“We repeat this in warm shopping centres where we can flit from store to store without braving the icy winds.”

Want to hear the best part?

Apparently shopping malls are closing at unprecedented rates.  The era of the indoor shopping center is over. 

Which means that evolution supposedly caused us to seek out “warm shopping centres where we can flit from store to store without braving the icy winds” for all of 40 years.  A blink of an eye, in evolutionary terms.

I also love that we apparently “evolved” to want to be indoors all the time, when the bottom line is that it’s probably only in the last century that such a thing was even an option for more than a tiny fraction of the most elite sector of society, in the most temperate climates, with the most sophisticated building techniques.

Great post, as always. This however had me laughing out loud…“No, people didn’t move—-lady cavepeople just flitted about, grabbing Prada from this cave and Calvin Klein from that.”

My co-workers are all staring at me wondering what’s wrongw/me.

This was the subject of a one man show called Defending the Caveman.  So did this choad get his information from a Broadway play?

“My co-workers are all staring at me wondering what’s wrongw/me.”

Aside from the obvious, I mean.

Apparently shopping malls are closing at unprecedented rates.  The era of the indoor shopping center is over.

The problem with most medium to small-sized malls is the anchor stores.  The big chains have been going to stand-alone big boxes where they get more room than they have in malls.  Without the anchors, the small shops in the rest of the mall (even if they themselves are representative of large chains) don’t get the traffic, and the mall is inevitably doomed.

In most places I’ve been to new “shopping centres” are the equivalent of industrial parks: a large collection of big boxes with several strip malls for smaller stores, usually a few fast food joints, movie theatre, and so on.  Basically the old “golden mile” wrapped up into its own little neighbourhood.

can i call my theory researched if i cite “because I say so” as a source?

that article links to another in the same paper: research suggests that women can’t read maps and men lose small objects because of the hunting/gathering divide. surely there are other sexist tropes /imaginary historical scenes to be drawn on by now? that one’s getting a little stale.

This sounds too much like the murals in the old Waltham Supermarket in Waltham, MA.  There were three walls of them, first with “savages” hunting wild game and nativeoid peoples doing other hunting, fishing, and gathering activities.  Then there were white farmers on the plains, etc. 

At the end there was a mural with the text:“The Quest for Food Is Not Ours - Within These Walls You Will Find Your Happy Hunting Ground”.

Flitting from store to store, indeed.

No no, Amanda. You’re missing out the all-important Cave Reasoning step. See:

“Caveladies evolved to value the colour white because, when they ground up roots and seeds to make cavepies for their cavehusbands, a white colour indicated the food was free of contamination. Cavemen naturally only saw the cavepies in the cooked state, so they prefer brown. This is why women all want white wedding dresses and men should never do laundry.”

Exactly, KeithM - the opposite of what the latest Evo-Psych Buffoon is claiming.  If we had a deeply-rooted evolutionary urge to develop, build, and patronize indoor shopping malls, it’s unlikely that a minor change in urban geography would lead to the decline of said malls. 

Notice, for instance, that things that really are deeply rooted in evolution and genetics are much, much harder to get rid of.  Teenagers have sex drives.  People with sedentary lives crave high calorie foods.  No matter how hard some of us might wish not to have childbearing hips, they just keep insisting on manifesting themselves.

If people evolved to be inside all the time, it strikes me as odd that being inside all the time raises your chances of being depressed.  If anything, it seems people go out of their way to go outside when the weather is nice, and it lifts your mood considerably.  Spring in Austin is so nice that it makes it really hard to do work inside.  I’m struggling right now, watching the sun come up and warm my plants.

Given the history of Madison Avenue in creating the current idea of what a woman “is naturally”, I sort of assumed evo psych began as a marketing scheme to begin with. I mean, if most of the other ideas of femininity were directly created by advertisers in the 50s to sell house supplies, why wouldn’t they also create evo psych to try and protect their original market scheme?

It’s kind of silly in reality though, because the products aren’t really in as much risk as the marketing people think they are if they lose the gender binary. Even if you lose the wife as slave mindset, people still need to cook dinners, clean the house, vacuum the floors, and want devices to make it easier especially when both partners work all day.

Still it is amazing how much social ill the Flintstones has done pretty much single-handedly. Every wingnut from the evo psychs to the creationists seem to have a fundamental need to believe real cavemen lived like 1950s stereotypes.

Well, to take a little credit away from Don Draper (“Love is something we invented to sell pantyhose”), a lot of our ideas about domestic femininity come from the 19th century.  They, however, didn’t get overly hung up on Caveman stereotypes - in fact, a lot of ideas about The Ideal Homemaker were promoted on the basis of being “modern”, “scientific”, “hygienic”, “liberating”, etc. rather than hearkening back to tradition or naturalness. 

I’m not really sure what the connection was back then between Domestic Femininity and commercial culture, but I’d be really curious to learn more about that.  Certainly ideas about all this crap were used very early on in product marketing and advertising.  Then again, other early marketing towards women used proto-feminist imagery, like women riding bicycles.  So I’m not sure early commercial advertising was necessarily all misogyny, all the time.

