no friend of the infertile, and in most primates, the end of childbearing coincides with the end of life, so it was always hard to see why human females get to live for years, even decades, after their ovaries go into retirement. Hence the "grandma hypothesis": maybe the evolutionary "purpose" of the postmenopausal woman was to keep her grandchildren provided with berries and tubers and nuts, especially while Mom was preoccupied with a new baby. If Grandma were still bearing and nursing her own babies, she'd be too busy to baby-sit, so natural selection may have selected for a prolonged healthy and mature, but infertile, stage of the female life cycle.

To test this possibility, anthropologist Kristen Hawkes made quite a nuisance of herself among the hunting-gathering Hadza people of Tanzania, charting the hour-by-hour activities of 90 individuals, male and female, and weighing the children at regular intervals. The results, published in late 1997 and reported by Angier in detail, established that children did better if Grandma was on the case--and, if not her, then a great-aunt or similar grandma figure. This doesn't prove the grandma hypothesis for all times and all peoples, but it does strongly suggest that in the Stone Age family, Dad-the-hunter was not the only provider. The occasional antelope haunch might be a tasty treat, but as Hawkes and her co-workers conclude about the Hadza, "it is women's foraging, not men's hunting, that differentially affects their own families' nutritional welfare." If the grandma hypothesis holds up, we may have to conclude that the male-female pair bond was not quite so central to human survival as the evolutionary psychologists assume. The British anthropologist Chris Knight--who is, incidentally, male--suggests that alliances among females may have been more important in shaping the political economy of Paleolithic peoples.

The thinking that led to man-the-hunter was largely inferential: if you bring the women along on the hunt, the children will have to come too, and all that squalling and chattering would surely scare off the game. This inference was based on a particular style of hunting, familiar from Hemingway novels and common to the New England woods in October, in which a small band of men trek off into the wild and patiently stalk their prey, a deer or two at a time. But there is another way to get the job done known as "communal hunting," in which the entire group--women, men and children--drive the animals over a cliff or into a net or cul-de-sac. The Blackfoot and other Indians hunted bison this way before they acquired the horse--hence all those "buffalo jumps" in the Canadian and American West--and net hunting is the most productive hunting method employed by the Mbuti people of the Congo today. When driving animals into a place where they can be slaughtered, noise is a positive help, whether it's the clashing of men's spears or the squeals of massed toddlers.