Hunting as subsistence and mating effort? A re-evaluation of “Man the Hunter”, the sexual division of labor and the evolution of the nuclear family

The role of men in hunter-gatherer societies has been subject to vigorous debate over the past fifteen years. The proposal that men hunt wild game as a form of status signaling or “showing off” to provide reproductive benefits to the hunter challenges the traditional view that men hunt to provision their families. Two broad assumptions underlie the signaling view: 1) hunting is an inefficient means of obtaining reliable calories; 2) hunted game is a public good and shared widely to others when there is an audience, and without expectation of future reciprocation. If hunters lack the ability to direct food shares, then the ubiquitous observations of male hunting and universal pair bonding cannot be explained from a perspective that emphasizes provisioning and a division of labor. Here we show, however, that there is little direct empirical support for the assumptions of the signaling hypothesis. The ethnographic record depicts a more complex relationship between food sharing patterns, subsistence strategies and the sexual division of labor than has been suggested by recent treatments. We then describe a framework that incorporates trade-offs between mating and subsistence strategies in an economic bargaining context that can help improve our understanding of men’s and women’s roles in hunter-gatherer societies.