INTRODUCTION TO ARCHAEOLOGY Nancy White - Touro Institute

were obvious. One alternative model, called “Woman the Gatherer” (Dahlberg 1981), suggested
that foraging for foods other than meat, done by women, was what increased intelligence and
drove hominid evolution. In this scenario the earliest artifacts were of fiber, were probably
invented by women, and were probably containers, slings and strings made for carrying things
that were gathered. Another model suggested that a three-foot-tall creature of Lucy’s type was
not going to be hunting large game animals often, but that meat is easily available on the African
savanna through scavenging, grabbing the remains of whatever was already killed by a lion or
something else.
Is the scavenging model testable? Yes, to an extent, because we can see if the bones on possible
living floors bear signs of human action. They might be broken open in a distinctive way to
extract the marrow, something only humans would do. Further, they might have teeth marks
from gnawing animals and cut marks from stone tools. Each is distinctive under magnification. If
cut marks overlie chewing marks it suggests that something else killed and began eating the
animal before hominids got it to eat.
Which reconstruction of australopithecine lifeways is the most popular? As detailed in Lucy
(Johanson and Edey 1981) and many other introductory texts, the provisioning model (p. 62-63
in the textbook) seems to be the most popular. It portrays the hominid male as scavenger,
gatherer, all-around guy who obtains the food and brings it back to camp where the female and
kids are staying, supposedly increasing the reproductive success of the species. What keeps him
coming back is supposed to be the hidden estrus cycle of the female. Women do not have
monthly periods in which the sex organs become swollen and bright pink, as some monkeys and
apes do, advertising fertility and sexual receptivity. The idea was that the attraction of sex at any
time led to the early institution of monogamy. You can see the implication of this in the artist’s
reconstruction of how the Laetoli footprints were made. Though we have three sets of footprints,
larger and smaller, the painting shows the male hominid striding ahead, holding some kind of
tool, while the female is the requisite number of paces behind, carrying the kid. What other
interpretations could have been possible? Obviously many, including that the prints were made
hours apart by individuals who did not even see each other.
What is the real evidence for all the models and what is sheer speculation? The only hard data
are the bones, the tools, the footprints, and the landscape. First-level inference can tell us about
scavenging or living floors, but there are alternative interpretations. What one scientist calls a
living floor another may see as a cache of meat stored for future use but covered in rocks to
prevent other animals from getting it. The supposed constant sexual receptivity of human
females is a pretty sexist notion, and now it is clear that it is characteristic of many primates and
that the marked estrus cycle is the derived characteristic, in other words, evolved later. The
notion of monogamy does not jive with the social organization of ape troops (which are usually
matrilineal—apes know their mothers and siblings but not their fathers). Nor is it supported by
ethnographic analogy, since monogamy is a minority marriage type among human cultures. Nor
does the ethnographic record support the idea of sedentary women staying home with the kids
and waiting for food to show up with the hubby. We know that women hunt in many cultures,
and even if the division of labor means that they are the plant gatherers, they work hard and
move around; note this picture (Zihlman 1981:92) of a !Kung woman on a gathering trip from