Biological anthropologist Dr. Cara Wall-Scheffler joins me to discuss the evolution of human locomotion and how it dovetails into the findings and conclusions of the research article she co-authored, The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts, published last month in PLOS ONE.

The data gathered and examined across numerous foraging societies by the authors of this ethnographic review points to the incredible diversity of labor males and females typically engage in to acquire food and other resources. Simultaneously, the findings and conclusions in this study upend stereotypical and essentialist notions about what the commonly understood sexual divisions of labor are—the “man as hunter” and “woman as gatherer” myth—with implications for not only anthropology as a field of study, but for contemporary discourse on topics of gender and sex.