Well after the age of serfs and lords got the Bastille they had to find some other way to get a whole class of people to work for the powerful for free.  Women “evolved” to do so!

And if you believe that I have a bridge in Alaska to sell you

Being, as I am oft-accused, extremely anti-science because I don’t whole-heartedly accept “studies” about feminine inferiority

No, you’re not anti-science, you’re anti pseudo-science.  The people who push this evo-psych stuff are the ones who are anti-science.

I keep pointing that out, but clearly my wee woman brain makes me unable to see how this is super real science.

At my university the majority of graduates in Chemistry and Biology were women…

But clearly that’s because biology is sort of like chemistry, and chemistry is a whole lot like *cooking*, which prehistoric women were really good at. Now physics involves *hunting* increasingly small particles, so men are better at it.

There is literally no area of life that is too trivial for evo psych to meddle in. Remember this?

Even the stories that don’t seem to be explicitly mysoginist (e.g. ones about male aggression) really are, because they serve to reinforce a wider background of belief in “gender difference”, against which increasingly more outlandish claims about the inferiority of women seem increasingly more plausible all the time. It’s a virtuous loop, and yeah, I agree that it’s very marketing driven.

After all, the more you segment the consumer base the more potential markets you have. Why would Gillette be content with selling one razor per household (all you can be reasonably supposed to need in order to shave a given amount of stubble) when they can sell two - a silver one for him and a pink one for her?

Is there anything actually to this study besides pointing out similarities between shopping and nomadic gathering? The problem with evo psych is too much of this research is this sort of “just so” story making. Is this a plausible explanation? Sure, why not. Is there any evidence to support the hypothesis? No, not really.

In this case, there doesn’t appear to be any underlying data or research, but even when they perform good studies, they add these stories on top of their results. An example is that recent study showing that women’s genitals can show signs of stimulation when they report not being sexually aroused whereas, men generally report arousal when they have an erection. It’s a good interesting study, but then they add the conclusion that it’s a defense mechanism against rape, when it could just be that men have more obvious external clues to indicate that they are in fact aroused. It could also be any number of cultural reasons that lead women to claim they are unaroused when they in fact are. The term “aroused” could just mean something different things to men and women. Men may think erection = arousal, but women think actually desiring sex is arousal.

That’s the problem with evo-psych. They spend too little time on real research and too much time trying to convince themselves and the public that their research confirms pre-conceived cultural stereotypes.

(Responding to BlackBloc @ 11:45) At the University of Redlands, the chemistry department got more than a few women students because the physics faculty was viciously sexist and made any woman who dared to try to major in it miserable until she left.  We liked having more women around, but it would’ve been nicer if the goddamn school had done something about the professors.

Of course this is the same school where a woman complained to the school that the window of her ground floor bedroom wouldn’t lock and got nothing.  She broke up with her abusive boyfriend, told them he was abusive, and that she really needed a lock as she was afraid he’d get in that way.  Nothing.  He went in through that window with its broken lock and raped her.  She went to the city police to report her rape.  The dean of fucking students went down to the police station to try to talk her out of pressing charges, he was a young man who made a mistake and wouldn’t it be tragic if his life got ruined over something silly like this?

Unsurprisingly, the boy was the son of one of the university’s trustees.  This was back in the late 80’s, so it may have changed since.

wouldn’t it be tragic if his life got ruined over something silly like this?

I realize this kind of thing is common, but nevertheless my blood pressure just tripled.

wouldn’t it be tragic if his life got ruined over something silly like this?

Oh, absolutely.

It would be much better if his life got ruined over something more serious, like being castrated with a rusty pen-knife.

Looking at that picture, I wonder what the evo psych answer is to clothing that covers the breasts and (related) the male phenomena of guys who completely FREAK OUT over women who breast-feed in public (“freak out” in the “that’s like going to the bathroom in public - gross!” kind of way).

Anyone want to take a try at arguing backwards? I can’t.

This “theory” is old news. Back in the 90s, David Feldman included in one of his Imponderables books a letter from a reader (a layperson, incidentally) suggesting that the differences in the way men and women shop are rooted in the differences between hunting and gathering. It goes like this: All animals are equally nutritious, so a hunter just kills the first critter he finds and takes it home, and men tend to approach shopping with the same methodology. Plant foods, on the other hand, vary considerably in their nutritional content, and the pickings change from season to season and month to month, so a gatherer has to be a lot more picky and analytical about how she goes about bringing home the berries, and take more time to find the good stuff, and modern women handle shopping the same way.

It’s still bogus, but at least it’s not quite so offensively bogus.

You’re not anti science, you just have the ability to read and process information to decide which is real science and which is junk science. I read one a few months ago that was titled Oestradiol Level and Opportunistic Mating in Women and was a bunch of crap as well. I think all you can do is keep pointing it out when you find it.

