The Descent of Woman by Elaine Morgan

Author:Elaine Morgan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780285639843
Publisher: Souvenir Press
Published: 2001-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

Eight

Man the Hunter

We have now arrived in the Pleistocene. The hominids are moving up the rivers and settling on the shores of the new inland lakes. They are so accustomed after ten million years to using pebbles for tools that they use river pebbles, and ultimately (in inland areas where there are no pebbles at all) the nearest thing to pebbles they can find, such as flintstones. They are so accustomed to living in caves that since caves inland are harder to find they tend to settle in places where they can find them, and leave their bones and their relics there: hence ‘cavemen’.

Where they had been accustomed to covering the floor of the cave with dried seaweed, they now covered it with straw or furs of animals. Archaeologists have found one ancient cave in Nice, France, where relics of both traditions survive. They unearthed in the cave the remains of the place where the fire burned, and around it a pattern of tiny shells from the kind of molluscs that cling to the strands of seaweed, and just above that a number of claws (but no bones) from the skins of animals. Clearly it was not a gigantic step they had to take when the Pleistocene rains came down; it was not much more than a change of locale.

But the gap was over. Dramatically, their bones appeared again on the plains, where for millions of years no trace of them had been left. As Ardrey puts it: ‘We came marching back from wherever we had been.’ And we came back sea-changed and different: upright, bare-skinned, omnivorous, tool-using, in the first stage of recovering from the biological emergency, and in the first stages of true verbal communication.

I propose to examine in detail four facets of the androcentric legend concerning the major developments of this stage of our history. One is a rather romantic minority report by Robert Ardrey, who suggests that the seeds of our war-torn society were sworn at this time, because there were two speices of Australopithecines, one peaceful and one belligerent, and the belligerent one wiped out the peaceful one and was the ancestor of the bloodthirsty human race.

The other three are far more important, because they are almost universally accepted. Specialists may have reservations about them, but their reservations have not for the most part percolated into the public consciousness: the man in the street swallows them whole.

The first myth is that man at this time became a hunting carnivore, and that woman, being a non-hunter, stayed at home with her offspring waiting for her mate to bring home the sustenance without which none of them would have survived.

The second myth is that, as a consequence of this, woman already at this early date dwindled into a housewife, contributing nothing to human culture, while the males laid down all the foundations of technology and art.

The third myth is that during this time the human race became pair-bonded, because man the hunter needed a peaceful mind based

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