Gender in History

Studying early human history on any topic means relying primarily on material remains: tools made from hard materials; fossilized bones, teeth, and other body parts; evidence of food preparation, such as fossilized animal bones with cutmarks or charring; holes where corner-posts of houses once stood; rock art and pigments; bits of pottery and metals. To this, scholars add evidence from linguistics, primatology, ethnography, neurology, and other fields, reports from ethnographers and missionaries, and written sources from cultures that existed centuries later in the same area. Physical remains gave the earliest human era its name – the Stone Age. Nineteenth-century scholars divided this further, into the Old Stone Age, or Paleolithic Era (to about 9500 BCE), during which food was gained largely by foraging, followed by the New Stone Age, or Neolithic Era (about 9500 to 3000 BCE), which saw the beginning of plant and animal domestication.

Using material evidence to analyze gender is difficult. By themselves, tools and other objects generally do not reveal who made or used them (though sometimes this can be determined from the location in which they were found), nor do they indicate what they meant to their creators or users. Tools made of hard materials survive far longer than those made from softer materials such as plant fibers, sinew, and leather, or from organic materials that generally decay such as wood, which gives us a skewed picture of early technology and lifeways. Evidence gets rarer and more accidental in its preservation the further back one goes, so interpreting the partial and scattered remains of the early human past involves speculation. This is particularly true for gender and other social and cultural issues.

This chapter reviews the basic outline archaeologists, paleontologists, and other scholars have developed about early human history, although just as in physics or astronomy, new finds spur rethinking. It surveys some generally accepted ideas about gender roles and relationships, as well as key controversies about them, beginning with the evolution of hominids and ending with debates over the origins of patriarchy.

Early Hominids

The eighteenth-century European scientists who invented the system we now use to classify living things placed humans in the animal kingdom, the order of Primates, the family Hominidae, and the genus homo. The other surviving members of the hominid family are the great apes – chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans – and the family includes a number of species that have become extinct.

Between seven and six million years ago some hominids in Africa began to walk upright at least some of the time, and over many millennia the skeletal and muscular structures of some of them evolved to make upright walking easier. About 3.4 million years ago, some of these hominids – who paleontologists place in the genus Australopithecus – began to use naturally occurring objects as tools to deflesh animals, as evidenced by cutmarks and scrapes on fossilized animal bones. This gave them greater choice about when and where they would eat, as they could cut meat into portable portions. At some point, certain groups in East Africa began to make tools as well as to use them; the earliest now identified are 2.6 million years old, but archaeologists suspect that older ones will be found. Hominids struck one stone against another to break off sharp flakes that contemporary archaeologists have found are capable of butchering (though not killing) an elephant, and carried the rocks from one place to another to make these stone tools.

Like making anything, making these stone flakes required intent, skill, and physical capability, the latter provided by a hand that was able to hold the “hammer” stone precisely, with an opposable thumb and delicate muscles that could manipulate objects. Why austrolopiths developed this hand that was very different from the less flexible (but much stronger) hands of other primates is not clear, but what is clear is that they already had it when they began making tools. The human hand did not evolve to use or make tools, but used tools because it had already evolved. It is thus what paleontologists call an “exaptation”: something that evolved randomly or for a reason that we do not yet understand, but was then used for a specific purpose. Other structures within the body that became essential in later developments – such as the larynx, which allowed more complex speech – were also exaptations. (Many social structures and cultural forms were exaptations as well – they developed for reasons that are unknown, or perhaps simply as experiments, but then became traditions; explanations for how they originated were invented later that probably have little to do with how they had actually developed, as we will see with patriarchy shortly.)

Australopiths seem to have eaten anything available, and to have lived in larger groups than just a few closely related individuals. Living in larger groups would have enabled them to avoid predators more effectively – for hominids were prey as well as predators – and may have encouraged more complex communications and behaviors.

Around two million years ago, one of branch of australopiths evolved into different types of hominids that later paleontologists judged to be in the genus homo, including homo ergaster (“working human”). They made multipurpose sharpened stone tools generally called handaxes and then slightly specialized versions of these, which they used for a variety of purposes, including chopping plants as well as meat. This suggests greater intelligence, and the skeletal remains support this, for these early members of the genus homo had a larger brain than did the australopiths. They also had narrow hips, longer legs, and feet that indicate they were fully bipedal, but here there is an irony: the slender upright pelvis made giving birth to a larger-brained infant difficult. Large brains also take more energy to run than other parts of the body, so that large-brained animals have to eat more calories than small-brained ones.

