The Women's History of the World Read online

  How are we going to tell Father? For Nigel Calder, ‘the first lords of the universe were globules of coloured slime’3 – they may only have been protoplasmal molecules or start-up bacilli, but they were male. Yet in contradiction to this age-old bias of biology is the recent discovery that every single person on this planet is descended from the same primitive hominid, and that this common ancestor was a woman. Using the latest techniques of gene research into DNA, the molecular structure of gene inheritance, scientists working independently at the Universities of Berkeley, California and Oxford have succeeded in isolating one DNA ‘fingerprint’ that is common to the whole of the human race. This has remained constant for millennia despite the divergence of races and populations throughout the world – and it is incontrovertibly female. This research points directly to one woman as the original ‘gene fount’ for the whole of the human race. She lived in Africa about 300,000 years ago, and her descendants later migrated out of Africa and spread across the face of the globe, giving rise to all the people living today.4

  This work on the woman who could have been our grandmother Eve is still in its infancy, and controversial in its implications. Not least of the problems it poses for the sons of Adam is its implicit dismissal of the Christian myth – for the ‘gene fount mother’ necessarily had a mother herself, and the identity or numbers of her sexual partners were irrelevant, since hers was the only cell that counted. Indisputable, however, is the central role of women in the evolution of the species. In terms of the DNA messages that a new individual needs in order to become a human being, the essential genetic information is only ever contributed by and transmitted through the female. In that sense, each and every one of us is a child of Eve, carrying within our bodies the living fossil evidence of the first women who roamed the African plain side by side with their men.

  As this suggests, nothing could be further from the truth of the role played by early woman than the ‘hunter’s mate’ stereotype of the dim huddled figure beside the fire in the cave. From around 500,000 B.C., when femina erecta first stood up alongside homo erectus in some sun-drenched primordial gorge, many changes took place before both together became sapiens. And there is continuous evidence from a number of different sites throughout the Pleistocene age of women’s critical involvement in all aspects of the tribe’s survival and evolution generally thought of, like hunting, as reserved to men.

  The early woman was in fact intensively occupied from dawn to dusk. Hers was not a long life – like their mates, most hominid females, according to scientific analysis of fossil remains, died before they were twenty. Only a handful survived to thirty, and it was quite exceptional to reach forty.5 But in this short span, the first women evolved a huge range of activities and skills. On archaeological evidence, as well as that of existing Stone Age cultures, women were busy with and adept in:

  – food gathering

  – child care

  – leatherwork

  – making garments, slings and containers from animal skins

  – cooking

  – pottery

  – weaving grasses, reeds and bark strips for baskets

  – fashioning beads and ornaments from teeth or bone

  – construction of shelters, temporary or permanent

  – tool-making for a variety of uses, not simply agricultural – stone scrapers for skins, and sharp stone blades for cutting out animal sinews for garment-making

  – medicinal application of plants and herbs for everything from healing to abortion.

  Of women’s duties, food gathering unquestionably came top of the list, and this work kept the tribe alive. At no point in pre-history did women, with or without their children, rely on their hunting males for food. Certainly the men hunted, as in many ‘primitive’ societies they still do. Anthropologists have now surveyed around 175 hunter/gathering cultures in Oceania, Asia, Africa and America. In ninety-seven per cent of these, the hunting was exclusively dominated by the males of the tribe; in the remaining three per cent it was totally and invariably a male preserve. But these wide-ranging and well-documented studies also show how inefficient hunting is as a means of providing food. Meat from the kill comes in irregularly and infrequently – the !Kung bushmen of Botswana, for instance, hunt strenuously for a week, then do no more work for the rest of the month – and the meat, especially in hot climates, cannot be stored. As a result, only women’s gathering, not men’s hunting, sustains the tribe. Working unceasingly during the daylight hours, women regularly produce as much as eighty per cent of the tribe’s total food intake, on a daily basis. One interpretation of these figures is that in every hunter/gatherer society, the male members were and are doing only one-fifth of the work necessary for the group to survive, while the other four-fifths is carried out entirely by the women.6

  In earliest times, women’s gathering served not only to keep the tribe alive – it helped to propel the race forward in its faltering passage towards civilization. For successful gathering demanded and developed skills of discrimination, evaluation and memory, and a range of seeds, nut-shells and grasses discovered at primitive sites in Africa indicate that careful and knowledgeable selection, rather than random gleaning, dictated the choice.7 This work also provided the impetus for the first human experiments with technology. Anthropologists’ fixation on man the hunter has designated the first tools as weapons of the hunt.8 But since hunting was a much later development, earlier still would have been the bones, stones or lengths of wood used as aids to gathering for scratching up roots and tubers, or for pulverizing woody vegetation for ease of chewing. All these were women’s tools, and the discovery of digging sticks with fire-hardened points at primitive sites indicates the problem-solving creativity of these female dawn foragers, who had worked out that putting pointed sticks into a low fire to dry and harden would provide them with far more efficient tools for the work they had to do.9

