Men, Women and Beasts: Relations to Animals in Western Culture

Much of Western anthropology, since its origins in the 19th century, has emphasized "man the hunter" and has seen in males hunting animals the primary roots of human culture. This view has put a deep mark on exhibits in museums of anthropology and thereby on the public image of human "nature" and development. There is reason to question this view. First, humans belong to the ape family. Early hominids split from tlleir common ancestors with apes about 4 million years ago. Baboons and chimpanzees are primarily herbivores and insect eaters, who eat other animals occasionally, roughly about 5% of their diet. The human digestive tract remains that of its herbivore ancestors, and humans lack the canine teeth ofbaboons to strip meat from bones. While early hominids, like other apes, occasionally ate animals, for perhaps tlrree million years these were generally not large, but small or weak, young animals, or the scavenged bodies of animals already dead. It is interesting that this scavenging aspect of early animals have been entirely ignored in popular culture. Clearly it doesn't lend itself to the same ideology of male dominance and aggression as does that of "man the hunter" going up against mammotlls with spears. Only when stone tools developed could humans strip meat effectively from bones. Later, fire aided humans in the digestion of meat by allowing them to roast it. Large-scale hunting awaited the development of more sophisticated hunting weapons, roughly about half a million years ago. But for most of the last two million years of human development, humans lived in small, fairly stable, hunting-gathering communities. Although the ratio of animal food to plant food varied with the environment, the general pattern in the tropics, where humans ftrst developed and predominated until about 100,000 years ago, was one in which female plant-gathering activity accounted for about 70% of the human diet. Women were seen as owning and controlling the houses of the village, as well as the food supply they gathered and processed. Meat from male hunting was given high status, but in fact the males often returned empty-handed. A strong ethic of sharing controlled relations of all members of the village. Food was not saved or stored or regarded as the private possession of individual households. A rough equality of labor and power seems to have prevailed between men and women in most of these societies.