Neanderthal Women Unite!

I'm a devoted reader of Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear series, so anything with the word "Neanderthal" in its headline grabs my attention.

Two weeks ago, I was intrigued by a New York Times article Equality Between the Sexes: Neanderthal Women Joined Men in the Hunt. The article made clear that Neanderthals are alive and well -- or at least Neanderthal opinions about women's equality.

The New York Times describes a hypothesis by two scientists at the University of Arizona, Mary C. Stiner and Steven L. Kuhn, in Current Anthropology, which describes itself as "one of the leading international scholarly journals in anthropology since 1961." The suggestion in their article, titled What's a Mother to Do? is that Neanderthals did not die out in the Upper Paleolithic period from biological or cognitive differences vs. modern humans, as other anthropologists have surmised for centuries, but because women tried to be equal to men by fighting alongside them in search of large game.

"Their skeletons are so robustly built that it seems improbable that they just sat at home looking after the children," the Times says. "More likely, they did the same as men, with the whole population engaged in bringing down large game."

Turns out hunting mammoths is dangerous, as evidenced by bone fractures in Neanderthal skeletons. Thus Neanderthals were "putting their reproductive core -- women and children -- at great risk," by allowing women to hunt.

Modern-day humans, on the other hand, "exploited the environment more efficiently, by having men hunt large game and women gather small game and plant foods ... [this] division of labor and diversified food sources ... secure[d] a continuous food supply" and allowed modern humans to flourish while the poor gender-equal Neanderthals perished.

Obvious takeaway: Desirable women must be petite and weak (God forbid robustness lead us to hunt 5,000 ton beasts or million-dollar Wall Street jobs!) We must stay close to home working the earth, hunting only small game, and just looking after the children. We cannot combine work and raising kids once we bear children. What's a mother to do? Clearly, we must stay out of the hunt -- or risk destroying the entire human species.

By Leslie Morgan Steiner |  December 19, 2006; 9:30 AM ET  | Category:  Research
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