The Invisible Sex: Uncovering The True Roles Of Woman In Prehistory

  • J. M. Adovasio,
  • Olga Soffer &
  • Jake Page
HarperCollins: 2007. 320 pp. $26.95 0061170917 | ISBN: 0-061-17091-7

The Invisible Sex is a refreshing book that opens with a crucial reminder: “science is not truth; it is, instead, a method for diminishing ignorance.” The authors — two well-known anthropologists (Jim Adovasio and Olga Soffer) and a science writer (Jake Page) — set out to diminish readers' ignorance about the human past, using a breezy, colloquial style that only occasionally irritates.

Their main point is that the male-dominated science of anthropology has usually chosen to interpret the evidence of the human past by basing it on male-dominated stereotypes. The authors succeed admirably in heightening the readers' awareness of such practices and in countering these stereotypical presentations with imaginative and equally defensible re-interpretations of particular sites or bodies of evidence. The end result helps to flesh out a more plausible female role in prehistory than has been offered previously. In many ways, this book is a much-needed antidote to the past hundred years of popular and scientific writing on prehistoric human life, and avoids the clichéd pitfall of veering too far into a hyper-feminist view.

Credit: JOE MAGEE

The authors make many palpable hits. For example, they remark on the assumption that Lucy, the first largely complete Australopithecus to be found, was identified as female because the bones were small, not because they were diagnostically female. Similarly, they deconstruct the beautiful diorama at the American Museum of Natural History in New York of two australopithecines walking across the Laetoli plains, which are covered in damp volcanic ash, about 3.3 million years ago. A male and female walk together companionably, his arm around her shoulders. The female's head is turned, giving the impression that she is looking at the viewer, while the male remains focused on what lies ahead. The subtext of this depiction emphasizes the intimacy of their closely spaced footprints with the familiarly possessive/romantic gesture of a male arm around the female's shoulders. What would fit the evidence just as well — and echo many more observations of primate social behaviour — would be that the footprints were made not by a 'couple', but by a female and her juvenile offspring. Why choose one over the other?

Another target for scepticism is the supposed dominance of a hunting lifestyle among hominins. This idea ranged from Raymond Dart's lurid osteodontokeratic hypothesis — that bones, teeth and horns were used with minimal alteration by early hominins as tools for slaughtering animals and possibly each other — through the presentation of early, tool-making Homo ergaster in East Africa as a hunter rather than a scavenger. This 'man the hunter' stereotype lingers in images of the mighty, mammoth-slaughtering PalaeoIndians in North America. And yet, the authors argue, the mere existence of tools does not prove that hunting was important, much less that it was the mainstay of hominin survival or a predominantly male activity.

Such biases of the prehistoric record are common, especially with regard to the oldest sites. The authors aver that in recent dry cave sites, fibre artefacts outnumber stone ones by a factor of 20 to 1. In several other situations, fibre and wood artefacts have been found to account for 95% of all artefacts recovered. That amounts to a tremendous amount of information not available to archaeologists in most parts of the world.

These are stunning observations that remind anthropologists that what we see is a tiny fraction of what might once have been present, not only in terms of individual animals but also in terms of artefacts. Many of those 'lost' artefacts may been essential aids to gathering, capturing small (not heroically large) animals, or modifying the world (building nests or brush shelters) in ways that do not involve obtaining food.

The authors also review the fascinating discovery by Adovasio and Soffer of fibre impressions on the clay fragments at Dolni Vestonice I in the Czech Republic. These attest to the existence of eight different weaving techniques, sewing, net-making and basketry, providing a startling new glimpse of life 26,000 years ago. They suggest that fibre arts had been a well-developed industry for some time before the formation of that site.

Making things out of fibre is not the sole prerogative of either sex in ethnographic accounts, the authors point out. But throughout the tribal world today, women make most of the basketry. The making of ceramics items, especially pottery, is chiefly the province of women. So, they claim, it is safe to assume that most, if not all, of the ceramics, weaving, basketry and clothing was made by women in the years that Dolni Vestonice and the other Moravian sites were inhabited.

This is an astonishing leap of faith for those who have advocated a greater appreciation for the variability and malleability of gender roles elsewhere in the book. The interpretations offered by the authors are no more convincing than the standard ones, primarily because their interpretations are based on ethnographic and behavioural analogies that are different from, but not demonstrably sounder than, those they criticize.

Unfortunately, they never grapple with the central and most difficult questions of all. For example, when is it justifiable to draw on behavioural analogies from modern humans to interpret the past? When ought we to rely on behaviours of non-human primates or other mammals instead? And how are we to evaluate the relative probability of past behaviours when modern behaviours are so variable? Having pointedly raised these issues, the book disappoints because it does not offer any principles for doing a better job of reading the past.

The book is also flawed by appallingly poor attention to fact-checking. The authors misplace Olduvai Gorge and Laetoli in Kenya (they are in Tanzania); they call Mary and Louis Leakey palaeontologists instead of archaeologists; they cite Homo as the first of “what could at the time be called the hominid [hominin] line” (a grossly inaccurate remark because australopithecines are also hominins or hominids); and they mistakenly state that the carbon isotopes that distinguish grass-eaters from tree-eaters are 14C and 13C, rather than 13C and 12C.

Unforgiveably, there are no notes in the book to identify the sources of either direct quotations or specific points of information. These glaring defects undercut the credibility of this otherwise intelligent and provocative work.