As a brit I feel required to inform you ‘muricans that you should not confuse Manchester Met with Manchester University (UMIST). Manchester University is the prestigious one and is one of the best for sciences in the country, and Manchester Met is a low ranked ex polytechnic. I think the equivalent would be UMIST as an Ivy League (or close) and Manchester Met as Anwhere State. Manchester Met is the place you go when you don’t have the grades required to go to a decent university but still want to go to uni, it is ranked very low for psychology on the league tables and has an awful research rating.

Unsurprisingly, the boy was the son of one of the university’s trustees.  This was back in the late 80’s, so it may have changed since.

Nope, it hasn’t changed since then.  Acquaintance rape is as much an epidemic now as it ever was.  In college, one classmate raped another classmate.  I was the first person that the victim told the next day, so I was there for everything.  First we went to the school counseling center, which provided free crisis counseling.  I went with her to the hospital after that, along with the therapist.  I went with her to the police station and waited for hours while she talked to the detective.  I was there when the school counselor called the school security office.  My friend did everything right, and nothing happened.  The police interviewed him by phone, and then the detective left for vacation.  There was no further investigation even there was evidence in the form of phone records and witnesses that they could have investigated.  The school waited over 4 months and finally had some weird peer-led trial and the guy got off completely.  There was nothing she could do about it, and she had to keep taking classes with this guy.  Every idea she came up with to get justice would have hurt her more than him.  It saddens me to think that he is free to continue doing this, and that so many more guys will get away with it.

  After all, the more you segment the consumer base the more potential markets you have. Why would Gillette be content with selling one razor per household (all you can be reasonably supposed to need in order to shave a given amount of stubble) when they can sell two - a silver one for him and a pink one for her?

Sharing razors is incredibly disgusting and I think far less of you for suggesting such a thing.

kultist: Is this a particular American (or whatever nationality you are) hangup? At home we each have our own razor for convenience, but if my or her blades ran out and we didn’t notice in time to go to the store before we needed to shave, well… we don’t really care about sharing. I mean, you swap more germs kissing than with a razor…

Of course, in our case we happen to be fluid-bonded. If you’re at a state of your relationship where you’re still using barrier methods for STDs (and for some people, that state is *forever*), then yeah, sharing razors is not the best idea. Because the sort of thing you might be sharing with razors is a bit more dangerous than when spit swapping.

Dr. David Holmes is a prominent British “TV Psychologist” (who once toured with The Buzzcocks!) but his specialty is forensic and criminal psychology.

Why doesn’t anyone ever ask anthropologists about this shit? I mean, other than the fear of being laughed at for presenting tens of thousands of years of pre-civilized historical peoples as all being Captain fucking Caveman.

I’m British, and for me sharing a razor is like sharing a toothbrush with someone: You do it if there is no other alternative and get your own ASAP. Sharing razors is disgusting for many reasons:

-Dead skin and bits of hair get trapped between the blades and you’re getting that all over your face
-You’re getting another persons dead skin cells in any cuts you might get which is gross
-If one of the people is spotty, that’s incredibly gross
-You don’t know where the other person has used it, which is also gross.

Essie [the] Elephant @ 12:15: Yeah, it has that effect on me too.  I liked my tiny corner of the school—chemistry had four professors, a gay man teaching Organic, a tiny Jewish woman doing Physical chemistry, and two older white guys, one blah, one nice.  They all hated being the department chair and rotated every year—but a lot of it was pretty toxic.

catgirl @ 12:53: Damn.  I was hoping it had changed.  Like I needed another reason to not send them money if I ever came into any.

but at least it’s not quite so offensively bogus.

Of course it’s just as offensively bogus.  If not more completely boneheaded.  Because, no, hunters have NEVER just gone off and bagged the first critter they saw.  Humans are actually pretty specialized as to what kinds of animals we like to eat, and under what conditions.  There’s also piles and piles of evidence that among hunter/gatherer groups, a lot of wildlife management and animal husbandry went on.  Making sure to not to hunt animals which were too young, keeping gender ratios and local populations at sustainable levels, and the like.  Not to mention that you don’t want to waste time dragging home a sick animal or something too old, too scrawny, or otherwise unappetizing.  This is not even to get into things like following a migrating herd or knowing what time of year the deer are going to mate, calve, etc.

Seriously, that’s almost as stupid as saying that in prehistoric times, pre-butchered shrink-wrapped steaks were available for the asking from temperature controlled caves, which is why humans nowadays prefer to shop in supermarkets.

I’m British, and for me sharing a razor is like sharing a toothbrush with someone

Sure.  In that it’s mildly ooky, but ultimately a product of marketing and not in the realm of biohazards or anything like that.  I have no problem using someone else’s toothbrush if for some reason I’m without my own.  Especially if it’s a sexual partner or someone else I’m particularly intimate with.  I’ve used my mom’s, for instance—I came out of her body, what’s a little oral bacteria?

