| There are different ways of looking at women in human evolution - biological, cultural and genetic. Different models suggest different roles women played, but how these ideas are approached and analyzed has a great deal to do with who is looking at the data. Arguments are still being made against the active and aggressive roles of women in prehistory. Lacking scientific evidence to illustrate absolute behaviors, it falls to women Paleoanthropologists to break the glass ceiling and give a voice to the women who helped shape humanity (Zihlman 1997:108). As such, the neglect of women in the prehistoric record is slowly being corrected. Because empirical understanding of the past can only come from the material fossil evidence, even with scientific data analysis, gender assumptions are made because of prevailing cultural biases. Because mitochondrial DNA is passed down matrilineally, the idea of using this to trace human ancestry has been challenged for its “feminist” attempts to re-write hominid history. By looking at mtDNA, it is possible to analyze changes in humans over time, allowing for human variation, migration and gene selection (Cann 1997:80). For example, if women selected mates based on cultural and environmental adaptation, it can be argued that mtDNA is a roadmap to a better understanding of human origins, as well as population diversity. Cann recommends a more feminist critique of extant hypotheses – focusing on the roles of women, rather than men, in human evolution (1997:87). The role women play in hominid evolution is not static. Skeletal morphology, which illustrates the development of bipedal hominids over time, and current understanding of human infant underdevelopment (from primate babies who can grasp and walk, to human babies who are completely helpless) suggest that these transformations directly influenced women, who adjusted culturally to allow for such changes.The "man the hunter" model suggests that bipedalism was the direct result of men having to walk long distances to hunt meat to support pair-bonded females and children. However, this model of active, bipedal men bringing food to helpless, quadrapedal women is NOT supported by the archaeological record, primate behavior, or modern foraging groups, nor can the theory be supported by differences in brain function (Falk 1998:130). Additionally, there are multiple theories regarding the cultural and physical evolution of hominids, including environmental, food-sharing, pair-bonding and foraging patterns (Ehrenberg 1989:19). Any or all of these influences would have profoundly effected human development – and the complexity of humans suggests that both males and females contributed to the evolution of people from proto-human to homo sapiens. In retrospect, it seems that the current models of human evolution are best discussed not as unyielding gender-biased concepts, but with an eye towards a post-modern inclusive revision of extant ideologies. A holistic approach and more of a “sharing model” that questions the very insistent androcentric gender roles of the "man the hunter" models is necessary for challenging concepts that place women in passive, restrictive evolutionary roles (Fedigan 1986:60-62). |
  
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