Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (20 page)

Across the Middle East at that time, there were at least five other transformations, in what is now Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Israel, and Palestine, including Jericho; the region was a cradle of farming, but it makes no sense to try to pinpoint the origins, because the genes from wheat to goats show independent transitions even in these places, separated by mere hundreds of miles. Beyond them, Cyprus and Greece were only a little behind. Ideas may have migrated, but the tamed plants and animals did not. This was cultural evolution in parallel. It occurred independently in places throughout the world, wherever a well-watered soil enabled wild plant management, population growth, and the passage from following herds to tending and breeding them. It was also an evolutionary coup for the plants and animals, which reaped great reproductive benefits by cozying up to our ancestors.

This shift, eventually worldwide, began independently in many places: China cultivated millet on the Yellow River, rice on the Yangtze; New Guinea, yams, taro, and bananas; West Africa, gourds and sorghum; Aztec Mexico, maize and squash; the Incan Andes, potato and quinoa; and the Amazon basin, peanuts, manioc, and chili. None of these civilizations had to get the idea from the others. Anthropologist Marvin Harris liked to call the New World the “Second Earth,” because it independently repeated the Old World experiment, going from foraging to farming and on to cities and empire. Women’s work and, no doubt, their creativity were involved in each transition, yet the consequences for them were profound, pervasive, and none too happy.

But what brought the change about? In 2012 archaeologist Melinda Zeder, building on half a century of research, updated what is called
the Broad Spectrum Revolution. This was the worldwide intensification of hunting and gathering that began by about twelve thousand years ago, corresponding to the oldest layer of the Zagros site. Population growth both caused and resulted from the changes; the world had filled up with hunter-gatherers who no longer readily found empty places to go. Global warming after the last ice age played a role. Certain locales with rich, varied resources now allowed more diversified hunting and gathering, based on different abundances around the year. People settled in; they built more permanent homes and communal structures, formed alliances with other groups in the wider area, and had both the need and the power to defend what they had built against intruders. Inequality, political maneuvers, coalition building, and formal armed conflict enhanced men’s power.

This new kind of hunter-gatherer culture was seen in real time in the Northwest Coast Indians, like the Tlingit and Kwakiutl. Anthropologist Susan Walter recently summarized what we know about these societies. They harvested abundant salmon, shellfish, and other marine resources; stored food; and had many other resources, enabling a dense population unknown to most hunter-gatherers. This plenty led to social classes, inherited rank and wealth, sizable permanent houses, ceremonies called potlatches with dazzling and even wasteful displays and giveaways of wealth, multiple wives for rich men, raiding, warfare, slavery for captives taken in war, and stunning, ambitious art like totem poles (sometimes with slaves buried under them).

Even in plural marriages, high-ranking women were privileged, doing preferred ceremonial work and crafts, and leaving the drudgery to junior wives and slaves. Women processed food and managed long-term food stores. They smoked salmon—the most important preserved food—and this task required more skill than fishing. Marriages sealed alliances, and wives served as ambassadors to their home communities. Women contributed greatly to subsistence and helped mount the lavish potlatches and feasts—but they did it on
behalf of their husbands, the chiefs, who had many wives and slaves. Large polygamous families were favored and led to more married children and more alliances.

Many cultures that sowed the first seeds in a hunter-gatherer world must have resembled these Native American societies. A spectacular site from an early example is Göbekli Tepe, in southern Turkey, which dates to around eleven thousand years ago. Its centerpiece is a group of rings of monumental stone pillars carved with symbolic figures—the world’s first known temple—that people made pilgrimages to from many miles around. It was contemporary with the earliest farming cultures, but its builders continued to depend entirely on hunting and gathering. Yet it had already begun to achieve the organization of large numbers of people that would characterize the farmers to come.

