A document "skews" the image of prehistoric women

• The documentary

  Lady Sapiens

  conveys an image of prehistoric women marred by many biases, according to our partner The Conversation.

• Indeed, nothing attests that the Paleolithic woman could, as

  Lady Sapiens

  suggests

  , choose her partners, control her fertility, access the same activities and exercise the same social influence as men.

• The analysis of this phenomenon was carried out by Anne Augereau, protohistorian specialist in the Neolithic and the evolution of tooling, Christophe Darmangeat, HDR lecturer in social anthropology and Nicolas Teyssandier, prehistorian in charge of research.

The idea that the Paleolithic woman would have been demeaned by centuries of misogynist prejudices constitutes an inexhaustible source of inspiration today.

The latest work in this vein,

, which brings together a video game, a documentary and a book, enjoys wide media coverage.

At first glance, for anyone concerned with the emancipation of women and the promotion of scientific knowledge, this is only cause for celebration. However,

conveys an image of prehistoric women marred by many biases, by restoring what appears much more as a contemporary fantasy than the real state of scientific knowledge. The Paleolithic woman is thus depicted in the guise of a

emancipated, choosing her partners, controlling her fertility, accessing more or less the same activities as men and exercising social influence on an equal footing with them.

In order to achieve this result, the presentation seeks to eliminate all elements which might suggest even the simple possibility of male domination.

A biased presentation: the gendered division of labor

Thus, the gendered division of labor, which constitutes an essential dimension of this male domination, is presented as weak or even absent in the first European societies of

, between 40,000 and 12,000 years ago.

therefore insists on the idea that women hunted small animals and that they participated in collective hunts, which is quite likely. However, as the observation of all known hunter-gatherers in ethnology demonstrates, this fact in no way prevented women from being the object of a series of prohibitions of remarkable consistency: these are in fact almost universally excluded from the handling of cutting or piercing weapons.

Illustration of an Upper Paleolithic camp (Gravettian era) narrating human activity during this period © MothsART / Wikimedia CC BY-SA 1.0

Apart from the Agta of the Philippines, no known hunter-gatherer population has ever allowed women to wield spears and bows and thus intervene in the bloody killing of big game.

There is therefore a bias in taking precisely this people as an example ... by omitting to specify that they obtained their plant products from neighboring farmers, and that they were therefore entirely specialized in the acquisition of meat.

The processing of archaeological information stems from the same imbalance.

If the investigation is difficult due to a very small number of skeletons, a study dating back some ten years has shown that male right elbows - and they alone - bore the mark of repeated throwing, which he said. is easy to interpret by a parallel with the ethnographic observations where the weapons launched, with the help of a thruster for example, are handled by the men.

The authors of

certainly mention this study ... but it is to immediately bring to the pinnacle a discovery made a year ago, which would have proved that "certain women of the Upper Paleolithic, like men, threw weapons to kill the big game ”(p. 235).

Woman huntress of the early American continent (Sciences Advances, 2020, vl. 6, n ° 45) © Matthew Verdolivo / UC Davis IET Academic Technology Services (via The Conversation)

However, the only female corpse found in Peru, buried with hunting weapons, could only be sexed with a probability of about 80%, a figure well below the confidence threshold normally required, namely 95%. . As for the assertion of the discoverers that 30% to 50% of hunters in ancient America were huntresses, it is based on a sample of only 27 individuals among whom the data of 4 skeletons, including 3 female, are considered reliable by the authors themselves. A healthy scientific attitude would therefore require that a study claiming, on the basis of such tenuous clues, to reveal a reality at odds with all ethnological observations, be received with the caution it deserves.

Still concerning the gendered division of labor, other elements mentioned emerge from equally hasty conclusions.

Thus, these ornaments from the culture of the Aurignacian, about 37,000 years ago, the realization of which is attributed to women on the sole basis of the smallness of the ivory pearls that composed them.

The same is true of the famous negative hands affixed to the walls of the caves, and which were attributed to female artists on the basis of Manning's index, based on the proportions between the fingers.

However, forensic anthropology has since shown that it could not be considered a sure method to discriminate the sex of handprints in wall art.

Negative hand and punctuation from the Pech Merle cave (Lot), so-called Gravettian culture, Late Paleolithic © authors (via The Conversation)

Abduction of women and polygamy

When the book

evokes a possible male domination, it is from two essential angles: that of polygamy and the abduction of women.

We read that the abduction of women "probably does not respond to an anthropological reality" (p. 88).

One speaker nevertheless conceded that it could have been observed, while minimizing its impact.

In reality, the abduction of women is one of the most banal realities in ethnology.

It has been amply documented in hunter-gatherer populations, and reflects the existence of unilateral rights of men over women.

As for polygamy, we read that “the ethnography of hunter-gatherers teaches us that the form of privileged relationship is monogamy.

This is best suited to a society where we cannot be too many… ”(p. 90).

This way of presenting things is very biased to say the least.

An overwhelming majority of hunting-gathering societies allow polygamy - sometimes to very high degrees - and almost always, reserving it only to men.

A Mangaridji family (Australia), photographed in 1912 by B. Spencer.

The man in the center "owned" at least six wives © L. Hiatt, Arguments about Aborigines, p.

Cambridge University Press, 1996, p.

74 (via The Conversation)

Forgotten male domination

Once the foregoing is minimized or dismissed, the authors describe

as "a woman of action", who was possibly a "woman of power" (p. 203).

Paleolithic women therefore enjoyed a "privileged status" (p. 203) - according to the documentary, they were "respected, honored, revered".

However, the essential question remains that of male domination, observed in the great majority of human societies.

This domination is expressed with particular vigor in matters of matrimonial and sexual rights, the husband being able to lend or repudiate his wife, while she did not have any kind of equivalent right.

In many societies, it was furthermore legitimized by a religion whose secrets were forbidden to women.

Not a word is said about these customs, and therefore on the possibility that they date back, in one form or another, to this time.

It would be nice to argue the absence of archaeological traces: unequal sexual or matrimonial rights leave no material imprint.

In itself, the absence of direct archaeological evidence of male domination therefore does not allow any conclusion.

Our “PREHISTORY” file

In fact, the message conveyed by

is that a woman involved "in many daily activities essential to the survival of her family" (p. 203) cannot be inferior. Yet this is a vision belied by the entire history of gender domination and, beyond that, of the exploitation of labor. One only has to look at our own society to realize that doing useful work is in no way a guarantee of recognition, and even less of social power.

The story that

weaves

presents a modernized version of the myth of the primitive matriarchy where it would be the productive activity of women that would have ensured gender equality.

In fact, insofar as the gaps in the archaeological documentation can be illuminated by ethnological observations, it is likely that the societies of the

Paleolithic

were marked as much by the gendered division of labor as by higher or lower levels of male domination.

There is no doubt that there is something appealing about claiming otherwise.

But for science, as for the emancipation of women, the most attractive theories are not necessarily the most correct and, therefore, the most useful.

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What if hunting had been decisive for the evolution of the human brain?

This analysis was written by Anne Augereau, protohistorian, specialist in the Neolithic and the evolution of tools at the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP), Christophe Darmangeat, HDR lecturer in social anthropology at the University de Paris and Nicolas Teyssandier, prehistorian, researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) [with the contribution of Fanny Bocquentin, Bruno Boulestin, Dominique Henry-Gambier, Jean ‑ Loïc Le Quellec, Catherine Perlès and Priscille Touraille].

The original article was published on The Conversation website.

Declaration of interests

The authors do not work, do not advise, do not own shares, do not receive funds from an organization that could benefit from this article, and have not declared any affiliation other than their research organization.

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