This disjuncture between brain and pelvis had many consequences, including gendered ones. The pelvis puts a limit on how much the brain can expand before birth, which means that among modern humans, much brain expansion occurs after birth; humans are born with brains that are only one-quarter the size they will be at adulthood. Humans thus have a far longer period than do other animals when they are completely dependent on their parents or others around them. Those parents also have a long period during which they must tend an infant or it will die. Judging by brain size, that period was shorter in homo ergaster than in modern homo sapiens, but it may still have been long enough that groups developed multigenerational social structures for the care of infants and children. Perhaps homo ergaster mothers might have even helped one another to give birth, just as they (and the males as well) helped one another gather, hunt, and prepare food, activities that are clearly evident in the fossil record.

Along with a larger brain and narrower pelvis than austrolopiths, homo ergaster also had other physiological features with social implications. Their internal organs were small, including those for digestion. Thus in order to obtain enough energy to survive, they had to eat a diet high in fat and protein, most easily obtainable by eating animals and animal products – insects, reptiles, fish, eggs, and birds along with mammals. Catching some of those animals may have necessitated walking or running significant distances in the hot sun, which is difficult for most mammals because they only lose body heat through panting. Homo ergaster probably had the ability to cool down by sweating, a process made easier by the fact that they were relatively hairless.

This lack of body hair facilitated cooling (and thus hunting), but it also meant that infants could not cling as easily to their mothers as could those of other primate species. How homo ergaster mothers handled this problem is not evident in the fossil record. Perhaps they did not hunt when they had small children or they left their children briefly, as sites indicate that groups sometimes had a home base to which they returned. Perhaps they devised slings made of plant or animal material to help carry their children, though like any tool made from soft materials, these have left no trace.

Another solution to the problem of a short digestive tract is to transfer some digestion outside the body, through cooking. Raw meat is hard to chew and digest, as are many raw plant products; other primates spend many hours a day chewing. Cooking allows an outside source of energy – fire – to do much of this work, breaking down complex carbohydrates and proteins to increase the energy yield of food; it also detoxifies many things that would otherwise be dangerous to eat. There are a few shreds of evidence of fire at early homo ergaster sites, and some scholars, including Richard Wrangham, argue that even without fossil evidence of actual cooking, the larger brains, smaller and less pointed teeth, and shorter guts that developed about two million years ago would only have been possible with cooked food. Other scholars see cooking as a more recent invention, perhaps as late as 400,000 years ago, when hearths become a common part of the archaeological evidence in many areas.

Wherever and whenever it occurred, cooking had enormous social and cultural consequences. Cooking causes chemical and physical reactions that produce thousands of new compounds and make cooked foods more aromatic and more complex in their flavors than raw foods. As descriptions of roasted coffee or chocolate put it, they develop “overtones” or “flavor notes” of completely different things. Because members of the genus homo were omnivores, they may have been genetically predispositioned to prefer complex flavors, so that cooked food tasted (and smelled, which is essential in taste) better. Thus cooking led to eating together in a group at a specific time and place, which increased sociability. Cooking may also have encouraged symbolic thought, as cooked foods often make us think about something else, and both cooking and eating can be highly ritualized activities – plus cooking involved fire, which itself has deep meaning in later human cultures.

The evidence for cooking among homo ergaster is thin, but the evidence for migration is unequivocal. Gradually small groups migrated out of East Africa into Central and Northern Africa, and into Asia by about 1.5 million years ago. They reached what is now Spain by at least 800,000 years ago, and then further north in Europe.

Some groups evolved into slightly different species of hominids, the most famous of which are the Neanderthals (homo Neanderthalis), named after the Neander Valley in Germany, where their remains were first discovered. Neanderthals lived throughout Europe, Western Asia, and Siberia between about 130,000 and 30,000 years ago, the era of the last ice age. They had brains as large as those of modern humans and made and used complex tools that enabled them to survive in the diverse environments and climates in which their bones have been found. They built freestanding houses, and controlled fire in hearths, where they cooked animals, including large mammals and many kinds of plants. They lived in small communities, and cared for their young, old, and injured. They sometimes buried their dead carefully, and occasionally decorated objects and themselves with red ochre, a form of colored clay.

