The gathering hypothesis is a term in
evolutionary psychology coined in
1970s feminism
Second-wave feminism was a period of feminist activity that began in the early 1960s and lasted roughly two decades. It took place throughout the Western world, and aimed to increase equality for women by building on previous feminist gains.
Wh ...
as the antithesis of "
hunting hypothesis
In paleoanthropology, the hunting hypothesis is the hypothesis that human evolution was primarily influenced by the activity of hunting for relatively large and fast animals, and that the activity of hunting distinguished human ancestors from o ...
", suggesting that gathering rather than hunting was the main factor in the emergence of
anatomically modern humans.
David Buss argues that tools were not used for hunting initially, but instead to dig up and gather plants. It is possible the invention of tools explains the transition from a forest habitat to the savanna woodlands and grasslands. Tools made gathering food easier and more economical enabling ancestral humans to live in a sparser environment. It was not until the invention of receptacles to store food that more elaborate tools used to hunt, skin, and butcher were developed. According to the gathering hypothesis hunting had no major role in the evolution of modern humans.
One of the sources of evidence for the gathering hypothesis is in the alleged “Superior Spatial Memory of Women.” McBurney et al. found that women perform better on memory tasks than males whereas men perform better on rotation tasks.
Hawkes furthers the argument for the gathering hypothesis in that women obtain larger fitness benefits by tending to their offspring, thus they provision, because it is simpler to coordinate gathering and offspring care.
The "Superior Spatial Memory of Women" has been supported through more recent studies by Neave et al. in which females were both quicker and made few mistakes in gathering and identifying specific plants than their male counterparts.
However, the gathering hypothesis cannot account for
sexual division of labor
The sexual division of labour (SDL) is the delegation of different tasks between males and females. Among human foragers, males and females target different types of foods and share them with each other for a mutual or familial benefit. In some spe ...
in men hunting and women gathering, high
parental investment
Parental investment, in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, is any parental expenditure (e.g. time, energy, resources) that benefits offspring.Clutton-Brock, T.H. 1991. ''The Evolution of Parental Care''. Princeton, NJ: Princeton ...
of human males, male coalition psychology, why humans live in environments without
plant resources
Plants are predominantly photosynthetic eukaryotes of the kingdom Plantae. Historically, the plant kingdom encompassed all living things that were not animals, and included algae and fungi; however, all current definitions of Plantae exclude ...
, human gut structure versus primate gut structure, reciprocal alliances (
alliance theory), and why women share food.
See also
*
Aquatic ape hypothesis
The aquatic ape hypothesis (AAH), also referred to as aquatic ape theory (AAT) or the waterside hypothesis of human evolution, postulates that the ancestors of modern humans took a divergent evolutionary pathway from the other great apes by becom ...
References
{{Human Evolution
Human evolution