CHAPTER 6
How Cooking Frees Men
“Voracious animals . . . both feed continually and as incessantly eliminate, leading a life truly inimical to philosophy and music, as Plato has said, whereas nobler and more perfect animals neither eat nor eliminate continually.”
—GALEN,
Galen on the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body
D
iet has long been considered a key to understanding social behavior across species. The food quest is fundamental to evolutionary success, and social strategies affect how well individuals eat. Group size in chimpanzees rapidly adjusts to monthly changes in the density and distribution of fruiting trees. Chimpanzee society differs markedly from gorilla society, thanks to the gorillas’ reliance on herbs. Humans are no exception to such relationships. The Man-the-Hunter hypothesis has inspired such potent explanations of bonding between males and females that it has seemed to some researchers that no other explanation is necessary. In 1968 physical anthropologists Sherwood Washburn and Chet Lancaster wrote, “Our intellect, interests, emotions and basic social life, all are evolutionary products of the hunting adaptation.” Such ideas have been highly influential, but they have rarely looked beyond meat. The adoption of cooking must have radically changed the way our ancestors ate, in ways that would have changed our social behavior too.
Take softness. Foods soften when they are cooked, and as a result, cooked food can be eaten more quickly than raw food. Reliance on cooked food has therefore allowed our species to thoroughly restructure the working day. Instead of chewing for half of their time, as great apes tend to do, women in subsistence societies tend to spend the active part of their days collecting and preparing food. Men, liberated from the simple biological demands of a long day’s commitment to chewing raw food, engage in productive or unproductive labor as they wish. In fact, I believe that cooking has made possible one of the most distinctive features of human society: the modern form of the sexual division of labor.
The sexual division of labor refers to women and men making different and complementary contributions to the household economy. Though the specific activities of each sex vary by culture, the gendered division of labor is a human universal. It is therefore assumed to have appeared well before modern humans started spreading across the globe sixty thousand to seventy thousand years ago. So discussion of the evolution of the sexual division of labor centers on hunter-gatherers. The 750-strong Hadza tribe are one such group. They live in northern Tanzania, scattered among a series of small camps in dry bush country around a shallow lake.
The Hadza are modern-day people. Neighboring farmers and pastoralists trade with them and marry some of their daughters. Government officials, tourists, and researchers visit them. The Hadza use metal knives and money, wear cotton clothes, hunt with dogs, and occasionally trade for agricultural foods. Much has changed since the time, perhaps two thousand years ago, when they last lived in an exclusive world of hunter-gatherers. Nevertheless, they are one of the few remaining peoples who obtain the majority of their food by foraging in an African woodland of a type that was once occupied by ancient humans.
Dawn sees people emerging from their sleeping huts to eat scraps of food from the previous night’s meal. As consensus quietly develops about the day’s activity; most of the women in camp—six or more, perhaps—take up their digging sticks and go toward a familiar
ekwa
patch a couple of kilometers (more than a mile) away. Some take their babies in slings, and one or more carries a smoldering log with which to start a fire if needed. Older children walk alongside. Meanwhile, in ones and twos, various men and their dogs also walk off with bows and arrows in hand. Some men are going hunting, others to visit neighbors. A scattering of people remain in camp—a couple of old women, perhaps, looking after toddlers whose mothers have gone for food, and a young man resting after a long hunt the previous day.
The women walk slowly, in pace with the younger children. They stop occasionally to pick small fruits that they eat on the spot. After less than an hour they break into smaller parties as each forager finds her own choice site in calling distance of her companions. The digging is hard and uncomfortable but it does not take long. A couple of hours later the women’s karosses—cloaks made of animal skins—are covered in piles of thick, brown, foot-long roots. These
ekwa
tubers are a year-round staple for the Hadza, always easily found. As the karosses fill, someone starts a fire, and shortly afterward the foragers gather for a well-deserved snack. They bake their
ekwa
by leaning the tubers against the coals. In barely twenty minutes, the smaller ones are ready. After the simple meal, some women chat while others dig up a few more
ekwa
to make sure they have enough for the rest of the day. Most have found other foods as well—a few bulbs, perhaps. They tie up their karosses and start homeward. Each woman totes at least 15 kilograms (33 pounds). They are back in camp by early afternoon, tired from the hard work.
Anthropologists sometimes debate whether hunting and gathering is a relaxed way of life. Lorna Marshall worked alongside Nyae Nyae !Kung women gathering in the Kalahari in the 1950s. “They did not have pleasurable satisfaction,” she said, “in remembering their hot, monotonous, arduous days of digging and picking and trudging home with their heavy loads.” But times and cultures vary. Anthropologist Phyllis Kaberry, who worked with aborigines in the Kimberley region of northwestern Australia, said the women enjoyed one another’s company and their foraging routine.
Back in the Hadza camp, each woman empties her kaross in her own hut. By early evening she has a fire, and a pile of
ekwa
lies baked and ready. She hopes the men will bring some meat to complete the meal. During the evening hours several men return. Some have honey, a few have nothing, and one arrives with the carcass of a warthog. After he singes the animal’s hair off in a fire, men and women gather to divide it. Following the typical practice of hunter-gatherers, many men in the camp get a share, but the successful hunter makes sure his friends, family, and relatives get the most. Soon each household fire is cooking meat. The delicious smells enrich the night air. The meat and the roasted
ekwa
are quickly consumed. As the camp settles into sleep, enough
ekwa
remains for breakfast the following day.