Would I want to have a common household toothbrush?  No, because it’s terribly inefficient.  Not to mention there’s something kind of private and individualistic about it; it affirms our sense of autonomy and selfhood or some similar psychobabble.  I also like having separate clothes that are just for me and not held in common with other members of my household who might happen to wear the same size, and the like.

Hm, part of what I meant to quote got lost…  Y’all get the idea, though, I suppose.

I’m American and the husbandman and I have different razors, though he also uses mine. He’s got one of those fancy ones for his face, but will use my cheap one (the Daisy razor is the best one on the market and like one of the cheapest, seriously!) for his armpits. I’ve tried using his fancy face razor on my legs, and it doesn’t work nearly as well for me. *le shrug*

In general, Evo Psych cracks me up. it’s just so cartoonishly hilarious, and they don’t realize it.

The only reason I would avoid using other people’s razors is concern over the sharpness.  What if they don’t like their blades as sharp as I do so it is duller than I prefer?  Or what if when I use it I end up dulling it but they don’t realize and next time they shave they’re stuck with a dull blade and get mad at me?

But then again I stopped shaving years ago so its not that pressing an issue for me anymore.

Are we sure this isn’t just performance art? For one thing, there are incredibly few places in the world where there are multiple caves deep enough to shelter you from the wind, all with entrances next to each other. And if you’re building a fire, you put it in the back of the cave too, because otherwise the fire gets blown or rained or snowed out.

Ashley- your husband shaves his armpits?  How metro!  What would the good Dr.  Holmes think of *that*? 

and yeah, i about lost it at “flit from store to store”... hilarious.

I’ve used my mom and sister’s disposable razors (new ones; you buy them 8 to a pack or so, and I didn’t have any when I was visiting from off island) and it seems to me that women’s and men’s razors are oriented differently—one for the face and the other for the leg.

In any case, their razors turned my face into bloody swiss cheese. I’ve blamed this on the shape, but am completely open to the idea that they use crap-ass razors and I tend to go for the triple-blade deluxe type.

See, for me toothbrush sharing is the epitome of gross, and I know it’s irrational because Hello! I already kiss her, right? I seriously consider ‘hey, I used your toothbrush’ to be grounds for throwing it in the garbage and getting a new one. But then I’m weird about toothbrushes. I can’t stand hearing the sound of someone brushing, it’s like nails on chalkboard times 10… Ads on TV with sound of people brushing tend to result in me getting an instinctive aversion to buying the brand that was advertised on that ad.

Razors? Screw it, like I said whenever we forget to buy more blades we just share, and we’re pretty absent-minded about getting new blades. I seriously can’t contemplate someone finding sharing razors as being anywhere near as gross as sharing a toothbrush… Like, the fact you tell me means it’s true, but I can’t wrap my mind around it.

I’ve always wondered where the idea came from that cavemen would bonk cavewomen over the head with a club and drag them off by the hair.  It’s such a specific and weird image, and it _can’t_ have any basis in anthropology or paleontology, can it?

But then I’m weird about toothbrushes.

Yeah.  I think as long as we can all admit that what we’re talking about are personal idiosyncrasies and not Laws Of Nature, and that a lot of this comes out of the way products are marketed to us, we’re all sort of on the same page.  There’s no biological reason I need my own toothbrush and my own razor blade.  There’s no reason I should choose the smaller curvy pastel-colored container of “unscented” deodorant over the larger blocky primary-colored one, either. 

Also, re Mark Temporis—5-10 years ago the razor companies came up with the idea that they should design razors specifically to shave the face or the body, rather than just a choice of an all-purpose razor in either pink or black plastic.  I have to admit that this is one of the things I’m susceptible to; I swear the fancy razors Designed For Your Special Lady Curves are a million times better than the Daisy ones which are just a basic razor done in pastel plastic.  If I’m going to shave, I want it to be painless, thorough, and long-lasting.

Amanda is on a never-ending quest for the dumbest thing anybody ever said.  There is no dumbest thing.  People keep on coming up with dumber things all the time.  Give it up, Amanda, there is no bottom.

And this particular wad of baloney doesn’t seem to come from anybody associated with evo psych.  Dr. Holmes of MMU is a forensic psychologist.  Maybe he interviews shoplifters?  If you scroll his web page you come to the part where it begins to talk about stalking.  Maybe he stalks the stalkers?

Probably Dr. Holmes is trolling for grant money.

And the whole cave-person thing is an old mistake, corrected decades ago.  They found some human bones in a cave and assumed that humans lived in the cave.  It later turned out the bones were brought to the cave by the tigers that were eating the people!  So out with the whole cave-guy and cave-gal terminology, okay?  You too Dr. Holmes.

Jamie D: His hair also goes down past his waist (and is GORGEOUS!), he has no problem carrying my purse for me and buying me tampons, helps me with picking out clothing and is TOTALLY enamored with babies. Seriously, the man has more of a “maternal instinct” than most women I know.

I think the gender role police would have a field day with him.

