The Real Truth About The Female Body

  • PHOTOGRAPH FOR TIME BY ROBERT SEBREE

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    PHOTOGRAPH FOR TIME BY HOWARD SCHATZ
    SEXUAL CHOICE -- Men, it has been assumed, are the more promiscuous sex, while women seek a stable guy to help raise the family. But in fact, say some experts, females may have a natural incentive to play the field

    But there was only indirect evidence of communal hunting in Paleolithic times until archaeologist Olga Soffer came across the kind of clue that, a gender traditionalist might say, it took a womanly eye to notice. While sifting through clay fragments from the Paleolithic site of Pavlov in what is now the Czech Republic, she found a series of parallel lines impressed on some of the clay surfaces--evidence of woven fibers from about 25,000 years ago. Intrigued to find signs of weaving from this early date, Soffer and her colleagues examined 8,400 more clay fragments from the same and nearby sites, eventually coming across the traces of a likely tool of the communal hunt--a mesh net. The entire theory of man-the-hunter had been based on "durable media," Soffer explains, meaning items like the sharpened stones that can serve as spearheads, rather than softer, biodegradable goods like baskets, fabrics and nets. But in archaeologically well-preserved prehistoric sites, such as those found underwater or in dry caves, the soft goods predominate over the durable by a ratio of about 20 to 1. If the hard stuff was the work of men, then "we've been missing the children, the women, the old people," she asserts. Thanks to Soffer's sharp eye, Paleolithic net hunting is no longer invisible, and in net hunting, Soffer says, "everybody participates."

    Furthermore, as Mary Zeiss Stange points out in her 1997 book Woman the Hunter, there's no reason to rule out women's hunting with hard-edged weapons too, perhaps even of their own making. Among the Tiwi Aborigines of Australia, hunting is considered women's work, and until the introduction of steel implements, it was done with handmade stone axes the women fashioned for themselves. By putting women's work back into the record, the new female evolutionary scientists may have helped rewrite the biography of the human race. At least we should prepare to welcome our bold and resourceful new ancestor, Xena the hunter princess.

    The news of Soffer's discovery, which is too recent to have found its way into Angier's or Hales' book, will disconcert many feminists as well as sociobiologists. After all, the gratifying thing about man-the-hunter was that he helped locate all the violence and related mischief on the men's side of the campfire: no blood on our hands! But there are other reasons to doubt the eternal equation of masculinity with aggression and violence, femininity with gentleness and a taste for green salads. In ancient Greece and Sumer the deities of the hunt, Artemis and Ninhursag, were female--extremely female, if you will, since these were also the goddesses who presided over childbirth. Even more striking is the association of ancient goddesses with nature's original hunters, the predatory animals. In Anatolia, the predator goddess was Kybele, known as the commander of lions. In Egypt she was Sekhmet, portrayed as a lioness whose "mane smoked with fire [and whose] countenance glowed like the sun." Images of goddesses tell us nothing about the role of actual women, but they do suggest that about 3,000 years ago, at the dawn of human civilization, the idea of the fearsome huntress, the woman predator, generated no snickers among the pious.

    Re-Evaluating the Roles
    No one, so far, is suggesting a new view of human evolution centered on, say, woman-the-hunter-gatherer and man-the-idler-and-camp-follower. Human evolution is a 2 million-year-long story at least, enacted in a multiplicity of settings--deserts and forests, coastlines and vast continental plains, cool zones and tropical ones--each requiring different survival strategies. The theoretical Achilles' heel of contemporary evolutionary psychology is that it posits an "ancestral environment" in which humans evolved and developed their repertoire of hardwired responses. But there never was "an" ancestral environment. Ice ages came and went; landmasses fused and separated; whole species of edible animals expired. Our inherited tool kit of psychological responses has had to be at least as varied and complex as the situations there were to respond to.

    If we accept that adaptability, meaning a knack for problem solving, is the hallmark of our species, then it gets a lot harder to make dogmatic assertions about human nature in either masculine or feminine form. And if we accept that females played a varied and active part in the evolutionary struggle for survival, much of the popular wisdom about the psychology of the sexes begins to look a little dated and lame. Cases in point:

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