Woman the Gatherer - Man the Hunter

Women have been gathering since the beginning. Ever wonder why women always talk while they work and men don’t. We just looked at why men are silent, so they don’t scare off the animals while hunting. Women on the other hand wanted to scare off the wild animals. While out in the field gathering they probably talked with each other in loud voices. This would scare off the animals and help them keep track of each other at the same time.

Gathering is much different than hunting. When hunting you focus on a single task and give it your all. But gathering is more like modern shopping; you have to look at everything before you decide what you really need. Modern shopping and early gathering are so closely linked to each other it’s real scary. Even the process has not changed with modern technology. Yes modern woman drive to the mall but the process has not changed one single bit!

My wife in her youth was subject to her mother’s habit of dressing up her girls in their Sunday best to go downtown to window shop. That was the common way to shop before the shopping mall was invented. It is also were the term window shopping came from. It was a rite of passage for the females in the family. My wife and her sisters hated it so much they never passed it along to their children. I am sure my Mother in Law learned it from her mother.

This may be the same reason that women go to the bathroom together. Men have better plumbing and can relieve themselves in short order. Women on the other hand need to take a moment and stoop down and in doing so would have put themselves in more danger from wild animals while they are off balance. Women probably went to relieve themselves as a group to provide some protection for each other and to warn off the animals.

A good friend of mine is a jogger and has been running though his neighborhood for many years. He is also an observant person. He runs in the city of Del Mar; a very up scale area north of San Diego in Southern California. Over the years he has noticed that men usually run by themselves and women run in groups. I am sure some of this is due to the need for personal protection, but Del Mar is a very safe area. I think women run today for the same reasons they ran together thousands of years ago.

The Kitchen Table Anthropologist

Sex is a big deal for our animal friends

We can learn a lot about ourselves from the behavior of animals. In looking at animal behavior it is much easier to be object and not cloud our impressions with all our human baggage.

Recent research on animal behavior has shattered the myth that animals are monogamous. For the longest time there was this romantic belief that once animals mate, it’s for life. Our only means of research has been to observe behavior. The new research is based on DNA and is much more scientific.

Of the 4000 or so mammals alive today only about a dozen are monogamous. We have always assumed that monkeys and Chimpanzees fool around, but this research has proven that Chimps copulate between 500 and 1000 times for each live birth, with every male in their group. The reasons are most interesting, food, power, protection and comfort, sound familiar? 

Yes, we are not primates but sometimes our behavior is closer to that of the primates than we would like to believe. It is common theory that early man behaved like animals in many ways. It is only since becoming “modern man” that we have taken to marriage and monogamous relationships. And not all marriages are monogamous, the divorce rate and extra martial affairs are quite common. My monogamous marriage of more than 40 years is unfortunately an exception and not the rule.

It is possible to have a relationship like mine but with early man living with the animals and probably learning some activities from them; it goes against thousands of years of our primitive behavior.

The Kitchen Table Anthropologist

For many men monogamy is very difficult - because it is so new

Monogamy, or having only one sex partner, has only been around for about 1900 years.  Even in the days of the early church priests had more than one wife, it was just what everyone did.

Thousands of years ago women often mated with several men in their tribe, that way no one knew who the kids belonged to so men took care of and protected all the children in the tribe. These cavewomen were smart and knew how to handle their men even back in the day.

Our male sex drive today is very strong and is ment to reproduce; it has kept us going for all these years. If we did not have this strong sex drive we would not have survived as a species. Also having large families were part of our survival because many children died both at a young age and in childbirth. So if we had a dozen or more kids we would ensure that at least a few children would survive and keep the linage going.

Today many men and women have one sex partner and a lot of us are happy with this arrangement. BUT after thousands of year of great sex with anyone in the tribe at anytime of the day or night,  it's hard to be monogamous. It's just not who we started out as.

The Kitchen Table Anthropologist