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