Queens of the Stone Age

Have scholars given the cavewoman a more passive image than she deserves?

By Laura Miller

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March 21, 2007 | The lifestyles of the female and prehistoric are a surprisingly frequent topic of conversation, especially when you consider that Paleolithic women didn't have corporate careers to abandon in favor of becoming stay-at-home moms or the disposable income to buy Jimmy Choo sandals. As with their educated upper-middle-class sisters of today, people think they understand exactly how prehistoric women lived, even though these notions often turn out to be more cartoon than reality. And I mean that literally, since single-panel cartoons in the New Yorker featuring shaggy cavemen in one-shoulder bearskin outfits dragging their consorts by the hair probably represent the sum of what most of us know about the lives of our (very) distant ancestors.

We've been talking about "cavewomen" a lot because in recent years the way people lived back then has become a justification for how people behave now. Dare to challenge any aspect of traditional sex roles, and someone will inevitably pipe up to explain that these matters were all settled back in the Pleistocene era and trying to change them goes against nature, evolution and the sum total of all human knowledge, little lady. It's astonishing, really, how well-informed the average person writing letters to the editor or posting comments to Web forums is about Paleolithic societies.

Actually, what's astonishing is how much the members of the peanut gallery think they know about such things, considering how few sureties real paleoanthropologists will swear to. "The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory," by J.M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer and Jake Page, promises to lay out everything the most current research has established about archaic women, and the truth is that it's pretty thin gruel. The authors can point out some embarrassing mistakes made by past experts and suggest some intriguing alternative interpretations of various facts and artifacts, but even so there's a lot of padding and extraneous material in this book's 300 pages.

The truth is that we can prove very, very little about how prehistoric people organized their social groups, especially when it comes to sex roles. We have bones, some tools and the remains of dwellings and other structures, but these can't tell us for sure who brought home the bacon or wore the pants, to use two inappropriately modern figures of speech. Sometimes these finds can't even tell us for sure who was who; one of the unsettling revelations in "The Invisible Sex" is that Lucy -- the famous Australopithecus afarensis whose 3.3 million-year-old fossilized remains were discovered in 1974 by archaeologists in a remote valley of the Awash River in Ethiopia, could possibly be a Luke instead. The leader of the expedition who found "her" says that the identification of the remains as female is not much more than an educated -- and possibly biased -- guess, based on the relative smallness of the bones.

The biased guessing in a lot of old-school anthropology comes in for some pointed ridicule in "The Invisible Sex." The scientists of generations past -- and the magazine and book illustrators and museum diorama designers who translated their theories into images -- had a fixation on the idea of prehistoric man as a mighty hunter, working in teams to bring down large, dangerous animals like mammoth and bison. A painting from the National Geographic archives (reproduced in this book) pictures a fivesome of well-developed and scantily clad Paleoindian studs battling the fearsome great short-faced bear, a predator the authors describe as "capable of bringing down any prey except perhaps an adult mammoth." This sort of fairy tale, along with scenarios in which bands of doughty hunters chased herds of mammoths off cliffs and returned laden with meat to camps of grateful women and children, "appear now to be mythmaking on the part of the paleoanthropological community," they explain.

Of the fictional short-faced bear hunt (an example of the now-discredited Clovis First theory concerning the reputedly rapacious initial settlers of North America), the authors write: "That any group of humans armed with only spears would ever attack such a creature is of course ludicrous. They would instead have exercised all their wiles to stay out of the way of such a profoundly dangerous killer. Yet, the very reverse image leaped into the imaginations of people who had convinced themselves that these supposed first Americans were preternaturally gifted hunters, capable of feats now known only from the special-effects department of Hollywood."

Their point is that, like Hollywood action films, many early conceptions of prehistoric life were fantasies, the work of anthropologists caught up in a thrillingly macho vision of our forebears that owes more to Conan the Barbarian than to the archaeological record. That vision rarely featured women, and when they did appear it was only to sit around awaiting the next delivery of mammoth steaks, for which, it was implied, they would trade their sexual favors or perhaps the handful of nuts and berries they'd rustled up on the side. So seductive is this "theme of man the hunter" that it prevailed when the remains of a diminutive new species of the genus Homo were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2004 (and promptly labeled "hobbits" by the press). An artist's drawing of the creature depicted it as bearded fellow holding a spear and carrying a freshly slain giant rat slung over his shoulder -- despite the fact that the chief find was a female.

Adovasio, Soffer and Page are not proponents of any New Age feminist theories about the distant past. They take pains to point out that there is not a shred of evidence to support the theory, advanced by the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, that many Neolithic societies were matriarchies devoted to Goddess worship. But they argue persuasively (if somewhat disjointedly) that the anthropologists and archaeologists of the past were invested in the conventional sex roles of their time. This often rendered them blind to the implications of some of their finds and uninterested in the crucial roles (apart from the merely reproductive one) that women probably played in prehistoric communities.

The evidence scientists use to construct theories about those communities falls into roughly three types. They look at fossils and artifacts; they observe contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures (or in some cases, other primates) and, more recently, they analyze the DNA of living humans to trace the distant origins of certain genetic mutations. Each method has its strengths and drawbacks, and sometimes the truth hides in plain sight.

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