  Unlike the worked flint heads of axes, spears and arrows, however, very few of the earlier tools have survived to tell the tale of women’s ingenuity and resourcefulness. Sticks also lacked the grisly glamour of the killing-tools in the eyes of archaeologists, and had no part to play in the unfolding drama of Man the Hunter. Archaeology is likewise silent on the subject of another female invention, the early woman gatherer’s ‘swag bag’, the container she must have devised to carry back to the camp all she had found, foraged, caught or dug up in the course of her day’s hunting.10

  For the volume of food needed, and the range of food sources available, make it impossible that the women gatherers could have carried all the provender in their hands or inside their clothing. Their haul would have included not merely grasses, leaves, berries and roots, but also vital protein in the form of lizards, ants, slugs, snails, frogs and grubs. Eggs and fish were rare treats but not unknown, and for shore-dwellers the sea presented a rich and bottomless food store. Whatever presented itself, from dead locust to decomposing snake, the woman gatherer could not afford to pass it up; nor, with the burden of sustaining life for all on her shoulders, could she return to the home site until her bag was full, when she faced the day’s final challenge, that of converting these intimidating raw materials into something resembling a palatable meal.

  Woman’s work of gathering would inevitably take on a wider and more urgent dimension when she had infants to feed as well as herself. Her first task as a mother would have been to adapt her gathering bag into a sling to carry her baby, since she had to devise some means of taking it with her when she went out to forage. As most early women did not live beyond their twenties, there would be no pool of older, post-menopausal women to look after the next generation of infants once their own were off their hands. Hominid babies were heavy, and got heavier as brains, and therefore skulls, became larger. Similarly, evolving bodies of mothers presented less and less hair for their infants to cling to. Whether she slung her baby diagonally across her breasts, or on her back in the less common papoose style of the native mothers of th
e New World, sling her she did. How? If only archaeology could tell us that.

  Mothering the young had other implications too, equally crucial both to early women and to the future of the race. Two factors made this work far more demanding than it had been to their primate grandmothers. First, human young take far longer to grow and become self-supporting than baby apes – they consequently need far more care, over an extended period of time, and cannot simply be swatted off the nipple and pointed at the nearest banana. Then again, the mothering of human babies is not just a matter of physical care. Children have to be initiated into a far more complex system of social and intellectual activity than any animal has to deal with, and in the vast majority of all human societies this responsibility for infants has been women’s primary work and theirs alone. How well the first mothers succeeded may be seen from the world history of the success of their descendants.

  The prime centrality of this work of mothering in the story of evolution has yet to be acknowledged. A main plank of the importance of Man the Hunter in the history of the human race has always been the undisputed claim that co-operative hunting among males called for more skill in communication and social organization, and hence provided the evolutionary spur to more complex brain development, even the origins of human society. The counter-argument is briskly set out by Sally Slocum:

  The need to organize for feeding after weaning, learning to handle the more complex socio-emotional bonds that were developing, the new skills and cultural inventions surrounding more extensive gathering – all would demand larger brains. Too much attention has been given to skills required by hunting, and too little to the skills required for gathering and the raising of dependent young [italics inserted].11

  Similarly women’s invention of food-sharing as part of the extended care of their children must have been at least as important a step towards group co-operation and social organization as the work of man the hunter/leader running his band. Women’s work as mothers of human infants who need a long growing space for postnatal development also involves them in numerous other aspects of maternal care (sheltering, comforting, diverting), in play, and in social activity with other mothers and other young. All these are decisively shown by modern psychology to enhance what we call IQ and must have been of critical value in assisting our branching away from the great apes in mental and conceptual ability. Female parents are not the only ones who can comfort, stimulate or play. But all these activities are very far removed from the supposed role of hunting, killing, primitive man.12

  Nor does the significance of the mother-child bond end there. In the myth of Man the Hunter, he invents the family. By impregnating his mate and stashing her away in the cave to mind the fire, he creates the basic human social unit which he then maintains by his hunting/killing. The American journalist Robert Ardrey, chief exponent of the hunting hypothesis, naively pictures the sexual division of the average primeval working day: ‘the males to their hunting range, the females to their home-site (we think of it today as the office and the home).’13 But in contradiction to this Big Daddy scenario, a mass of evidence shows that the earliest families consisted of females and their children, since all tribal hunting societies were centred on and organized through the mother. The young males either left or were driven out, while the females stayed close to their mothers and the original home-site, attaching their males to them. In the woman-centred family, males were casual and peripheral, while both nucleus and any networks developing from it remained female. These arrangements continue to operate in a number of still-existing Stone Age tribes worldwide, the so-called ‘living fossils’. As anthropologist W. I. Thomas stresses, ‘Children therefore were the women’s and remained members of her group. The germ of social organization was always the woman and her children and her children’s children.’14

  In fact the human debt to the first women goes on and on, the more we unravel the biological evidence. It is to early woman that we owe the fact that most of us are right-handed, for instance. As Nigel Calder explains, ‘handedness, the typical right-handedness of modern humans, is a female phenomenon’.15 From time immemorial woman has made a custom of carrying her baby on the left side of the body, where it can be comforted by the beating of her heart. This frees the right hand for action, and would have been the spur towards the evolution of predominant right-handedness in later human beings. Support for the ‘femaleness of handedness’, Calder shows, comes in the fact that to this day infant girls develop handedness, like speech, very much more quickly and decisively than boys.