“Seriously, that’s almost as stupid as saying that in prehistoric times, pre-butchered shrink-wrapped steaks were available for the asking from temperature controlled caves, which is why humans nowadays prefer to shop in supermarkets.”

Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and predict that whoever originally advanced that gem never hunted anything that wasn’t in a glass case.

“Sorry, Raquel, the first animals I saw today were a skunk and a porcupine. Here you go, when’s dinner?”

I get what you’re saying, The Opoponax, but to me, that’s why the theory is just completely bogus, rather than offensively and completely bogus. The writer didn’t seem to be trying any sort of ought from the supposed is the way the evo-psych types routinely do.

And I still find it funny that the “pros” are so late to the party on this particular point.

...trying to derive any sort of ought…

Me brain no work good today. I can has cheezburger?

It always seemed to me that caves were a highly unlikely place for nomads to rest. First of all it reduces you to mountainous areas which will have less room to run from predators and less prey to hunt as compared to the plains or forest. Plus, caves tended to be where predators sheltered and the wild noises and weird shadows that are often common to caves would make it easy to convince primitive man that caves were where evil shadows live.

I’m not saying that caves were a no-no and certainly there were cultures who have adapted cliff walls and caves and thus have the most surviving “artwork”, but that I doubt it’d be anything close to the universal standard or that many tribes could greatly afford too much direct division of labor between the sexes, especially when first settling or as nomads. It’d just be easier to let the old, sick, and a few good guard warriors to defend the encampment and children while the rest hunted, scouted, or gathered resources.

Even putting basic logic into it, the ideas fall apart. It literally only works by starting from a sexist assumption and trying to build the case from there. Ok, women talk to much and men are silent emotionless types, it’s not because of socialization, it’s because women had to point out to other gatherers where the good food was where tough masculine he-men warriors I am living vicariously through to get over cultural guilt of not being a mass-murdering pyschopath “great warrior” would instead need to be completely silent when stalking the mighty brontosaurus or ooh wild tigers, something manly that you’d wrestle to the ground and choke to death with your bare hands. And then you’d club your choice of woman and Suzy couldn’t reject me then, she should be lucky I restrained myself. Wait, where was I. Oh yes, that’s absolutely why. All evolution, not at all the pathetic anxious masculinity of trying to fit arbitrary and harmful ideas of what makes a man a man in a world that’s increasingly egalitarian. Yup, totally.

I really wonder what anthropologists have to say about people like this who misuse all their careful and hard work to justify 1950s talking points. I imagine it’s the same reaction as when biologists are asked about abortion or social darwinism.

What’s really hilarious, Cerberus, are the ones that have managed to convince themselves both that men are strong, silent types by nature because hunters have to be stealthy, and that language evolved specifically in order to facilitate coordinated hunting. It truly boggles the mind.

Whenever I used my ex’ razor to shave my legs he would look like he got mauled by a cat the next day. And very pissed at a dull razor!

The only evo-psych BS I’ve bought into is tha men shop for a satisfact and that women shop for an optimum. Hunting parties of males might come up empty handed, so it was a good bet to kill whatever game met minimum criteria and go home. Gathering women could usually find something useful, but it was worth their time to seek the maximum yeild.

Even though this just-so-story is plausible. I don’t think we have have a case for explaining how men and women shop differently. First off, do men and women really shop that differently? Show me the studies! Furthermore, even if women optimize while men satisfice, might this be a culturally transmitted behavior? If the man is the breadwinner and the woman is dependent; the man has the luxury of choosing the quick satisfact, while the woman is compelled to make a case that her choices are an optimum.

BTW, you mised the sexiest cavegirl ever:

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Mariette_Hartley

Chicks Spock wanted do are a huge turn-on. Been into wide-hipped blondes in black pants ever since I saw this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Side_of_Paradise_(Star_Trek)

Making sure to not to hunt animals which were too young, keeping gender ratios and local populations at sustainable levels, and the like.  Not to mention that you don’t want to waste time dragging home a sick animal or something too old, too scrawny, or otherwise unappetizing.

Indeed.  “Killing the first thing they come across” is a statement that hunters would keel over laughing at.  Even sport hunters, who aren’t concerned about how the animal tastes since they’re after the trophy, pick and choose when they can.

Just to use examples from where I live, you’d never hunt male caribou for food in the fall because that’s mating season and the meat tastes like crap because of the hormone overload.  You’d never take an obviously old musk ox because their meat is so tough it has to be boiled into a tasteless dough before it’s edible.  Big trout (like 10+ pounds) are dog food because they taste awful (and if there are char, no one takes trout at all except for dog food).

The only time hunters up here take the first thing they come across is for something like seals, where it’s so damn hard to get one at all that you have to take your shot (or harpoon one) when you can.

Well, as I’ve always said, the smartest men know that they’re inferior to women. Hint: it’s about the chromosome combo.

It always seemed to me that caves were a highly unlikely place for nomads to rest.

