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THE I N V I S I B L E SEX
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
J. M. Adovasio, Ph.D., is the founder and director of the Mercyhurst
Archaeological Institute and Provost of Mercyhurst College in Erie,
Pennsylvania. He is author, with Jake Page, of The First Americans.
Olga Soffer, formerly a fashion industy insider, is emerita professor
of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and
research associate at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA.
Jake Page is a former editor of Natural History magazine and science
editor of Smithsonian magazine, as well as the author of numerous
books. He lives in Colorado.
A selective list of other books by the authors:
F
j. m. adovasio
Basketry Technology:
A Guide to Identification and Analysis
The First Americans:
In Pursuit of Archaeology’s Greatest Mysteries
with Jake Page
olga soffer
Perceived Landscapes and Built Environments:
The Cultural Geography of Late Paleolithic Eurasia
with S. Vasil’ev and J. Kozlowski
Beyond Art with M. Conkey, D. Stratmann,
and N. Jablonski
The Upper Paleolithic of the Central Russian Plain
jake page
In the Hands of the Great Spirit:
The 20,000-Year History of the American Indian
Hopi
with Susanne Page
J. M. ADOVASIOj
OLGA SOFFER & JAKE PAGE
Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK
THE I N V I S I B L E SEX
UNCOVERING
THE TRUE ROLES
OF WOMEN
I N P R E H I S T O RY
Originally published in the United State in hardcover by Smithsonian
Books/ HarperCollins in 2007 under ISBN 978-0-06-117091-1
First published 2007 by Left Coast Press, Inc.
Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © 2007 J. M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, and Jake Page
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:
Adovasio, J. M. The invisible sex: uncovering the true roles of women in
prehistory/ J. M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer & Jake Page.p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-59874-390-6
ISBN10: 1-59874-390-21.Women, Prehistoric. 2. Sex role—history.
3. Sexual division of labor—History. 4. Feminist archaeology.
I Soffer, Olga. II. Page, Jake. III. Title.
GN799.W66A36.2007305.4209–dc
222006050582
Designed by Janet M. Evans
ISBN13: 978-1-59874-390-6 paperback
in memoriam:
Ma r i a n n a Da v y d o v n a G v o z d o v e r
June 2, 1917–December 28, 2004
. . . an outstanding Russian scholar, stimulating
colleague, consummate charmer, and good friend,
whose impact on Paleolithic archaeology was muted
because of both her gender and her ethnicity—a
modern-day example of “invisible sex” at work
in academia.
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contents
xi
AUTHORS’ PREFACE
1
INTRODUCTION
5
PART ONE: The Beginnings
7
ONE: The Stories We Have Been Told
27
TWO: Origins
52
THREE: The Importance of Being Upright
72
FOUR: Who Brought Home the Bacon?
89
FIVE: Gray Matter and Language
115
PART TWO: The Road to Thoroughly
Modern Millie
117
SIX: Leaving the African Cradle
142
SEVEN: Almost Altogether Truly
Modern Humans
169
EIGHT: The Fashioning of Women
193
PART THREE: Peopling the World
195
NINE: Cakes, Fish, and Matrilineality
210
TEN: Seamstresses of the Far North
219
ELEVEN: Settling Down in America
243
TWELVE: The Agricultural Evolution
277
CONCLUSION: Not Invisible After All
280
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
283
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
291
INDEX
x
The Invisible S E X
authors’ preface
This book is the product of three authors,
and that may well remind readers of the old
caveat about too many chefs in one kitchen,
which implies a culinary catastrophe. But
numerous chefs are common in the arena of
scientific discourse. Some scientific papers
include the names of practically everyone
who had anything to do with the experiment or investigation being described—
probably even the guy who delivers the pizza
on late nights in the lab. In theory, everyone
except maybe the pizza guy signs off on the
wording of the final article, signaling an
overall agreement with its contents. But this
book is not a piece of scientific discourse
like that.
We might never have known one another,
much less worked together, except for a
series of contingencies and serendipitous
events. This is fitting, since the story we will tell here is also one
of contingencies, of what might be called accidents. For example,
the occasional mutation occurs in some ape’s genes, a mutation
that does nothing to harm the creature and perhaps does something helpful. A slightly different ape emerges. Over a few million years, and a lot of mutational games of chance (most of
which ended in TILT), here we are: humans.
In a similarly random manner did the three of us come together to produce this book.