The societies responsible for these structures would soon go through a transition like the one in Zagros. Then they would become agricultural chiefdoms, like those in Hawaii, Africa, and the American Southeast—strictly tiered worlds with privileges of inherited rank and wealth, public politics, warfare, captives, slaves, formal religions, ornate ceremonies, substantial dwellings, multiple wives for men who mattered, and death or a subservient role for others. Yes, hunter-gatherers in some conditions had the population and settled life that led to organized inequality, between the sexes as well as among the social classes. But for most of our time on earth, hunter-gatherers were nomadic bands where men may have tried to dominate but women had a voice.

Strangely, the shift to agriculture in many parts of the world worsened health as it increased human numbers. In a 2011 study, Amanda Mummert and her colleagues, including the leading paleopathologist George Armelagos, who died in 2014, summarized a number of new excavations made since Armelagos and Mark Cohen first put forth the case for this counterintuitive claim a quarter century
before. Of the newer studies, fourteen showed a decline in height from before to after farming began, while just five showed the opposite, and in these cases other changes explained the trend. The fourteen can be added to the many older studies that showed declines in height, along with other indicators of poorer health.

Generally, the decline can be attributed to increased malnutrition and infectious disease in childhood. Farming made food abundant but narrowed its variety. Hunter-gatherers took advantage of seasonal and local variation in vegetables and fruits and also ate meat and fish, so they had a broader range of nutrients, while farmers often depended on one or two starchy crops. This also made them more likely to go hungry in a dry year. Infectious disease spreads faster in dense, settled populations—although in general, most traditional societies are found to have roughly similar high mortality. But how did the population grow if mortality wasn’t lower?

Women had more births.

Hunter-gatherers have later weaning ages and longer interbirth intervals than farmers, and this supports the idea that agriculture brought more frequent births, affecting women dramatically. Patricia Lambert, in 2009 in a paper called “Health Versus Fitness,” proposed a basic Darwinian explanation: the decline in health was a price that people making the transition had to pay for greater reproductive success—the only meaning of fitness in Darwinian terms. Certainly, this first demographic transition allowed our species to fill the world at a higher density than hunting and gathering had. But new discoveries suggest other consequences.

Paleopathologist Vered Eshed and her colleagues, in ongoing research, examined the skeletons of more than two hundred Natufians—hunter-gatherers living in what is now Israel and neighboring areas. They compared them to people living in the same places after the switch to farming. They did not study height, but they did look at life expectancy and disease. Trauma was equally prevalent in hunter-gatherers and farmers, although skull trauma
declined, possibly reflecting fewer encounters with large prey or less conflict. But infectious, inflammatory disease rose markedly, because of a denser population and rodents infesting grain stores. Hunter-gatherers, for most of their history, were also protected by their nomadic way of life.

The surprise was this: there was no overall decline in longevity in this sample, yet women’s life spans
declined
while men’s
increased
. Young women were especially vulnerable, probably because they were starting motherhood earlier and having more births closer together. This asymmetry is one reflection of the biological change in women’s lives when hunter-gatherers settled down as farmers. Women were probably working harder, but they also were turned into baby-making machines. They had always been the source of new life—this is as old as life itself—but with agriculture, the always-risky pregnancies and births came faster. It was almost as if Eve had gotten Adam’s curse as well as her own: she now tilled the soil by the sweat of her brow to get her bread
and
her sorrows in bringing forth children were multiplied. Women gave more of themselves and died younger even as they were cut out of public life.

To be sure, in many places there were transitional, small-scale cultures, relying on gardening and a few domestic animals, or sometimes even a form of agriculture, that left room for women’s influence. Anthropologists reported on similar cultures in modern times. In New Guinea, Margaret Mead described Tchambuli women as unadorned, managing, and industrious, fishing and going to market while men fussed with their hair, put makeup on, and went head-hunting; Mead’s account has proved to be exaggerated, but sex roles there were certainly not the same as in the West, whose readers she was addressing. Others have studied the Mosuo (also known as the Na), a peasant ethnic group in China, where women shared power because wealth passed through the female line; they kept their husbands literally at a distance—the men were basically tolerated visitors—and
occasionally replaced them. The Minangkabau in Indonesia (and the related Malays of the state of Negeri Sembilan, in Malaysia), also matrilineal, reckoned descent from a queen mother; women had more influence than in many cultures—controlling marriage, for example. And the Ashanti of Ghana were a matrilineal kingdom in which women ran markets and passed their brother’s wealth to their children.