  One last biological legacy of woman to man deserves more gratitude than it seems to have received. At primate level, the male penis is an unimpressive organ. So far from terrorizing any female, the average King Kong can only provoke sympathy for his meagre endowment in relation to this vast bulk. Man, however, developed something disproportionately large in this line, and can truly afford to feel himself lord of creation in the penile particular. And he owes it to woman. Quite simply, when femina aspiring to be erecta hoisted herself on to her hind legs and walked, the angle of the vagina swung forward and down, and the vagina itself moved deeper into the body. The male penis then echoed the vagina’s steady progress, following the same evolutionary principle as the giraffe’s neck: it grew in order to get to something it could not otherwise reach.16 This need also dictated the uniquely human experimentation with frontal sex. The future of the species demanded that man gained entry somehow. But the ease with which most couples move between frontal and rear-entry positions during intercourse is a constant reminder of the impact of woman’s evolutionary biology.

  The biology of woman in fact holds the key to the story of the human race. The triumph of evolution occurred in the female body, in one critical development that secured the future of the species. This was the biological shift from primate oestrus, when the female comes on heat, to full human menstruation. Although generally unsung, indeed unmentioned, female monthly menstruation was the evolutionary adaptation that preserved the human species from extinction and ensured its survival and success.

  For female oestrus in the higher primates is a highly inefficient mechanism. The great female primates, chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans, come on heat rarely, and produce one infant every five or six years. This puts the whole species dangerously at risk of extinction, and the great apes today survive only in small numbers and in the most favourable environments. With twelve chances of conceiving in every year, instead of one every five years, the human female has a reproductive capacity sixty times higher than that of her primate sisters. Menstruation, not hunting, was the great evolutionary leap forward. It was through a female adaptation, not a male one, that ‘man’ throve, multiplied and conquered the globe.

  And female menstruation was not merely a physical phenomenon like eating or defecation. Recent commentators have argued that women’s so-called curse operated to cure not only man’s shortage of offspring, but also his primeval mental darkness. In their pioneering work on menstruation, The Wise Wound, Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrave stress the connection made in primitive societies between the lunar and menstrual cycles, suggesting that woman first awakened in humankind the capacity to recognize abstracts, to make connections and to think symbolically. For Elise Boulding, these mental functions arise from an earlier stage in which women taught men the principles of number, calendar organization and counting: ‘Every woman had a “body calendar” – her monthly menstrual cycle. She would be the first to notice the relationship between her own body cycle and the lunar cycle.’17 Other female authorities have expressed their amusement at the naïvety of one professor, the celebrated Jacob Bronowski, who on the TV series ‘The Ascent of Man’ solemnly described a prehistoric reindeer bone with thirty-one scratches on it as ‘obviously a record of the lunar month’. Commenting on ‘The Ascent of You Know Who’, Vonda McIntyre demurred: ‘Do tell. A thirty-one-day lunar month? I think it a good deal more likely that the bone was a record of a woman’s menstrual
cycle.’18

  Objectively this carefully notated silent witness of an irretrievably lost transaction could have been either of these; or both; or neither. But in the routine, unconscious denial of women’s actions, experiences, rhythms, even of their ability to count, the possibility that it could have been a woman’s record of her own intimate personal life was not even considered.

  No attention at all, in fact, has been given to the implication for women when light and infrequent oestrus gave way to full menstruation, with bleeding in varying but substantial amounts for one week in every four. What did early woman do? Did she simply squat on a pile of leaves and leak? This is uncomfortably close to the passive female fire-watcher of the Man the Hunter myth – and it is out of the question that the tribal food-gatherers, so vital to survival, could have been out of action for twenty-five per cent of their time. But if the women moved around at all, an unchecked menstrual flow would have resulted in badly chapped and painful inner thighs, especially in colder or windy weather, with the added risk of infection in hot climates. Skin scabbing so caused would hardly have had a chance to heal before the menstrual flow was on again.

  A number of indicators point to the solution. In the wild, female monkeys are observed to bunch up pads of leaves to wipe off oestrus spotting. From still-surviving Stone Age cultures it is recorded that the women weave or fashion clothes, slings for their babies, and rough bags to carry what they scavenge or garner. The first women must have devised menstrual slings or belts, with some kind of pad to absorb the heaviest flow. Even today both Maori and Eskimo women contrive pads of a fine soft moss, while Indonesian women make tampon-type balls of a soft vegetable fibre. The Azimba women of Central Africa use the same fibre as pads, which are held in place by an oval sling of soft goatskin fastened to a belt of twisted thong.19 It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the women capable of bringing the infant human race forward into the future could also have found the way to deal efficiently with their own bodies.