If you are old enough, you might remember cartoon images of a caveman, carrying an outsized club over one shoulder while dragging a cavewoman by her long hair. The woman was passive.
During the heyday of this sort of humor, an expression, “battle of the sexes,” was often used. The Free Dictionary tells us that this idea was due to old-fashioned ideas of gender.
The cartoons and the expression that men and women were always at odds could have grown out of the idea that early humans ate a meat-based diet. Even archaeologists and anthropologists formerly credited the advance of homo sapiens to the hunter, who was always male. Archaeological finds of caches of butchered bones supported this hunch and suggested that prehistoric females interested in healthy infants might have sought a hunter as a mate.
During the 1950s, archaeologist George Christopher Williams, while exploring senescence, noticed human women survive long after menopause and decided that maybe menopause freed aging females to help with the rearing of their daughters’ children. That is an outline of the grandmother hypothesis, which I first heard of as utilizing the experience and wisdom of the elderly women in order to sustain the survival skills and the myths of the tribe.
Williams inspired others, including Kirsten Hawkes, who formulated the current version of the grandmother hypothesis, based upon field work among contemporary hunter-gathers. Hawkes and her colleagues saw that a successful hunt is largely due to chance, and that much of the meat was consumed at the kill site by the hunters, leaving little to be brought home.
The team also saw foraging grandmothers succeed in filling the bellies of the toddlers in tow as effectively as they filled the baskets brought to their daughters, who were now carrying the next generation. Foraging provides more reliable sustenance than hunting.
Those pregnant women and their toddlers, with their berry-stained faces, illustrate one of the strategies for the survival of not just the clan, but, possibly the clade. Humans could have nursed their infants — who at birth were more helpless than their ape cousins — as ape mothers do for several years. Because changes at the genetic level made it possible for human women to survive menopause, babies could be entrusted to aged, familiar and loving allomothers, which meant the toddling child could be weaned, and, mom and dad could produce another child. The more children who survived to adulthood, the more likely the survival of the group and the species would be.
Over the past month, I have listened to lectures and read academic papers about this hypothesis. It is obvious that men took a lead role in proclaiming their hunting skill. Within the hunting fraternity, perhaps, the man with the best eye and the strongest throwing arm became the leader. Taking this one step further, it is possible that political systems and cultures grew from this notion of males taking the lead.
Many questions were raised for me while reading about the grandmother hypothesis. The first was about Henry VIII’s quest for a male heir. Of course, he would not have known about his earliest ancestors and his ego needs and his political necessity were not those of earlier humans. However, royalty unknowingly adopted, then amplified, the child rearing practices of our ancestors.
Queens handed their babies to milk nurses to ready their bodies for the next pregnancy. Rather than grandmothers becoming allomothers, ladies of the court assumed responsibilities for the royal infants. My question is, did the practices of royalty help to make breast-feeding something to be hidden, to be ashamed of?
In the division of prehistoric labor, as men seemed not to participate in child care nor were the products of hunting sufficient to make meat the principal source of food, the role left to men was to protect their women and children. Was protection the root of machismo and the reason why a wife was once called, “the little woman”? More seriously, did the fellowship of the hunters and the dominance of the most successful lead to hero-worship and fraternal organizations and competitive sports?
If we return to the 1950s, we find headlines about men dying before their wives, generally due to heart attacks. But was the weakness of the male hearts due to more than a weak heart valves, smoking, a high in fat diet, alcohol and a sedentary lifestyle? Was it written in ancestral DNA? Assuredly, according to both medical and genetic research.
More to the point, was the division of labor itself founded by our ancient ancestors?
Nourishing infants with milk produced by the mother’s body defines our class. We are mammals. To some extent, the human infant, born live and premature, is dependent upon the mother. But, is that dependency enough to declare women the weaker sex? I say no. Both men and women have weaknesses. Both are unable to do certain tasks. I vote for the strengths and weaknesses balancing out, both within the individual and between the sexes.
Susan Wozniak can be reached at columnists@gazettenet.com.