The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley Page A

(Does this ring any modern bells? Fancy chefs and barbecuing are the two most masculine forms of cooking today.) On average, across the world, each sex contributes similar quantities of calories, though the pattern varies from tribe to tribe: in Inuits, for example, most food is obtained by men, whereas in the Kalahari Khoisan people, most is gathered by women. But – and here is the crucial point – throughout the human race, males and females specialise and then share food.
    In other words, cooking encourages specialisation by sex. The first and deepest division of labour is the sexual one. It is an iron rule documented in virtually all foraging people that ‘men hunt, women and children gather’. The two sexes move ‘through the same habitat, making strikingly different decisions about how to obtain resources within that habitat, and often returning to a central location with the results of their labour.’ So, for example, while Hiwi women in Venezuela travel by foot to dig roots, pound palm starch, pick legumes and collect honey, their menfolk go hunting, fishing or collecting oranges by canoe; while Ache men in Paraguay hunt pigs, deer and armadillos for up to seven hours a day, the women follow them collecting fruit, digging for roots, gathering insects or pounding starch – and sometimes catching armadillos, too; while Hadza women in Tanzania collect tubers, fruit and nuts, men hunt antelope; while Greenland Inuit men hunt seals, women make stews, tools and clothing from the animals. And so on, through example after example. Even the apparent exceptions to the rule, where women do hunt, are instructive, because there is still a division of labour. Agta women in the Philippines hunt with dogs; men hunt with bows. Martu women in western Australia hunt goanna lizards; men hunt bustards and kangaroos. As one anthropologist put it after living with the Khoisan, ‘Women demand meat as their social right, and they get it – otherwise they leave their husbands, marry elsewhere or make love to other men.’
    What is true of extant hunter-gatherers was equally true of extinct ways of life, as far as can be ascertained. Cree Indian women hunted hares; men hunted moose. Chumash women in California gathered shellfish; men harpooned sea lions. Yahgan Indians (in Tierra del Fuego) hunted otters and sea lions; women fished. In the Mersey estuary near Liverpool are preserved dozens of 8,000-year-old footprints: the women and children appear to have been collecting razor clams and shrimps; the men’s prints are moving fast and paralleling those of red and roe deer.
    An evolutionary bargain seems to have been struck: in exchange for sexual exclusivity, the man brings meat and protects the fire from thieves and bullies; in exchange for help rearing the children, the woman brings veg and does much of the cooking. This may explain why human beings are the only great apes with long pair bonds.
    Just to be clear, this argument has nothing to do with the notion that ‘a woman’s place is in the home’ while men go out to work. Women work hard in hunter-gatherer societies, often harder than men. Neither gathering nor hunting is especially good evolutionary preparation for sitting at a desk answering the telephone. Anthropologists used to argue that the sexual division of labour came about because of the long, helpless childhood of human beings. Because women could not abandon their babies, they could not hunt game, so they stayed near the home and gathered and cooked food of the kind that was compatible with caring for children. With a baby strapped to your back and a toddler giggling at your feet, it is undoubtedly easier to gather fruit and dig roots than it is to ambush an antelope. The anthropologists have been revising the view that the division of labour by sex is all about childcare constraints, though. They have found that even when hunter-gatherer women do not face a hard choice between child care and hunting, they still