Codger the child-minder

nevermind the just-so stories (trigger warning -- guinea pigs)

There are a couple of papers described as debunking man the hunter:

Ocobock, Cara, and Lacy, Sarah. 2023. “Woman the hunter: The physiological evidence.” American Anthropologist 00: 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13915

Lacy, Sarah, and Ocobock, Cara. 2023. “Woman the hunter: The archaeological evidence.” American Anthropologist 00: 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13914

Via https://www.sciencealert.com/one-of-the-biggest-hunter-gatherers-myths-is-finally-getting-debunked

The debunking is not silly, but it is possibly a little bit of pot calling kettle black type of thing, not that the pot is wrong mind… —so then, it is possibly silly, because what appears to be used in this article to debunk, is more a refutation in kind. I don’t think it gets us anywhere, even if correct. Or because it is correct.

They mention the 1980s feminist response to man the hunter of Woman the Gatherer and the importance of that movement across the landscape. More pots calling pots calling kettles…

(Containers foreshadowing the hearth they sit on.)

Obviously I am going to suggest a blur in reframing to antidote the binarisation, because the danger is it can get caught up in polemic.

The blur is provided by children running around… just watch them —while you grow fat because you have to look after them, because going on a jog to loose weight means the children are on their own.

This can be bad.

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Polemic is a type of non-progress based social processing, a pothole on the road of argument. A silliness best avoided, but the worse part is that it is traditionally used — deliberately— by those who wish to remain in power (psychopaths and their allies). Polemic a symptom of a social pathology. It is often a distraction. It is bad worlding.

Polemic is a choice tool to stifle good worlding by turning debate into a type of doctrinal sport (at best) or, worse, an arena in which to scapegoat the powerless, i.e. is used to turn some peeps into losers who deserve everything they get in the re-hash.

This is the moral urge at work, it can have bad outcomes.

This is why refutation must always include reframing. Or at least point to it. This is not something, even if pointed out in the American Anthropologist articles, covered in the coverage of them.

Now, the articles may not (need to) do this as they are primarily evidence based, or at least evidence focussed. But what else needs to be said?

So then what is the re-frame here that would avoid polemic?

That the biggest selective force in human evolution (in all Homo sp.) has been how we have come to socially negotiate our roles in raising children. Not who does it, but how we decide how we do it.

Worrying about how bodies are ‘designed’ or fail, completely misses the point of being human.

Polemic ignores that example because power. Because chaos surfers.

Power is always the elephant in the landscape. How did that come about?

The landscape is a record of power and survival… I’ll leave that poetry of no-bones for another day.

How does that reframe anything?

It probably doesn’t.

But while most modern societies of hunter-gathers have strong sex-based divisions of labour…

(all human societies, especially in times of stability, become increasing structured by re-intensifying that order on all their products material & social, worlded and embodied)

—the key point is that these are socially negotiated. Regardless of who hunts or gathers or both or neither, someone has to look after the children. Otherwise, no reproduction, no survival, no arguments about who is the better hunter.

What we need are arguments about the better child minders.

The division of labour when re-framed like this, may well be answered in age-related categories rather than anything else. Sex divisions are just more obvious in the record, because bones, and polemic as cultural bones of contention (damn the poetry came back). Bones are obvious things, and are easier to tag and then codify into rites and rituals. Whatever.

Age is readily noticed in bones too but… — where’s that work on the old codger as child-minder, what about those well healed one-legged peeps in the fossil record? We have the grandmother hypothesis, but…

—I have done my own experimental social archaeology. Spoiler: if you take children hunting you will not catch anything.

Hunting with children has a 100% failure rate

Between the ages of first walking and talking, and whatever is the age of reason in your local area, children will not be able to link three vectors of movement (or more) required in hunting. Even if they could throw (which they can’t). Gathering and trapping require only two.

This is too much movement to consider. Children play all day. When they are playing they are playing, when they are learning, they are playing, when they are hunting, they are playing.

They play with their food. It is not a toy I said.

But it is all suddenly vastly more complex when we must consider movement in hunting as a number of vectors (three is the minimum) which we have to manipulate in mind and body, if not calculate, to meet at one point in the animal’s flesh. Success is not guaranteed.

Children can run, but do not get flanking, they do not get non-direct targeting, they do not get not-rushing at the animal when first sighted, they nearly always want help by charging full bore straight at the animals (mostly escaped guinea pigs).

(Herding is a type of hunting folks, just as trapping is a type of gathering.)

Animals can always be prey, they are designed to flee. Running straight at them is not the best technique.

Most animals are faster than humans. LOTS FASTER. We have slowed down with our success, our muscles are weaker than our nearest furry apes. We have to think and communicate our ways to meat, to bring home the bacon to the meal and so discuss who is doing what tomorrow (see Wranghams' Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human). Even if, dimorphically, one sex is generally weaker or more easily exhausted or not. We are weak as a species.

Even if one puts children in position and explained politely the best ways of moving, in relation to the likely movement of animals, the best way to flank and corral them in relation to a team member who has some experience in these matters… —they just run at the animals. (Hugo said, I learned years later, that I was a very nice man).

Taking children hunting would mean being even more reliant on whoever is gathering food that day. That week. That month. That season. That year.

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Unless the animals are running at the child (perhaps because they are huge and you are nothing to them, or perhaps prey) the child is unlikely to connect a third vector which will do damage to them (a spear, or, even more vectors, with a bow & arrow), and bring them down for the feast.

Hunting has at least three vectors that need to be connected, not just the physicality of muscles and bones and tools and the co-ordination of levers which these debunkings, and their prompts of man the hunter polemicise.

But I’ll admit the polemics per se do support my view that our success is based on how we socially negotiate these trade-offs.

Gathering with children has a 100% success rate

I’ll just let you think about that. Trapping is also above zero, but YMMV.