Caves are a likely place for people to rest when they happen to be ranging through places with lots of caves.  For instance up at the northern tip of Manhattan, there are some naturally occurring caves where evidence of pre-contact human habitation has been found.  However, in that situation it seems more like hunting parties would overnight there on occasion when their wanderings happened to take them in that neck of the woods, not so much that they were Cave People or whatever.  I’ve also heard that Native Americans in what is now Kentucky used to use the Mammoth Cave network for shelter from time to time.  You’re right, though, that for most of human culture, it’s not like we were nomadically wandering from cave to cave, avoiding areas without good access to large caves fit for human habitation.  Humans use caves just like they use any other obvious natural resource.

Also, you’re right about divisions of labor—the kinds of small bands that are typical for hunter-gatherer societies we know about within written history have tended to be much more egalitarian in terms of that stuff than any evo psych nutjob could ever imagine.  It also turns out, when you actually bother to do archaeology and/or ethnography, that large game hunting (the kind more typically done by men) is a very, very tiny minority of all food consumed by hunter-gatherers.  Men also forage, and women often trap smaller game.  The Man Hunt, Woman Gather idea is thoroughly debunked fiction.

What’s really hilarious, Cerberus, are the ones that have managed to convince themselves both that men are strong, silent types by nature because hunters have to be stealthy, and that language evolved specifically in order to facilitate coordinated hunting. It truly boggles the mind.

Well…in the hunting bit, especially in situations where you are using traps or the like to channel animals, you need a lot of talking for the preplanning.  Hunting big game (as we know humans did, and some cultures specialized in) with pointy sticks isn’t something that’s easy to begin with: not talking about it seems absurd.  For the actual hunting, a lot of it would be silent, perhaps using signals to pass communications.  But then, quite often, a great deal of yelling and screaming to spook prey to get it where you wanted it.

So really, it makes no sense to compare it to the modern day.  Well, you know, unless a guy is in the parking lot, coordinating his movements with his wife, goes silent when he enters the store, and proceeds to start screaming when he find that pair of pants he wants and takes them to the checkout counter.

“We repeat this in warm shopping centres where we can flit from store to store without braving the icy winds.”

*snicker* This is surely why malls were INVENTED in my home state of Minnesota but how does this explain malls in California?
*snicker*

The only evo-psych BS I’ve bought into is tha men shop for a satisfact and that women shop for an optimum. Hunting parties of males might come up empty handed, so it was a good bet to kill whatever game met minimum criteria and go home. Gathering women could usually find something useful, but it was worth their time to seek the maximum yeild.

That’s what I think the person I cited was getting at, only they oversimplified it to the point of stupidity.

So really, it makes no sense to compare it to the modern day.  Well, you know, unless a guy is in the parking lot, coordinating his movements with his wife, goes silent when he enters the store, and proceeds to start screaming when he find that pair of pants he wants and takes them to the checkout counter.

His wife? Don’t you mean his buddies? Because as we all know, cavewomen never participated in the big-game <strike>shopping</strike> hunting. It involved too much walking, which those wispy little cavewomen couldn’t handle. That was why they had to stay home and clean the cave all day!

The women weren’t hunting because they were busy feeding people.  If hunter-gatherer human folk back when are anything like contemporary hunter-gatherer peoples.  The women’s gathering/low-intensity agriculture provides the bulk of the calories available; hunting tends to be about status among men, more than anything else.

Kaninchen, we have pretty strong evidence that women hunted.  They didn’t tend to go on long-ranging tracking missions for big dangerous game, but then men didn’t do a lot of that, either, and such hunting typically didn’t make a huge economic impact.  That’s like justifying our entire system of gender on the fact that some people can fold their tongue into a W.  So?  Big deal?  What does this have to do with anything?

There’s a much better argument here for shopping malls as places to socialize. That fits with the cave and fire analogy. And if you can gather while doing that, so much the better. And why is it gathering as opposed to hunting? It’s ultimately about acquisition, right? So we have hunting and gathering and cementing of social relationships all in one warm, brightly lit place. That’s good evo psych as opposed to the more common, horrible kind.

Don’t any of these evo-psych bozos ever realize that actually, our ancestors rarely lived in caves?

I suppose they did a bit more of this in far northern latitudes, but the famous cave sites we tend to learn about were, even in such places, generally not places people lived everyday life. They tended to be ceremonial—burial sites; places like Lascaux where people did obviously arty and probably ceremonial things.

Gatherer-hunters live more or less out in the open, making small, portable or disposable shelters. They moved around; staying at a particular campsite for perhaps weeks at the most, then having exhausted the easy forage there, move on to another camp elsewhere in their larger range.

This is one reason why epidemic disease tended not to be such a problem for them; they would move away from sites recently contaminated with their own wastes and start over with new shelters, tools, etc.

