Woman the hunter?

 Letter to Sci-Am

At the conclusion of the featured article, “Woman the Hunter,” (Sci-Am, November 2023) we are told that:

“It was the arrival some 10,000:years ago of agriculture, …, that led to rigid gendered roles…”

Before this time, the article asserts, woman was as much a hunter as man. What follows from this assertion is illuminating, first, because, as implied by the article, woman enjoyed a level of equality in Neanderthal times that she hasn’t enjoyed since; and, second, because the turn to agriculture meant a turn away from the nomadic hunter-gatherer status, and  toward civil society, or civilization; and this in turn meant that women and men had to assign themselves the special roles which have been theirs until very recently. (The premise, incidentally, that it was through sheer brute force that men imposed their will on women  doesn’t hold, since, as asserted in the article, at the onset of agriculture women were as capable as men of determining their future, and we should therefore assume that the division of chores was made by mutual consent.) According to the article, therefore, this mutual agreement led us to what we are today—and women can absolutely take as much crediit as men for the development of civilization as we know it, good things and bad.