Are echoes of our earlier existence as hunters and gatherers still with us? In prehistoric times, women would provide for their families by collecting fruit and nuts while the men went off joyriding sabre-tooth tigers, and throwing sticks at mammoths, coming home late injured and dirty and exhausted, needing to be looked after.
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| Hunting peaches can be tricky. Especially if they aren't peaches. |
The modern equivalent of gathering for women with personal video recorders (PVRs) seems to be collecting as many hours of entertainment (especially films) as possible. The reason I mention this is that four women I know have managed to fill up their hard discs, while their poor partners are left with no room to record their essential episodes of Top Gear and the Simpsons. As an amateur evolutionary psychologist, this proves conclusively to me that the need the gather still expresses itself today in this compulsion to record films, to save them up for a possible future time when they'll be needed to fill up a few hours.
Interesting, the traditional conception of cavemen hunting the bulk of the food for the clan is incorrect. Women gathered most of the calories needed for survival while men supplemented this with occasional kills of game.
(Reference - some science mag I read a while ago.)
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