(Another was their very low population density, another was that they had no herd animals; herd animal diseases often jump over to their human keepers, in whom they tend to rage, unchecked by the immunities the animals themselves develop. Then again herd animals aren’t living very naturally either, cooped together much if not all the time, not relocating themselves as early humans did also, and often stressed by poor conditions or overbreeding. The transition to agriculture, including domestication of animals, definitely increased human prospects on the whole, but the nasty details account for much human misery we tend to assume is endemic to the human condition itself. Not so much, in many respects, for our ancestors!)

Okay, I’m just being a pendantic troll because I haven’t got the time or energy to respond to all the good stuff upthread, but I just had to get that out. The whole “caveman” image is as much nonsense as the part about “finding a mate by clubbing her and dragging her back to the cave.” Our ancestors were mobile outdoorspeople; even the Inuit don’t live in caves!

The closest thing I know of to real cave people are people who hide there from other humans—not at all typical of our ancestors.

Where does it come from, them? Victorian projection. 19th century European scholars and their popularizers tended to assume that they, the Euro elite, were the pinnacle of human development in every respect. Since they were quite barbaric in many respects, they pretty much had to assume everyone else, particularly our more primitive ancestors, were worse. Hence the “club” thing; Victorian marriages were little better, so they had to imagine the “cave people” going them one worse somehow or other.

As for the “caves” themselves—well, as burial sites they certainly did find some remains there. Someone used to solid, permanent buildings would assume that any human would seek the closest thing they could find to it for all purposes.

But, as Amanda said, caves aren’t really very convenient and certainly aren’t mobile; you’d have to live in a pretty cave-pocked region to expect to find one near every site you planned to exploit in the course of the year.

Real anthropological and careful archaeological investigations pretty quickly discredited the “caveman” as a scientific theory, but as a myth for our projecting and proud society they are just too good to forget.

The only evo-psych BS I’ve bought into is tha men shop for a satisfact and that women shop for an optimum.

Crap, has no one around here seen a guy’s guy shop for some sound equipment or a power tool or a muscle car or a gaming computer? The research, the ferreting out of pros and cons, the careful optimization of every aspect.

Guys satisfice purchases they really don’t care about, but they optimize stuff they’re into, perhaps even more obsessively than women supposedly do. Meanwhile, watch a woman buying something she doesn’t have her ego invested in. wham. bam. Whatever meets the minimum specs, head for the register.

The kicker is that guys, who write the evo psych, get to decide which things are important to optimize (stuff tied to male status) and which aren’t (stuff that women optimize).

<strike>Guys</strike> Human Beings satisfice purchases they really don’t care about, but they optimize stuff they’re into,

There.  Fixed.

I’m British, and for me sharing a razor is like sharing a toothbrush with someone

Sure.  In that it’s mildly ooky, but ultimately a product of marketing and not in the realm of biohazards or anything like that.

Aside from the obvious potential for spreading HIV and Hepatitis B and C and all those lovely biohazards, perhaps.

Think about it (men frequently cut themselves shaving).

If you know someone has HIV or Hepatitis you shouldn’t share razors, but otherwise it’s not a big risk.  I mean, it’s pretty unlikely that you’re going to get HIV from bumming your mom’s razor because they wouldn’t let you on the plane with your own and you didn’t want to check a bag. 

And as for toothbrushes, there’s nothing you can get from a toothbrush you couldn’t get from sharing a coke.

If hunter-gatherer human folk back when are anything like contemporary hunter-gatherer peoples.  The women’s gathering/low-intensity agriculture provides the bulk of the calories available; hunting tends to be about status among men, more than anything else.

Not universally true.  For instance, among the Inuit, traditionally, plant calories are pretty minimal: some berries in late summer, and that’s about it.  All the other calories are from mammals or fish.  Hunting (and therefore the vast majority of the food providing) is done by the men, however, that’s if you narrow the “hunting” bit to “act of putting pointy thing in animal”.  Caribou hunting, for instance, involved constructing a long fence to channel a herd where you wanted it with everyone (men, woman and the children old enough) acting to herd the animals, with the men then doing the primary kill.  Women might follow up with slitting throats if for some reason a lot had to be taken down and there wasn’t time to waste going from animal to animal.

Seal hunting was primarily only the men, and it was generally a solitary activity, involving standing motionless over a hole for hours at a time with a harpoon ready until a seal popped up.  Whale and walrus was a group of men thing.

For pretty much all of this, women were involved in the cleaning, skinning, and butchering.  Both sexes worked on things like drying meat and whatnot.

I can’t stand going shopping with a male friend of mine. He turns each and everything over a thousand times and it takes fo-EVA. It drives me wacky. And I know a ton of guys who practically do a doctoral dissertation’s worth of research online before buying an iPod. The only trends that I see are that men get bored standing around while women shop for things for themselves and vice versa. But of course we only hear the male side of the story. Their standing around boredom is much more significant than a woman’s is while waiting for him.

Not universally true.  For instance, among the Inuit, traditionally, plant calories are pretty minimal: some berries in late summer, and that’s about it.  All the other calories are from mammals or fish.

