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Back when I was debating on Tik Tok full time, I would most often cover subjects that related to feminism and sexual dimorphism. For context, the debate topic was quote, men are not inherently better leaders than women and vice versa. The title of the live conversation was meant to push back against [music] biases that often favored men in leadership roles while largely excluding women.
We usually call this phenomenon patriarchy. People would call in and argue that men simply possessed qualities that women did not and that these qualities set men up from birth to simply be better leaders than women. One of the ways I debunked these arguments was through presenting evidence of egalitarianism within prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies, particularly that of Paleolithic Homo sapiens.
I think in order to dive into this topic correctly, we should prepare with a bit of a biology lesson on primates. There are, as of this moment, around 20 different confirmed species of the genus Homo that have been identified by researchers. Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and the very popular Homo neanderthalensis just to name a few.
A lot of people have this really interesting concept in their head of a very popular graphic made about evolution wherein ape-like figure faces sideways walking straight eventually after many millions of years turning into a modern man. This is not how evolution worked at all. I cringe sometimes when people speak about the missing link as if human evolution was one long chain.
In reality, it's more like a massive forever growing family tree. There were multiple species of human all walking around the Earth at overlapping points in time. Within the last 300,000 years, several human beings have coexisted.
[music] Neanderthals and Homo sapiens being probably one of the best and most well-documented examples of this. None of these species show evidence of formal hierarchies like that of chiefs or kings [music] or queens or monarchs in any way. We have evidence that Neanderthals in particular cared for their sick and injured.
Fossils show individuals surviving for years with severe disabilities, which likely means that the group was supporting them, showing a very clear history of collaboration and communal care, rather than necessarily overt dominance. But, we'll dive deeper into that in a moment. Let's talk about bonobos.
Bonobos are more sexually dimorphic than human beings, but have female-led egalitarian societies. The males tend to weigh about 20 to 30% larger than the females. The ladies tend to gain dominance by forming strong cooperative bonds and acting as coalitions to fend off the angry males.
In this particular structure, high-ranking females often control key resources like food or shelter, and they also influence group dynamics. Chimpanzees, on the other side, have male-dominant hierarchies that are significantly more reliant on physical strength. Jane Goodall, rest in peace, queen, is the woman who discovered that chimpanzees live in complex patriarchal societies with strict, often violent, linear hierarchies.
Alpha males maintain power through stuff like calculated aggression, strategic alliances, and of course, intimidation. Humans are less dimorphic than both chimpanzees and bonobos. So, why do we assume male dominance is natural?
We share approximately 98. 7% of our DNA with both chimpanzees and bonobos, making them, to an equal degree, our closest living relatives. So, just to recap, chimpanzees tend to be patriarchal through violence, bonobos tend to be matriarchal through female coalitions, but humans do something wildly different called reverse dominance hierarchy.
Christopher Boehm in his book Hierarchy in the Forest, The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, describes how Paleolithic groups prevented [music] anyone from accumulating power. Instead of the strongest bully rising to the top like in chimpanzee societies, the human coalition would actively suppress these aforementioned [music] bullies. If someone tried to boss people around or hoard resources, the group had tools like mockery, ridicule, refusal to cooperate, social shaming.
In extreme cases where someone became genuinely dangerous, the group could collectively decide to exile or even execute them. Humans prehistorically did not favor having one singular leader in the band. Large decisions were generally made by consensus.
[music] If the group needed to figure out where the best place to find ripe fruit was or what time [music] of day would be optimal to burn down a neighboring forest, those discussions happened collectively. Someone with expertise, someone who knew the trails, the seasonal patterns, where [music] the fruit trees were, might have had influence in that moment, but they couldn't command. I want to note here that a formal hierarchy did not exist until the Neolithic era, after the agricultural revolution.
For the vast majority of human existence, Paleolithic groups had no formal leaders at all. Let me draw this out with a hypothetical really quick. Let's take Grug.
He's big, he's tough, he's full of ideas. After being particularly proud of a successful hunt, he's decided that he wanted to take the best cuts of meat for himself. "It's my kill," he thinks to himself sitting [music] on his rock eating the best of the meat.