In matrilineal societies, roughly a tenth of the world’s cultures, women had more autonomy, including weaker restrictions on extramarital sex, since men passed most of their wealth to their sisters’ and not their wives’ children; you don’t have to care much about the paternity of your sister’s children, since you are equally related to them whoever their father is. In some of these cultures, the dueling dominations of husband and brother gave a woman more breathing space and more control of her life as she played the two men against each other. But elsewhere she was under one or both their thumbs, and polygamy was allowed to them but not to her. So far, there has never been a
matriarchal
society—one truly run by women, not even where chiefs and kings inherited everything from their mothers.

Among the Malays of Negeri Sembilan, for example, men were considered to have stronger
semangat,
which is the gatekeeper of the self, reducing the likelihood of spirit possession. This contrasts interestingly with the !Kung, where men are considered more likely to be able to leave their bodies during trance, but either way the ideology favors men. In summarizing their situation, Michael Peletz, the leading ethnographer of gender in this society, says that both men and women spend much of their lives in a social universe “deeply suffused with ambivalence, alienation, and tension.” This is true of all human societies. He also observes, “Through a complex chain of symbolic associations, men and women alike appear to view menstrual blood as indexing the limited extent to which humans are able to ‘rise above’ their animal natures” and that “menstrual blood, and women generally, represent to men (however consciously) the precarious foundations on which male ascendancy rests.” I would be
hard-pressed to find a better expression of the way men feel threatened by women.

The men in this culture claim that they have both less passion and more reason than women do, and women tend to agree with them, although there is substantial variation in individual views. Men seem to feel that the differences between them and women justify a certain level of irresponsibility as husbands and fathers. Significantly, wealthier women are more accepting of male hegemony than poorer women are. Men’s behavior toward their wives is often compared to elder brothers’ treatment of their sisters, and the husbands tend to fall short of the elder-brother ideal. Among the Minangkabau, especially as described several generations ago, the husband’s role was even more tenuous; he might visit his wife only from dusk till dawn, and his children might not recognize him in public. A traditional aphorism about husbands said, “Like the ash on a tree trunk, even a soft wind and it will fly away.” With them as with their Malay counterparts, we are still left with what anthropologist Audrey Richards called “the matrilineal puzzle”—as Peletz puts it, “how to trace descent through women yet allocate authority to men,” and also how to negotiate the power of a woman’s male relatives against the claims of her husband. But married men are also under pressure to satisfy the economic demands of their wives’
female
relatives, one of the sources of women’s power in this culture.

Despite centuries of Islam, in Muslim Southeast Asia women were less socially inferior than in neighboring East Asia and even, at the time, in the West. Female gods survived, and “Women predominated in many rituals associated with agriculture, birth, death, and healing, perhaps because their reproductive capacities were seen as giving them regenerative and spiritual powers that men could not match.” A kind of gender pluralism prevailed, with acceptance of some forms of unconventional gender behavior, relatively relaxed sexual mores (with certain red lines not to be transgressed), and a sense of women's right to sexual pleasure in marriage. Much of this
was due to matrilineal or bilateral reckoning of kinship and descent and the underlying belief systems.

If Minangkabau men were traditionally like ash on a tree trunk, this is even more the case with the Na of southwestern China. In fact, for many Na women, you could say that the ash never settled on the tree trunk in the first place. Here, even in recent decades, the husband was often little more than a furtive nighttime visitor, and he might share that status with many other men. More than for any other, this is, as in the title of Cai Hua’s ethnography, “a society without fathers or husbands
.
” Even a review in
American Anthropologist
that accused the book of exaggerating Na uniqueness (citing the famous Nayar of northern India and some Polynesian cultures) also said, “They clearly are an extreme case of privileging visits over marriage, and an extreme case of privileging matrilineal ties over marriage ties.”