Try to picture very early humans and you might conjure up a cartoon-like image of a man in a leopard-print loincloth chasing a woolly mammoth with a spear. His wife, meanwhile, would be wearing the same style of leopard skin fetchingly tied at the shoulder – but she would be at home picking berries, perhaps with an infant strapped to her back.
But recently, science writers all over the media have been excited to report on a new study, published last month on the PLOS (Public Library of Science) open-access platform, which suggests that this imagined stark division of labour is inaccurate. “Worldwide survey kills myth of ‘man the hunter’,” announced Science magazine; CNN proclaimed the same myth “shattered”; and Spanish newspaper El Pais tells us that “Women have always hunted as much as men”.
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