The Hadza illustrate two major features of the sexual division of labor among hunter-gatherers that differentiate humans sharply from nonhuman primates. Women and men spend their days seeking different kinds of foods, and the foods they obtain are eaten by both sexes. Why our species forages in such an unusual way (compared to primates and all other animals, whose adults do not share food with one another) has never been fully resolved. There are many variations in the particular foods obtained. Tierra del Fuego’s bitter climate provided few plant foods, so while men hunted sea mammals, women would dive for shellfish in the frigid shallows. In the tropical islands of northern Australia, there was so much plant food that women brought enough to feed all the family and still found time to hunt occasional small animals. Men there did little hunting, mostly playing politics instead.
Although the specific food types varied from place to place, women always tended to provide the staples, whether roots, seeds, or shellfish. These foods normally needed processing, which could involve a lot of time and laborious work. Many Australian tribes prepared a kind of bread called damper from small seeds, such as from grasses. Women gathered the plants and heaped them so their seeds would drop and collect in a pile. They threshed the seeds by trampling, pounding, or rubbing them in their hands, winnowed them in long bark dishes, and ground them into a paste. The result was occasionally eaten raw but was more often cooked on hot ashes. The whole process could take more than a day. Women worked hard at such tasks because their children and husbands relied on the staples women prepared.
Men, by contrast, tended to search for foods that were especially appreciated but could not be found easily or predictably. They hoped for such prizes as meat and honey, which tended to come in large amounts and tasted delicious. Their arrival in camp made the difference between happiness and sadness. Phyllis Kaberry’s description of an aborigine camp in western Australia is typical: “The Aborigines continually craved for meat, and any man was apt to declare, ‘me hungry alonga bingy,’ though he had had a good meal of yams and damper a few minutes before. The camp on such occasions became glum, lethargic, and unenthusiastic about dancing.” Hunting large game was a predominantly masculine activity in 99.3 percent of recent societies.
Hints of comparable sex differences in food procurement have been detected in primates. Female lemurs tend to eat more of the preferred foods than males. In various monkeys such as macaques, guenons, and mangabeys, females eat more insects and males eat more fruit. Among chimpanzees, females eat more termites and ants, and males eat more meat. But such differences are minor because in every nonhuman primate the overwhelming majority of the foods collected and eaten by females and males are the same types.
Even more distinctive of humans is that each sex eats not only from the food items they have collected themselves, but also from their partner’s finds. Not even a hint of this complementarity is found among nonhuman primates. Plenty of primates, such as gibbons and gorillas, have family groups. Females and males in those species spend all day together, are nice to each other, and bring up their offspring together, but, unlike people, the adults never give each other food. Human couples, by contrast, are expected to do so.
In foraging societies a woman always shares her food with her husband and children, and she gives little to anyone other than close kin. Men likewise share with their wives, whether they have received meat from other men or have brought it to camp themselves and shared part of it with other men. The exchanges between wife and husband permeate families in every society. The contributions might involve women digging roots and men hunting meat in one culture, or women shopping and men earning a salary in another. No matter the specific items each partner contributes, human families are unique compared to the social arrangements of other species because each household is a little economy.
Attempts to understand how the sexual division of labor arose in our evolutionary history have been strongly affected by whether women or men are thought to have provided more of the food. It used to be thought that women typically produced most of the calories, as occurs among the Hadza. Worldwide across foraging groups, however, men probably supplied the bulk of the food calories more often than women did. This is particularly true in the high, colder latitudes where there are few edible plants, and hunting is the main way to get food. In an analysis of nine well-studied groups, the proportion of calories that came from foods collected by women ranged from a maximum of 57 percent, in the desert-living G/wi Bushmen of Namibia, down to a low of 16 percent in the Aché Indians of Paraguay. Women provided one-third of the calories in these societies, and men two-thirds. But such averages do not give an accurate sense of the value of items each sex contributes. At different times of year, the relative importance of foods obtained by women and men can change, and overall each sex’s foods can be just as critical as the other’s in maintaining health and survival. Furthermore, each sex makes vital contributions to the overall household economy regardless of any difference in the proportion of food calories contributed.
The division of labor by sex affects both household subsistence and society as a whole. Sociologist Emile Durkheim thought that its most important result was to promote moral standards, by creating a bond within the family. Specialization of labor also increases productivity by allowing women and men to become more skilled at their particular tasks, which promotes efficient use of time and resources. It is even thought to be associated with the evolution of some emotional and intellectual skills, because our reliance on sharing requires a cooperative temperament and exceptional intelligence. For such reasons anthropologists Jane and Chet Lancaster described the sexual division of labor as the “fundamental platform of behavior for the genus
Homo,
” and the “true watershed for differentiating ape from human lifeways.” Whether they were right in thinking the division began with the genus
Homo
is debated. Though I agree with the Lancasters, many think the division of labor by sex started much later. But there is no doubt of its importance in making us who we are.
The classic explanation in physical anthropology for this social structure is essentially what Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin proposed: when meat became an important part of the human diet, it was harder for females than males to obtain. Males with a surplus would have offered some to females, who would have appreciated the gift and returned the favor by gathering plant foods to share with males. The result was an incipient household. Physical anthropologist Sherwood Washburn put it this way:
When males hunt and females gather, the results are shared and given to the young, and the habitual sharing between a male, a female, and their offspring becomes the basis for the human family. According to this view, the human family is the result of the reciprocity of hunting, the addition of a male to the mother-plus-young social group of the monkeys and apes.