Women! Know Your Place!

The New York Review of Books for October 22 carries a review by Steven Mithen (subscription only) of two books on evolutionary psychology: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham, and Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants, and the Origins of Language, by Dean Falk.

Who's cooking your dinner? Who's looking after your kids? If you are a man, it is probably the woman—or women—in your life. You know that women mainly do the daily domestic grind. And so it has been, not just throughout history but also throughout the last two million years of human evolution, according to Richard Wrangham, author of Catching Fire, and Dean Falk, author of Finding Our Tongues.

There was once a time—not too long ago—when men could wallow with pride in the Stone Age accomplishments of our sex. It was slaying beasts, making tools, and fighting each other that transformed a Stone Age primate, physically and mentally little different from a chimpanzee, into the big-brained language-using primate that strode out of Africa to dominate the world. How lucky for women that their Stone Age menfolk were so brave and clever.

It is now men who need to nod in acknowledgment at the accomplishments of the Stone Age women who undertook the cooking and childcare. For according to Wrangham and Falk, it is those activities that provided the causes and conditions for the evolution of large brains and language. Women should particularly appreciate these two fascinating books about our evolutionary past.

The evolutionary history of our species is by far the best story ever to be told. It is one that needs continual rewriting and retelling as our knowledge of the fossil and archaeological records improves, as the genomes of humans, apes, and monkeys are revealed and compared, as neuroscience penetrates the working of the brain, and as we appreciate the evolutionary significance of activities that have previously been
neglected, cooking and childcare being the two cases in point. While the details
remain under debate, astonishing progress has been made in our understanding of human origins ever since Darwin explained how natural selection works and the first human fossils were found 150 years ago.

Mithen finds plenty to disagree with in each book, mainly because each one tries to provide a "magic bullet" explanation for all of our cognitive development. Even so, each provides a new take on the development of humankind's social skills that merits reflection.