True, but the Inuit are, as far as I know, completely unique in that. Every other gatherer / hunter society gets the bulk of its calories from gathering rather than hunting.

People, people! Seriously, I just used Gillette as an example! Let’s not turn this into an AIDS epidemic talking point, that is just a leeetle more dramatic than necessary! =)

Have another example then, for free: shampoo. More or less all shampoos are almost indistinguishable from washing up liquid. There is absolutely no reason (even is you have AIDS!) to have as many different kinds of shampoo in a household as you have members thereof, yet the majority of households do just that.

The Opoponax correctly observed above that we have real feelings of identity and individuality invested in having our own favourite brands and kinds of things, but let’s not kid ourselves that these are not marketing driven. As Amanda recently said on another topic, “cultural” doesn’t mean “not real”. You don’t have to come up with a serious epidemiological reason for shopping for more than you actually require in order to have the license to do so - it’s your money - but it doesn’t hurt to acknowledge the created nature of a lot of our wants.

There. I’ve name checked Amanda, The Opo, *and* Noam Chomski. Nobody can possibly disagree with me now! =)

TheLady:  I have very curly, very dry, very thick hair.  If I use anything other than a super moisturizing shampoo and a thick, sick conditioner, my hair is…indescribable.  I have no need for thickening shampoos, and I can’t use “normal” hair shampoos.  I’ve tried.  Believe me.

I feel the same, speedbudget, but for opposite reasons - I have very straight baby-fine hair which tends to be oily, and if I use anything other than one or two specific shampoos my hair will look like the head of a mop that hasn’t been cleaned in a year.

Then again, What Women’s Hair Is Supposed To Look Like is cultured (there’s nothing scientifically wrong with lank stringy oily hair, we just consider it unattractive). 

And of course all this ignores other choices we make (aside from Moisturizing/Volumizing/Shiny-Clean/Frizz-Tamer), about product design, packaging, and branding.

True, but the Inuit are, as far as I know, completely unique in that. Every other gatherer / hunter society gets the bulk of its calories from gathering rather than hunting.

Nope.  More recent analyses of ethnographic data on hunter-gatherer societies show that meat (which includes things like shellfish) makes up, on average, 50-65% of the modern hunter-gatherer diet, and was at least as high in the past.  Low numbers in the past were the result of picking and choosing: the people who made the calculations deliberately excluded groups such as Inuit and other native North American and North Asian people who tend (and did tend in the past) to have much more calories from hunting.  However, that said, there are also groups in the tropics and subtropics who have a primarily animal protein diet, in some cases based on things like fishing.

Now, this says nothing about the silly “Males mighty hunter, woman berry-picker” thinking.  It’s only about where the calories are coming from, not who brings them to the fire.

The Man Hunt, Woman Gather idea is thoroughly debunked fiction.

There was an article in the Natural History magazine ages ago where it followed a woman from a Philippine H/G tribe who hunted and wasn’t considered a freak by her fellow tribal members for wanting to do so.

When asked by the author what she would do if she had another child, the woman replied that she’d find a relative to babysit while she went out hunting.

TO, one can catch Hepatitis B from a toothbrush, the virus is hardier than the retrovirus known as HIV in that regard.

More recent analyses of ethnographic data on hunter-gatherer societies show that meat (which includes things like shellfish) makes up, on average, 50-65% of the modern hunter-gatherer diet, and was at least as high in the past.

Could you provide a citation for this?  I hate to get pedantic, but this is pretty much the opposite of what I learned as an anthropology major, and I graduated pretty recently.  I know people are coming up with new developments all the time, but it would really shock me if it turned out that all our best research from the last 40-50 years was 100% the opposite of true, and very recently debunked in a sudden yet completely thorough manner.

I know Wikipedia isn’t an infallible source, but their article on hunter gatherer economic systems reflects what I learned in college, rather than your claim.  Citing an anthology called Traditional Peoples Today: Continuity and Change in the Modern World, edited by Goran Burenhult.  Published 1994 by Harper Collins, looks to be a pretty typical Ethnology 101 type book.

KeithM:  “More recent analyses of ethnographic data on hunter-gatherer societies show that meat (which includes things like shellfish) makes up, on average, 50-65% of the modern hunter-gatherer diet, and was at least as high in the past.”

I don’t consider gathering shellfish to be “hunting,” really.  Do you?  I mean, it’s a little more like, oh, can’t think of the word…gathering.  Picking stuff up.  Except for the wily swimmy scallop, or the sneaky swimmy pinchy crab, shellfish are pretty straightforward for even children to gather.

Do you include grubs, bugs and insects in that “meat” category, too?  They’re not really something you stalk silently with your buds.

The invention of the net allowed everyone in a clan to “hunt” together.  Or fish.  Instead of running after shit, or poking it to death individually, you drive it into a net.  Babbling like silly old women is actually a good thing.  Probably led to domestication, too, since if you caught more than you needed you might put them in an area they can’t escape from until you’re hungry again.