Response to “Can women hunt? Yes, did women contribute much to human evolution through endurance hunting? Probably not.”

Abstract

We would like to begin our response to Martin and colleagues by thanking the authors for their thoughtful comments on our paper "Woman the Hunter: The Physiological Evidence" . We are grateful for the expertise each author brings to the conversation and recognize the important contributions they have made to the field of biological anthropology and reproductive behavioral ecology, in particular. We believe many of the concerns voiced by Martin and colleagues would be alleviated when "Woman the Hunter: The Physiological Evidence" is taken in conjunction with "Woman the Hunter: The Archaeological Evidence" (Lacy & Ocobock, 2024). These two review articles were written and published as sister articles and are meant to be read and considered together. Our articles review the array of evidence suggesting that not only were females capable of hunting but, in the Paleolithic, they were hunting.Martin and colleagues contend that we ignored the vast body of reproductive behavioral ecology work conducted among extant foragers in order to promote an ideologically motivated reanalysis of past gender roles. The majority of these extant groups display a rather strict sexual division of labor, where females typically gather plant materials or hunt small prey and males typically hunt larger prey. Martin and colleagues argue that this evidence, along with reproductive energetic trade-offs, should preclude reconstructions of our past where women are meaningfully contributing to hunting efforts (when hunting is defined as exclusively big game hunting). We disagree, as our review articles bring together a totality of evidence supporting women hunters in the Paleolithic, which was so large that the piece had to be split into two papers. Also, endurance hunting, as described by authors like Bramble and Lieberman (2004), was not a focus of either paper but was provided as just one example of a hunting style for which females may be particularly well suited.Martin and colleagues state that we failed to present testable hypotheses. Review articles, which describe the format of our two articles, are rarely structured around the scientific method and/or testable hypotheses. We cite the other authors who have already tested the hypotheses. Furthermore, we indicate numerous areas for future research, which review articles should, as this topic is woefully understudied. Since Man the Hunter continues to influence the field and be used as the default understanding of the past, our updated reviews were needed despite the excellent foundational work by other scholars who have challenged the long-standing paradigm of male-dominated hunting in the Paleolithic (e.g.,