to assume that in Paleolithic society men were also responsible for hunting, and women for gathering, an assumption that led to the familiar “man the hunter/woman the gatherer” dichotomy. Human remains provide some evidence for this, as skeletons and teeth indicate the type of tasks the person performed while they were alive, and in some places there are gender differences. But in many Paleolithic sites male and female skeletons show little evidence of sexually differentiated work. Archaeologists studying human remains often assumed that those buried with hunting tools such as projectile points and blades were male, but recently developed techniques that analyze tooth enamel have determined that many of these were female. (This is a good example of the way assumptions about gender can shape research findings.) In some of the world’s more recent foraging peoples, such as the Agta of the Philippines, women hunt large game, and in numerous others women are involved in certain types of hunting, such as driving herds of animals toward a cliff or compound or throwing nets over them. Where women hunt, they either carry their children in slings or leave them with other family members, suggesting that cultural norms, rather than the biology of lactation, is the basis for male hunting. The gender division of labor was most likely flexible, particularly during periods of scarcity, and also changed over time.
Both hunted and gathered foods were cooked, a task made easier in many cultures with the invention of clay pots, themselves “roasted” in a fire at a temperature high enough to make them watertight. Because organic materials from the Paleolithic survive only very rarely, it is difficult to speculate about clothing and other soft material goods, although bone needles for sewing and awls for punching holes in leather can give us some indications. Clothing and headgear were often decorated with beads made from shells, ivory, animal teeth, and other hard materials, and from the placement of these in undisturbed burials archaeologists can see that the clothing of men and women was often different, as was clothing in some places at different stages of life. Thus gender and age had a social meaning.
Paleolithic Society and Spirituality
Small bands of humans – 20 or 30 people was a standard size for foragers in harsh environments – were scattered across broad areas, but this did not mean that each group lived in isolation. Their travels in search of food brought them into contact with one another, not simply for talking, celebrating, and feasting, but also for providing opportunities for the exchange of sexual partners, which was essential to group survival. Today we understand that having sexual relations with close relatives is disadvantageous because it creates a greater risk of genetic disorders. Earlier societies did not have knowledge of genetics, but most of them developed rules against sexual relations among immediate family members, and sometimes very complex rules about allowable partners among more distant relatives. Some natural scientists argue that incest taboos have a biological or instinctual basis, while most anthropologists see them as cultural, arising from desires to lessen intergroup rivalries or increase opportunities for alliances with other lineages. Whatever the reasons, people sought mates outside their own band, and bands became linked by bonds of kinship, which in a few places has been traced through the study of bone chemistry and DNA. Mating arrangements varied in their permanence, but many groups seem to have developed a somewhat permanent arrangement whereby a person – more often a woman than a man – left her or his original group and joined the group of a mate, what would later be termed marriage.
Stereotypical representations of Paleolithic people often portray a powerful fur-clad man holding a club and dragging off a (usually attractive) fur-clad woman by her hair, or men going off to hunt while women and children crouch around a fire, waiting for the men to bring back great slabs of meat. Studies of the relative importance of gathering to hunting, women’s participation in hunting, and gender relations among contemporary foraging peoples have led some analysts to turn these stereotypes on their heads. They see Paleolithic bands as egalitarian groups in which the contributions of men and women to survival were recognized and valued, and in which both men and women had equal access to the limited amount of resources held by the group. This may also be a stereotype, overly romanticizing Paleolithic society as a sort of vegetarian commune. Social relations among foragers were not as hierarchical as they were in other types of societies, but many foraging groups from more recent periods had one person who held more power than others, and that person was almost always a man. In fact, anthropologists who study such groups call them “Big Man” societies. This debate about gender relations is often part of larger discussions about whether Paleolithic society – and by implication “human nature” – was primarily peaceful and nurturing or violent and brutal, and whether these qualities are gender-related. (See the later section on the origins of patriarchy for more on this debate.) Like much else about the Paleolithic, sources about gender and about violence are fragmentary and difficult to interpret; there may simply have been a diversity of patterns, as there is among more modern foragers.
Whether peaceful and egalitarian, violent and hierarchical, or somewhere in between, heterosexual relations produced children, who were fed as infants by their mothers or by another woman who had recently given birth. Breast milk was the only food available that infants could easily digest, so mothers nursed their children for several years. Along with providing food for infants, extended nursing brings a side benefit: it suppresses ovulation and thus acts as a contraceptive. Foraging groups needed children to survive, but too many could tax scarce food resources. Many groups may have practiced selective infanticide or abandonment. They may also have exchanged children of different ages with other groups, which further deepened kinship connections between groups. Other than for feeding, children were most likely cared for by other male and female members of the group as well as by their mothers, as they are in modern foraging cultures.
Within each band, and within the larger kin group, individuals had a variety of identities; they were simultaneously fathers, sons, brothers, and mates, or mothers, daughters, sisters, and mates. Each of these identities was relational (parent to child, sibling to sibling, mate to mate), and some of them, especially parent to child, gave one power over others. The interweaving of these relationships and their meaning varied from culture to culture, but one’s status in one relationship affected one’s status in the others, and often changed throughout one’s life. A woman’s situation as daughter or sister in a specific kin group, for example, shaped her relationship with her mate; her becoming a mother often further altered her status vis-à-vis the father of her child or other kin group members. A man’s relationship with his father and his status in the kin group often changed when he took a mate, and in some areas changed again if he became the father of a son. Judging by later ethnographic parallels, how kin groups were defined and understood varied tremendously, but they remained significant power structures for millennia, and in some areas still have influence over major aspects of life, such as an individual’s job or marital partner.
Burials provide evidence of social differentiation and social connections. The people who buried a young adult woman near Bordeaux in southern France about 19,000 years ago, for example, dressed her in clothing, covered her with ochre pigment, and placed her in a container made of stone slabs, along with a few perforated shells, a bead, some tools made of bone and stone, bones of antelope and reindeer, and 71 red deer canine teeth that had holes drilled in them for stringing and may have been on a necklace. Red deer did not live near Bordeaux at this time of worsening climate, so the teeth had most likely been brought there over many years through networks of exchange, perhaps given as gifts in marriages or in trade for other goods. Something about this young woman or her death led those who buried her to decide to include so many valuable grave goods; through this they referenced both her individual identity (and perhaps high social position) and her links to a social network that ranged across time and space.
Bands of foragers may have been exogamous, but as humans spread out over much of the globe, kin groups and larger networks of interrelated people often became isolated from one another, and people mated only within this larger group. Thus local exogamy was accompanied by endogamy at a larger scale, and over many generations humans came to develop differences in physical features, including skin and hair color, eye and body shape, and amount of body hair, although genetically there is less variety among them than among chimpanzees. Language also changed over generations, so that thousands of different languages were eventually spoken. Groups created widely varying cultures and passed them on to their children, further increasing diversity among humans.
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