In the light of all the evidence, from a wealth of scientific sources, of the centrality of woman, how do we explain the dominance and persistence of the myth of Man the Hunter? Charles Darwin’s concept of the origins of the human race included no such creature – his early man was a social animal working within ‘the corporate body’ of the tribe, without which he would not survive. But later Darwinians like Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer (‘the greatest ass in Christendom’, according to Carlyle) re-interpreted the evolutionary battle for survival as taking place not between genes, but individuals. By 1925 academics were treating this idea as fact, Professor Carveth Read of London University excitedly proposing that early man should be re-named Lycopithecu for his wolvish savagery, a suggestion enthusiastically taken up by another thriller-writer manqué, the South African professor Raymond Dart:
Man’s predecessors differed from living apes in being confirmed killers; carnivorous creatures, that seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of their victims and greedily devouring living, writhing flesh.25
As this suggests, the notion of Man the Hunter unpacks to reveal a number of other elements that feed and flatter male fantasies of violence and destruction. ‘We are Cain’s children,’ droned Ardrey. ‘Man is a predator whose natural instinct is to kill with a weapon.’ Lots of the boys have got off on this one, from Konrad Lorenz to Anthony Storr: ‘The simple fact is that we [who we?] are the cruellest and most ruthless species that has ever walked the earth.’26 Man’s natural aggression found its natural outlet in subordinating those around him: ‘women, boys and girls,’ wrote H. G. Wells, ‘all go in fear of the old male.’ For Ardrey, ‘dominance, a revolutionary social necessity even in the carefree forest life, became a day-to-day survival institution in the lives of the hunters.’27 Man’s ‘hunting pedigree’ can thus be used to justify every act of male aggression from business chicanery to wife-battering and rape, while the ‘right to dominate’ of ‘early boss man’ has proved far too serviceable to his successors to be cast aside.
In fact there is almost no aspect of modern human society, no self-flattering delusion about man’s ‘natural’ instinct to dominate and destroy, that ‘Man the Hunter’ cannot be said to originate and explain. Generations of academics have joined their respectful voices to the paean of praise for him and his pals: ‘our intellects, interests, emotions and basic social life,’ chirped American professors Washburn and Lancaster, ‘all these we owe to the hunters of time past.’ Needless to say, man the hunter did not carry all before him: Donald Johanson has described the hunting hypothesis as the product of Ardrey’s ‘vivid imagination’, and ‘an embarrassment to anthropologists’. In professional circles now the whole theory has been consigned to the wasteland between revision and derision, and psychologist Dr John Nicholson is not the only academic to admit to being ‘still annoyed that I was once taken in by it.’28
But once up and running through the great open spaces of popular belief, man the hunter has proved a hard quarry to bring down, and few seem to have noticed that for millennia he has travelled on through the generations entirely alone. For woman is nowhere in this story. Aside from her burgeoning sexual apparatus, early woman is taken to have missed out completely on the evolutionary bonanza. ‘The evolving male increased in body size, muscular strength and speed, as well as in intelligence, imagination and knowledge,’ pronounced a leading French authority, ‘in all of which the female hardly shared.’29 Countless other historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and biologists worldwide all make the same claim in different ways. Man, it seems, singlehandedly performed all the evolving for the rest of the human race. Meanwhile early woman, idle and dependent, lounged about the home base, the primordial airhead and fully evolved bimbo.
Yet in celebrating the achievement of early woman, and dismissing the farrago of flattering fictions that make up the myth of hunting man, it is essential not to substitute a denial of his real activities for the historic denial of hers. Man’s part in the survival of the species becomes more normal, more natural, and paradoxically more admirable once the essentially co-operative nature of early human life is reasserted.
Hunting was a whole-group activity, not a heroic solo adventure.
As Myra Shackley explains, ‘successful hunting, especially of large animals travelling in herds such as reindeer, horses, mammoth, bison and woolly rhinoceros meant co-operation in bands’.30 To this day, all members of hunting societies, including women and children, join in hunting/beating activities as a matter of course. In their own right, too, women have long been known to hunt smaller, slower or safer animals. An eighteenth-century trader of the Hudson Bay Company in Canada discovered an Eskimo woman who had kept herself alive for seven months on the mid-winter icecap by her own hunting and snaring ‘when there was nothing but desolation for 1000 miles around’.31
Hunting did not mean fighting.
On the contrary, the whole purpose of group organization was to ensure that primitive man did not have to face and do battle with his prey. The first humans, as Shackley shows, worked together to avoid this, ‘driving animals over cliffs to their deaths (as certainly happened at the Upper Paleolithic site of Solutre) or using fire to stampede them into boggy ground (the method used at Torralba and Ambrona)’.32 Cro-Magnon cave paintings from the Dordogne region of France vividly depict a mammoth impaled on stakes in a pit, a practice known worldwide. This method of hunting did not even involve killing, as the animal could be left to die. Most forms of hunting did not in fact involve direct aggression, personal combat or a struggle to the death, but involved preying on slow-moving creatures like turtles, on wounded or sick animals, on females about to give birth or on carcasses killed and abandoned by other, fiercer predators.
Men and women relied on each others’ skills, before, during and after the hunt.
The anthropologist Constable cites the Stone Age Yukaghir of Siberia, whose men formed an advance party to check out the traps for prey, while the women came up behind to take charge of dismembering the carcass and transporting it to the home-site.33 Since carcasses were used for food, clothes, shelter, bone tools and bead ornaments, most of which the women would be producing, they had a vested interest in the dismemberment. As Myra Shackley reminds us:
Apart from their use as food, animals were hunted for their hides, bones and sinews, useful in the manufacture of clothing, tents, traps, and the numerous odds and ends of daily life. Suitable skins would have been dried and cured and softened with animal fats. Clothes could be tailored by cutting the hides with stone tools and assembling the garment by lacing with sinews through holes bored with a stone tool or bone awl . . . There is no reason to suppose that Neanderthal clothes were as primitive as many illustrators have made them out to be . . . The remains of ostrich shells on Mousterian sites in the Neger desert suggest the Neanderthal was using them as water containers, as Bushmen do today . . . what use was made of the exotic feathers? There is no need to suppose that because there is a lack of archaeological evidence for personal adornment no attention was paid to it.34
Hunting man, then, was not a fearless solitary aggressor, hero of a thousand fatal encounters. The only regular, unavoidable call on man’s aggression was as protector: infant caring and group protection are the only sexual divisions of labour