The group initially does not engage in conflict. Grug is a big dude, but the next morning when Grug [music] wakes up, nobody shares their food with him. He tried to join the day's hunting party later on, and people suddenly had other plans.
When he speaks, no one looks up. Grug is being socially erased. "But But should not care [music] about this," says the third party.
Grug is a big tough guy, and a big tough guy takes what he wants. Except big tough guys cannot survive alone. In many ways, social isolation or erasure in the Paleolithic era was akin to a death sentence.
[music] Grug is so weak, says the even tougher and bigger third party. I would just force everyone to cooperate with me by threatening them with physical violence and carrying through [music] with said physical violence if they did not comply. All right then, bigger tougher guy.
Let's call you Hot Pepper. Hot Pepper is genuinely dangerous. Not only does he hoard food, but he frequently threatens [music] violence when people refuse to do what he commands.
Hot Pepper tried to control [music] who gets to eat and mate, where the band goes, who gets the comfiest rock, you [music] get the idea. In a troop, a group of chimpanzees, this might actually work. But this is not a troop.
This is a group of humans. There are 29 other people in the band who all possess weapons. And inevitably, after deciding a good life is better than a worse one, coordinate to overthrow Hot Pepper.
[music] One night, while Hot Pepper is asleep, the group makes a decision. That morning, he's gone. They may have exiled him or killed him.
Boehm documents cases of both happening in the ethnographic record. It's a dark day, but it's a necessary one to get the ultimate message across. We will not be ruled.
What does a cavewoman look like in your head? Is she carrying anything? Where is she?
What is she doing? If your answer was anything along the lines of holding a baby on her hip, staying near camp, and gathering berries, you are likely part of the majority of people who have been fed the biggest, most popular lie that we call Man the Hunter. The Man the Hunter Symposium was a sort of conference held in 1966 at the University of Chicago that gathered a group of anthropologists to discuss human evolution.
The symposium's core argument was that hunting large game was the defining human behavior that separated us from all the other primate species. [music] They claimed that it's what made us smart and creative and capable. Because the assumption was that only men hunted, their conclusion was that male behavior specifically drove human evolution forward.
The conference proceedings were unfortunately published in a book in 1968, quickly becoming the dominant framework in anthropology for many decades, often even bleeding into modern conversation about our Paleolithic ancestry. Museums based their exhibits around it, textbooks taught it as fact, and it shaped everything. But they literally had evidence at the symposium that contradicted their own thesis.
Richard B. Lee, one of the organizers, presented data showing that in contemporary foraging societies, gathered plant foods made up about 60 to 80% of their diets. Hunting contributed less, but they doubled down on hunting as the master behavior pattern of the human species, leaving women's labor to be briefly mentioned and referred to as support work.
Gathering was viewed as an unskilled, simple, almost mindless behavior that anyone could do with a baby on their hip. The ideology behind it tragically became the foundation for decades of bad science about gender and human evolution. When we reference gathering, for some reason, many people have this concept of a woman very delicately picking berries on a clearly lined path in the forest.
It's just so strange. Gathering required a generational, encyclopedic amount of knowledge of hundreds of plant species. Is this mushroom going to make me have nightmares, or will it simply pair well with my fish?
Has the fig tree I saw 2 weeks ago started to bear fruit, or should I wait a few more days before making the trip out there to pick some? A well-informed, well-trained gatherer can feed more people for longer periods of time than the most skilled hunter. Not to say that women did not hunt or that men did not gather, they did.
But we'll get into hunting in a moment. That meat that you caught yesterday will unfortunately make everyone sick when it spoils next week. But the quinoa I harvested 5 weeks ago is ready to cook and consume whenever.
Oh my god, now my child is sick. Well, I know a spot that has penicillin mold that I can make her chew on that will stop the infection. There are real examples of that by the way.
There's a DNA analysis of 50,000 year old dental plaque from Neanderthals in the El Sidrón cave that revealed traces of penicillin mold, which produces the natural antibiotic penicillin. Really neat stuff. If you wanted to be a useful member of your band 100,000 years ago, it doesn't hurt for you to know how to hunt, but it's crucial for you to know stuff like planning routes, seasonal changes, how to use digging and cutting tools, what plants will kill you and your whole team, and which ones won't.
