Photo by Flickr user Lord Jim. Used under a Creative Commons license.

I heard an interesting tidbit in a radio interview (sorry, can’t remember what show) with Richard Wrangman, author of the new book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

His (possibly too catch-all) thesis is that human evolution… what really accelerated us towards intelligence, tool manipulation, and so on, has been profoundly shaped by the development of cooking. Without going much deeper I’ll just say that without having read the book it sounds plausible enough.

But what was interesting to me was this little piece he kind of tossed in where he said, approximately, that where previously very early men and women had been obliged to spend much of their days seeking and chewing raw foods, once cooking was developed it meant that a woman, staying at home, could process enough food to keep a man. Which, he said, let men go out and do other stuff.

Since I identify with Sulamuth Firestone’s (genuinely) radical feminist thesis that domestic gender oppression was the original form of oppression (in the sense that it could occur equally in castle, hovel, or cave) I’m untroubled by Wrangman’s proposition. Again it sound plausible enough.

What’s interesting though, is that from his perspective it’s not that men “domesticated” women into cooking in order to provide themselves free labor, or that men heroically went hunting in order to feed the whole family (including the dependent partner and offspring) by “bringing home the bacon.” Instead, at least the way Wrangman put it in that interview, women undertook cooking in order to attract and keep men! Which, all things considered (note: the interview was not on All Things Considered) may not have worked out so well in the long run but in the short run might have made a great deal of sense.

The fly in the ointment being the classical surplus-labor argument that once freed of individual subsistence provision men could go out and, among other things, decide they were entitled to come home to a good meal instead of, oh, say, feel darn lucky to have someone to come home to. They’d also have time to talk, politic, conduct warfare, and generally hone their skills for organization and violence such that over time women no longer had a say in the matter of who should provide and who should be provided for.

So! Is the story true? I dunno. I regularly mock other evolutionary-psychology/sociobiology “just so” stories so I’m not going to roll over and celebrate this one just because it appeals to my sensibilities. But it does appeal to my sensibilities. Not least because it’s the first time I’ve heard an established male anthropologist or paleoanthropologist give women credit for initiating civilization, let alone evolution from neotenous apes to human beings.

This would be, incidentally, an invisible 4th-dimension to sociobiologists since it goes against contemporary standards of gender wherein all human behavior is driven by men trying to get pussy from otherwise reluctant women, and making sure women’s adultery didn’t, well, adulterate their “large investments” in helping to rear their own, as opposed to interloper’s, offspring.

Worse for the standard model of ev-psych/sociobiology, there could even be a sexual component to women taking up cooking for two in order to keep men hanging around. There weren’t light bulbs back then, so they didn’t need men to help change them. And by definition if they were able to gather and cook enough food to feed prospective partners then they weren’t driven by that need for male “providers.” So what could they have wanted to keep men around for?

No, couldn’t be! Nowhere in The Flintstones (sociobiology’s source for primary research) does Wilma keep Fred around for the occasional roll in the hay. So it can’t be true.

Er, well, it could be true. It just doesn’t fit any of the standard models.

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Heck, I’ll even do a little theory unification here and say those well-fed-looking paleolithic “venus” figurines they keep digging up and calling cave-man porn? If Richard Wrangman is even fractionally correct then a more likely explanation would be that the figurines served as reminders not so much hot sex as hot supper!

(Doh! Money quote via Tyler Cowen’s preview of Wrangman’s book “...a bachelor is a sorry creature in subsistence societies…”

And for the record, modern anthropologists say in most “primitive” pre-agrarian, hunter-gatherer societies women generally contribute anywhere from 50% to more than 90% of calories consumed by the community. So again, Wrangman at least has the benefit of plausibility. Which is more than can be said about the latest ev-psych “research” trying to winnow meaning out of statistical noise about men’s allegedly “evolved” preferences for waist/hip ratios of exactly .7.)

Going a step further into “evolutionary” explanations for everything, you know all the myriad theories about why women have bigger boobs, bellies, butts, thighs, and in-general curves compared to other primates? What if the appeal for men wasn’t so much youth or virginity or (for boobs) “this end up” reminders of buttocks for really (really!) primitive men. What if curves on women are “meant” to singal an increased likelihood that not just her offspring but her partner won’t starve?

Hey, you can make up all sorts of sociobiological/ev-psych “just so” stories that don’t look much like today’s dominant paradigms at all!