Neanderthals most likely understood biological sex differences, but what cultural significance they gave to these and thus how they understood gender is difficult to determine. Judging by wear and tear on skeletal remains, both males and females engaged in the same type of hard physical labor, and died at similar ages, so there was little behavioral differentiation. Males and females were buried in the same way and with similar types of grave goods.

Evidence from one 50,000-year-old Neanderthal site in Spain has yielded intriguing suggestions about some aspects of gender and family relations. Here 12 individuals of various ages appear to have been killed and eaten by another group, during a period – judging by the tooth enamel of the victims – of food scarcity. DNA evidence shows that these 12 individuals were related, and that the adult males were more closely related than the females. Thus the men had most likely stayed with their birth family, while the women had come from other families, a pattern that would be replicated later among homo sapiens of many eras and places. Two of the children were offspring of the same woman, and were about three years apart in age; this birth interval, perhaps the result of long breastfeeding, is also something that would be replicated among many later foragers. Extrapolating from a single site to all of Neanderthal society is dangerous, but this provides a glimpse of Neanderthal social relationships, both hostile and caring.

What archaeologists term anatomically modern humans (AMHs or homo sapiens) spread from Africa into areas in Europe and Western Asia where Neanderthals lived, and the two groups lived side by side for millennia, hunting the same types of animals and gathering the same types of plants. Eventually Neanderthals became extinct, killed by humans or diseases they had brought in, or simply losing out in a competition for food as the climate worsened in a period of increasing glaciation that began around 40,000 years ago. Neanderthals and homo sapiens also had sex with one another, at least sometimes, for between 1.5 and 2.1 percent of the DNA in humans living today outside of sub-Saharan Africa comes from Neanderthals. Since 2010, genetic studies of Neanderthals have taken off. Scientists have found, for example, that the exchange of genes between Neanderthals and AMHs provided resistance to some viruses, but also increased the genetic risk to others, including COVID-19. They have also found sex-based differences. Neanderthal-derived DNA does not include the mitochondrial DNA passed from mother to child, which means that the children who passed on their genes came from Neanderthal males and AMH females. This does not mean that there was no sex involving Neanderthal females and AMH males, but simply that this did not produce offspring that survived. Similarly, no modern man to date has been found with a Neanderthal Y chromosome, which suggests that the male offspring of Neanderthal males and AMH females were not viable. Genetic research is also beginning to include various other recently discovered extinct members of the homo genus, such as the Denisovans, who also interbred with homo sapiens. All of this indicates that the human evolutionary path is more complex and multibranched than we used to recognize, more of a bush than a tree.

Homo Sapiens

Archaeologists distinguish anatomically modern humans (homo sapiens) from other members of the genus homo by a number of anatomical features, most notably a relatively slender build, a head with a large cranium (and forebrain) with a face tucked underneath it, small teeth and jaws, and a larynx situated lower in the throat. The earliest fossilized remains showing these features come from Ethiopia, and have been most recently dated as about 195,000 and 160,000 years old. What archaeologists term “behavioral modernity” developed after anatomical modernity, though whether this was gradual or the result of a sudden “cognitive revolution” about 50,000 years ago is hotly disputed. Behavioral modernity includes long-range planning, development of new technologies such as the bow and arrow, the wide use of symbols in burials and personal adornment, more complex speech, and broad networks of social and economic exchange.

Some scholars see the development of cognition and brain complexity as a social and cultural as well as a physical process. Some of this operated at the individual level: individuals who had better social skills were more likely to mate than those who did not – this has been observed in chimpanzees and, of course, in humans from more recent periods – and thus to pass on their genetic material, creating what biologists term “selective pressure” that favored the more socially adept. For humans, being socially adept includes being able to understand the motivations of others – that is, recognizing that they have internal lives that drive their actions. Such social skills were particularly important for females: because the period when human infants are dependent on others is so long, mothers with good social networks to assist them were more likely to have infants who survived. Cooperative child rearing required social skills and adaptability, and may itself have been an impetus to increasing complexity in the brain. Selective pressure may have also operated in the realm of language. As we know from contemporary research on the brain, learning language promotes the development of specific areas of the brain. Neurological research thus supports the argument of paleolinguists that gradually increasing complexity in language led to more complex thought processes, as well as the other way around.