For a lot of people when they picture hunting, they usually imagine a group of large men poking an equally large animal with spears. But hunting required tracking and following animals across many, many miles of terrain. We had to track migration patterns, understanding where the animals would be at what time.
There is skill in maintaining your weapon properly and learning to work as a coordinated lethal [music] team. Humans had a particularly horrifying way of stalking and eventually killing their prey, and it's called persistence hunting. Persistence hunting has been suggested to be a key strategy for meat acquisition [music] in human evolution.
It's a form of pursuit hunting in hot environments in which the hunter runs or uses a mixture of running and walking to drive prey into exhaustion. If you were an antelope 300,000 years ago peacefully trotting across the valley with your herd and you spotted a group of Homo sapiens, you'd all likely begin to run away as quickly as possible, using up your energy until you felt you were completely safe. The humans are gone.
Everything's fine. For an hour or so. Suddenly, you see them again and now you need to run again.
You're getting a little tired now. Usually, predators don't follow for this long. Well, you've run about 15 mi now and you're much much faster than them.
You're definitely safe now. Except they're back. They're not panting nor do they show any signs of physical exhaustion.
Your herd makes a break for it one more time. But you've been running all day long. Your legs are weak and hurting.
[music] You need to eat and rest. You haven't seen running water all day. You're dehydrated.
You finally collapse from exhaustion. But before you close your eyes, you see a small group of fleshy, long-armed apes looming over you. It's over.
You've lost. This was never really a solo effort. Persistence hunting worked because humans, men and women, coordinated with each other consistently.
There is no evidence that this was an activity exclusive to males. The physical demands of persistence hunting generally favored endurance over raw strength and women's bodies are built for endurance. The qualities that made someone good at this type of hunting were never truly about being the biggest, toughest guy.
They were always about stamina, coordination, and the ability to keep moving for hours without overheating. If you send one strong guy out alone, he might get lucky every once in a while. But sending a coordinated group with good endurance, you could eat me regularly.
Of course, our ancestors chose the most efficient strategy. So, we've covered hunting and gathering. Now, I want to focus on what women actually did all those thousands of years ago.
Really, it's not too different from what men did. We have evidence of female hunters all across the world. They've been dug up and found with big game hunting tools and injuries that suggest that they were out hunting almost as much as men were.
One of the most notable instances we have is that of the teenage hunter from Wilamaya Patxa, roughly 500 km away from Machu Picchu. She was identified to be a 17 to 19-year-old big game hunter. And after initially being assumed to be male, osteological bones, proteomic proteins expressed by a genome, and isotopic analysis indicated that this early hunter was a young adult female who subsisted on terrestrial plants and animals, particularly hunting big game like vicuña, which is basically an alpaca who can survive in the extreme climates of the Andean highlands.
When she was found, people began to look around at other sites in the Americas to see if they had possibly mistaken other remains as male, and they had. Almost half of big game hunters' skeletons were identified to be female. For a significant amount of time, every single time we found a burial site with suggestions that the person we dug up may have been hunting, archaeologists immediately assumed them to be male, putting popular social biases of the time in front of tangible evidence-based research.
There absolutely could have been instances in the past where a prehistoric woman in a group of people would have been breastfeeding her baby, maybe even picking a berry off a bush. What most people don't understand is simply that the father of that baby would have likely been doing the same thing. Why are we patriarchal now?
That's a really good question. Most societies now, roughly 88% of them, are led primarily by men. Women, unfortunately, still are largely excluded from these roles.
If our ancestors were egalitarian, how did we get to be so patriarchal? Most anthropologists look back to the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago. There exists a debate currently among anthropologists about the specific mechanisms that flipped us from egalitarian to patriarchal.
Scholars have proposed a few different explanations, but it was likely some combination of all of them working together. One explanation focuses on the plow. Plow agriculture required significant upper body strength, something men had more of and women had less of.
So, men began to specialize in field work while women began to focus more on domestic work. Of course, this was not rigid. If it was the case that the man was sick or the woman was not around, they would switch roles as needed.
