The evolution of sex roles

[icymist]

Anthropologists are looking at how prehistoric tasks were divided, perhaps indicating the moment when we became truly human.

Could it be that Neanderthal females achieved an equality that is rare even by today's standards?
Some anthropologists make a case that our extinct female cousins hunted alongside the males during an epoch when our own ancestral women were gathering plants and doing other (essential) work. They argue that the appearance of gender roles was critical to humans' eventual domination of the globe - and that the importance of the women of the Pleistocene period has been vastly understated.

These assertions, controversial to be sure, play into growing scientific interest in prehistoric sex roles: How did our male and female ancestors divvy up the tasks of getting food, clothing and shelter, and how did those roles shape the evolving species? Did primitive peoples form relationships, the males playing father to sons and daughters, or did we act more like our chimpanzee and gorilla cousins - promiscuous, violent, with males fighting over the females?

Groping toward a fuller understanding of how we became human, some researchers are looking at how and when we came to act as women and men.

Read the article

[idgiehkt]

1. wow, that sounds promising

I think that part of the confusion around gender roles is that the roles themselves have no objective value of better than/worse than. It's the subjective value that we give them, that seems to be tied to the religious structure in each culture, that makes them 'equal' or 'not equal', or one more 'valuable' than the other. The language in just the snippet I've read sounds a little suspect though, because anyone who has observed chimpanzees on nature shows knows that they form relationships. Also in native American cultures like Cherokee, as well as in other so-called 'primitive' cultures, it was the brother of the mother who played the role of 'father' to her children, not the biological father, who might not even be known for sure. Our culture today could certainly be called 'promicuous, violent, with males fighting over females', too. As with anything, what we see in history, even of other species, is influenced by what we believe about it, just as present gender roles aren't valued equally only because of what our beliefs are about gender.

But the theory that neandertal men and women had more similar roles is interesting. I'd be curious to know (though it's impossible) if primitive man had 'social class' as well, since in the working classes it is far more common for females to work at the sames kind of jobs men do, even while pregnant, than in the middle and upper class.