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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:
Men are innately more aggressive than women? It certainly looks that way, at least if you count only the kind of aggression expressed with bullets and fists. Men brawl more; they are the principal occupants of penitentiaries and paramilitary groups worldwide--which is what you might expect if they had evolved as the designated spear chuckers of the species. But in laboratory studies of aggression, women display little difference from men in their willingness, for example, to administer an electric shock to another person. Cross-cultural studies of toddlers show that both sexes are equally physically aggressive until age three, which is about the age when girls get their first Barbies and boys get their plastic light sabers. In cultures in which physical aggressiveness was encouraged in girls, they sometimes grew up to be professional warriors. Just two years ago, archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball of the Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads, in Berkeley, Calif., reported on her discovery of what appear, almost beyond doubt, to be women warriors from 2,500 years ago. Grave sites she excavated near the Kazakhstan border in Russia contained female skeletons buried with daggers, arrowheads, swords and whetstones for sharpening metal. One of the women has a bent arrowhead lodged in her body cavity, suggesting that she was killed in battle.
Why focus on physical aggression anyway? As Angier notes, and any survivor of the sixth-grade clique wars knows firsthand, the female arsenal includes more insults and snubs than sticks and stones. "Most aggressive" is not a title that anyone other than Mike Tyson aspires to, but there's no point in awarding it prematurely to the sex that, through no fault of its own, may simply have the more poorly developed verbal skills.