The age-old narrative of men as hunters and women as gatherers has shaped our understanding of gender roles for millennia. Kimberly Hamlin argues this story is not only fictitious but dangerous, pointing to cutting-edge research which challenges these deeply ingrained assumptions about human development and the natural order.

In prehistoric times, so the story goes, men hunted; women gathered. This gendered division of labour from thousands of years ago explains, supposedly, how and why it is natural for men to lead and women to follow; for men to complete dangerous and heroic tasks while women complete mundane and thankless tasks; and, eventually, for men work outside the home for pay and for women to work inside the home for no pay.

In the 1960s, the academic hypothesis that male hunting was central to early human civilization gave rise to an influential symposium and book called Man the Hunter (1968), edited by anthropologists Richard Lee and Irven De Vore. The publication of Man the Hunter inaugurated the academic field of hunter-gatherer studies and cemented the caricatures of man-the-hunter/woman-the-gatherer in the popular imagination.