But, from the system they had set up, the expectation of women belonging in the home developed further even into families that were not farming. Then, there's the idea that property and inheritance drove patriarchy. This one goes back to Frederick Engels in the 1880s, but modern anthropologists have built on and refined that argument.
Once we settled after being nomadic for thousands of years, we began to accumulate property and surplus. With the existence of private property came the desire to pass it on to the next generation. But, you're not just going to give your lifetime of stuff to some stranger.
You want to give it to someone more significant, like your kid, for example. The only problem is you don't know which kid is yours. Paternity tests did not exist 10,000 years ago.
In comes the male monopolization of property, stemming from a need for paternity certainty. Here began the shift from matrilineal to patrilineal descent, which ultimately led to a control over women's sexuality and reproduction. If you can convince the woman that it's shameful and taboo to sleep with anyone else but you, you can guarantee that the child she bears came from you, or at least most likely did.
To understand how property and paternity certainty reshaped gender roles, we need to talk about what happened to child care. I mentioned this next bit briefly when we went over gathering, but I feel the need to expand on it just a touch further. Child care and allo-parenting.
I want to focus mostly on Sarah Hrdy's research on this topic because I found it was the most in-depth dismantling of the whole women stayed home with babies narrative. She writes, "According to the cooperative breeding hypothesis, allo-maternal assistance was essential for child survival during the Pleistocene. This breeding system permitted hominid females to produce offspring without increasing interbirth intervals and allowed for the movement into new habitats.
Reliance on allo-maternal assistance would make maternal commitment more dependent on the mother's perception of probable support from others than is the case in most other primates. She goes on to explain how the That was so hard to record. >> [laughter] >> She goes on to explain how the concept of it takes a village is rooted deeply into our prehistoric human evolution.
Allo-parenting allowed women to participate in band activities including hunting. All that changed when the agricultural nation attacked. We went from cooperative, flexible systems where everyone participated in the burden of child care to isolated nuclear families where women were tied to the home.
All in service of making sure property stayed in the right bloodline. Another popular theory as to why agriculture kick-started patriarchy is related to population density and warfare. Early Homo sapiens generally only went from place to place in groups of 20 to 30 people.
War in human civilization only really started once we had something worth defending. This bit kind of ties back into the property and inheritance thesis, but the main argument here is not necessarily that men began to control because they wanted to pass their belongings on, but rather because they were more capable of physically defending them. Having agriculture around meant being able to finally sustain higher population densities.
[music] More people meant they could cultivate a fixed territory, which led to increased intergroup conflict over resources. Ladies, we are very strong, but due to thousands of years of sexual selection and intersexual competition, males tend to be about six times stronger than women. While we are able to keep up with them for endurance hunting, combat without the use of weaponry tends to favor men.
This skill was far more useful for guarding the food, the buildings, and possibly even the women, which if the theory of property and inheritance is correct, were also at the time seen as property. Military prowess became a pathway to political power in this thesis. Theory number four ties back into caloric surplus and specialization.
Let me know if you can guess the theme of the Grables at the end of the video. Agriculture produced a food surplus for the first time ever, as discussed in previous theories, which freed up some people from food production. You don't want to work the land all your life?
Well, you can let someone know how much wheat they can get for two dozen eggs. Now all of a sudden we have bankers, priests, administrators, and directors of first impressions. We have it all in our civilized society.
Those roles were monopolized by men and therefore went on to formalize male authority. I have to be honest, this is one of the weaker theories, mainly due to the fact that there is some circular reasoning happening within it. Men held power, so powerful new roles went to men, but they're not able to explain why the role of a banker would go to a man in the first place.
Not my favorite, so we won't spend any more time on it. We've been egalitarian for about 95% of our existence on this earth. For the most part, we did not have formal leadership established until about 13,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Before then, we all hunted, we all gathered, we all raised the babies. We have established an observable evidence of this all across the world now. The concept of men leading and women following is not and has never [music] truly been biological.
So the next time you hear someone tell you that they would never vote for a woman, think back to a time before the last 5% of human history and ask yourself if that sentiment still feels correct. [music] Thank you for listening. All of the sources I used in this video will be available for you to check out in the description below, and remember to ingest [music] as much education as you can in this lifetime.
Okay, bye.
