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Hominin Adaptation as the Development of a Gendered Forager Division of Labor

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Abstract

“Division of labor,” generally defined, is the efficiency of dividing the overall process of producing something into specialized tasks, each performed by a different individual or group. Many anthropologists have regarded the gendered forager division of labor (with men hunting and women gathering) as a fundamental feature of hominin development (Washburn and Lancaster 1968; Murdock and Provost 1973; Isaac 1978a, b; Panter-Brick 2002; Makahashi and Feldman 2014). This is understandable; the ethnographic literature documents the importance of this mode of life for contemporary and historical foragers (Marlowe 2007; Jones 2016). This documentation has led many to speculate that gender-specialized foraging has been a defining feature of human adaptation from early on in the evolution of the hominin lineage. How early, however, is a matter of significant debate. This chapter on the division of labor (including exchange) and the next on bipedalism introduce the evolutionary framework for looking at the baobab as the Hadza and humanity’s tree of life.

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  1. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, USA

    John Rashford

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Rashford, J. (2023). Hominin Adaptation as the Development of a Gendered Forager Division of Labor. In: Baobab. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26470-2_3

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