Some of these social and cultural factors operated at the group level: as it developed, speech and other forms of communication allowed for stronger networks of cooperation among kin groups and the formation of larger social groupings. Family bands that were more socially adept had more contacts with other bands, and developed patterns of exchange over longer distances, which, as with trade in later periods, gave them access to a wider range of products and ways of using them and thus greater flexibility to meet any challenges to survival, including dramatic changes in climate. This was also the case with less utilitarian products, such as pigments and beads, which might have stimulated better forms of communication and higher levels of creativity as well as reflecting them. As Marcia-Anne Dobres and others have pointed out, new technologies and ways of using them were (and are) not simply invented to solve problems or address material needs, but also to foster social activities, convey world views, gain prestige, and express the makers’ ideas and sense of identity.

However and whenever behaviorally modern humans emerged, they did what homo ergaster did before them and what humans have done ever since: moved. First across Africa, and then into Eurasia, initially sporadically and then more regularly. They used rafts or boats to reach what is now Australia by at least 50,000 years ago and perhaps earlier, which required traveling across nearly 40 miles of ocean. During the last ice age, when much of the world’s water was in glaciers, a wide land bridge connected Northeast Asia and North America across what is now the Bering Strait. Humans moved to this area, Beringia, 20–25,000 years ago, and then stopped. New DNA analysis indicates that a human population lived in genetic isolation here for 5,000 years or so, and then some continued on to North America and others migrated back to Eastern Asia. Those in the Americas moved quickly, because by 15,000 years ago humans were already in southern South America, 10,000 miles from Beringia. Some scholars think that people came to the Americas much earlier, using rafts or boats along the coasts, but finding evidence for this is extremely difficult because ancient coastlines were submerged with the final melting of the glaciers between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago. Rising seas did not end migration, however, as humans responded by building boats, sailing to increasingly remote islands, including those in the Pacific, the last parts of the globe to be settled.

Eventually human cultures became widely diverse, but in the Paleolithic period people throughout the world lived in ways that were similar to one another, in small groups of related individuals – what anthropologists often refer to as “bands” – who moved through the landscape in search of food. Paleolithic peoples have often been called hunter-gatherers, but recent archaeological and anthropological research indicates that both historical and contemporary hunter-gatherers have depended much more on gathered foods than on hunted meat. Thus it would be more accurate to call them gatherer-hunters, and most scholars now call them foragers, a term that highlights the flexibility and adaptability in their search for food. Most of what foragers ate were plants, and although they did hunt large game, much of the animal protein in their diet came from foods scavenged or gathered, such as animals killed by other predators, insects, shellfish, small animals caught in traps, and fish and other sea creatures caught in weirs and nets. Paleolithic knotted and woven nets and baskets disintegrated long ago, but evidence of of them survives as impressions on fired clay fragments of storage containers from around 30,000 years ago, and knotting is probably much older than that.

Most foraging societies that exist today or did so until recently have some type of division of labor by sex, and also by age, with children and older people responsible for different tasks than adult men and women. Men are more often responsible for hunting, through which they gain prestige as well as meat, and women for gathering plant and animal products. This led earlier scholars to assume that in Paleolithic society men were also responsible for hunting, and women for gathering, an assumption that led to the familiar “man the hunter/woman the gatherer” dichotomy. Human remains provide some evidence for this, as skeletons and teeth indicate the type of tasks the person performed while they were alive, and in some places there are gender differences. But in many Paleolithic sites male and female skeletons show little evidence of sexually differentiated work. Archaeologists studying human remains often assumed that those buried with hunting tools such as projectile points and blades were male, but recently developed techniques that analyze tooth enamel have determined that many of these were female. (This is a good example of the way assumptions about gender can shape research findings.) In some of the world’s more recent foraging peoples, such as the Agta of the Philippines, women hunt large game, and in numerous others women are involved in certain types of hunting, such as driving herds of animals toward a cliff or compound or throwing nets over them. Where women hunt, they either carry their children in slings or leave them with other family members, suggesting that cultural norms, rather than the biology of lactation, is the basis for male hunting. The gender division of labor was most likely flexible, particularly during periods of scarcity, and also changed over time.