The stereotypical image of human’s ancient ancestors depicts men clubbing women and drag them back to their caves. According to researchers at University College London (UCL) however, referring to sexist men as “cavemen” may be doing a disservice to cavemen. According to the scientists, hunter gatherer societies show strong indications of sexual equality.
Of course, the researchers couldn’t study the social structure of ancient humans directly. Instead a team from the the Hunter-Gatherer Resilience Project in UCL Anthropology lived for two years among existing groups in the Philippines and Kenya.
The team noted, as others have previously, a low level of relatedness in the hunter-gatherer bands they studied. On the surface this is counterintuitive because people rely on close kin for raising children and so typically show a strong preference for staying close to siblings, parents and grandparents.
The study, published in Science is the first to show a relationship between gender equality in residential decision making and the composition of hunter-gatherer groups.
The researchers gathered geological information on relationships, mobility between different camps and residence patterns after interviewing hundreds of individuals in various groups. This allowed the team to create a picture of how people in various camps were related to one another.
Despite the small intimate communities in which the hunter-gatherer’s lived, the researchers found large numbers of individuals within each group with no kinship ties to it.
Using the data they gathered the team created a computer simulation to model the process of camp population assortment. They found that in male dominated societies, such as pastoral or horticultural groups, camp relatedness was much higher than in groups where men and women both had influence.
In groups that displayed gender equality in decision making, families tended to alternate between camps where husbands had close family and camps where wives had close family.
“While previous researchers have noted the low relatedness of hunter-gatherer bands, our work offers an explanation as to why this pattern emerges. It is not that individuals are not interested in living with kin. Rather, if all individuals seek to live with as many kin as possible, no-one ends up living with many kin at all,” said Mark Dyble, the first author of the new study in a statement.
The UCL researchers not that traits including hyper-cooperation, cumulative culture and high cognition are a result of unique human social organization patters.
“Sex equality suggests a scenario where unique human traits such as cooperation with unrelated individuals could have emerged in our evolutionary past,” said Senior author, Dr Andrea Migliano.
Clearly these evolutionary excesses can be attributed to higher levels of sexual equality. Modern humans first appeared about 200 thousand years ago and human social structures appeared before that. Agricultural societies, on the other hand, first appeared about 12,000 years ago which is not enough time for serious evolution to have occurred.