Adovasio, whom we will refer to as Jim, was thrust by an
extremely forceful archaeological professor into the extremely
unsexy field of perishable artifacts—basketry, cordage, weaving,
and so forth. These all fall into the category of perishable artifacts because they don’t usually preserve well, and hence there
aren’t very many to be studied. Before long he was the leading
scholar on all such artifacts in North America and had handled,
inspected, and thought about almost 90 percent of every such
artifact known on the continent. This put him, as a regular duty
of his profession, in mind of prehistoric women, since by analogy
to living populations it was women who usually made such stuff.
Also, by an accident (if you believe in such things), he became
terribly controversial when, in the 1970s in the Meadowcroft
Rockshelter in western Pennsylvania, he and his students came
across evidence that people had trod North America some 5,000
or 6,000 years earlier than the evidence until then showed. This
kicked up a terrible fuss, of course, which is just now dying down
some 30 years later, with most American archaeologists admitting that people were here much earlier. But to substantiate his
claim, Jim and his team invented some of the most rigorous field
xii
The Invisible S E X
and laboratory procedures ever seen in the field of archaeology,
including something called forensic microsedimentology, and it
was this technical excellence that recommended him, it seems, to
be invited to a historic pair of meetings of Soviet and American
archaeologists in the early days of glasnost. One of the prime
movers in these two meetings was Soffer, whom we will refer to
as Olga.
Jim knew from the age of three or four that he wanted to
be an archaeologist, but Olga had a stint in the fashion business
first. Of Russian extraction and a native speaker of that language,
she devoted most of her attention, starting in 1977, to the Paleolithic era in Soviet-dominated eastern Europe and central
Europe. She also served as a scientific advisor to Jean Auel for
two of her novels of the Pleistocene, Mammoth Hunters and Plains of
Passage.
Since Marx had said nothing about the Paleolithic, the
Soviet archaeologists could (and did) become friendly with Olga,
and they all wanted to bridge the chasm that existed between
Soviet and American colleagues. When Mikhail Gorbachev came
to power in the Soviet Union, this aim could become a reality.
Olga and George Frison, onetime head of the Society for American Archaeology, organized the first Soviet–American Archaeological Symposium in the summer of 1989 when nine North
American archaeologists traveled to the Soviet Union. Jim and
Olga met for the first time in the departure lounge at JFK airport in New York. Jim spoke Ukrainian, learned from his mother,
and when they arrived in the Soviet Union, he helped Olga with
translating and with herding archaeologists around the country
to visit various seminal sites. More than that, however, Jim had
Authors’ Preface
xiii
for 30 years been telling everyone in his field how important a
diagnostic tool was to be found in all those perishable artifacts he
had come to know so well. Nobody seemed to give a damn—
except that Olga did. Right off, perhaps in part because she was
as attuned to fashion as she was to ancient ceramics, she also took
up the cause.
A second symposium took place in Denver in 1991, in part
financed by Jean Auel, who had become a kind of archaeology
angel. Later that year, Olga and some colleagues were planning
the excavation of a site in the Ukraine and asked the Ukrainianspeaking and technically proficient Jim if he would like to come
along. He did. Later, in 1995, at a meeting about the Ukrainian
site in Olga’s home in Urbana, Illinois, she showed Jim some
slides of enigmatic impressions she had taken while working on
another project in Moravia in the Czech Republic. There she
had been looking at a huge collection of fired clay from some
26,000 years ago—at the time thought to be the oldest pottery
known anywhere—and had photographed some that had what
looked like parallel lines on them.
She projected the slides on the refrigerator door. Jim announced that the lines were the impressions of textiles, making
them by far the earliest such artifacts. Olga and another colleague
wondered whether he was not mistaking the texture of the refrigerator door as textiles, and Jim gave them a look that nearly
turned them into pillars of stone. So the Paleolithic Era (a.k.a.
the Stone Age) got its first textiles, which play an important part
in Chapter Eight of this book.
Meanwhile, not long after this historic meeting in the
kitchen, Jake Page, a onetime science editor at Natural History and
xiv
The Invisible S E X
Smithsonian magazines and then a freelancer, had been given an
assignment by Smithsonian to write an article about what was new
in the archaeological pursuit of what was called Early Man in the
New World. This necessitated a trip to Jim’s haunts at Meadowcroft, which led not to an article on the subject (Smithsonian decided not to publish the article because they heard that the editor
of National Geographic had one in the can) and then to a collaborative book called The First Americans.
So, when the idea arose for a book on the female side of
human evolution and prehistory, it made sense to take advantage
of all these earlier contingencies, all this serendipity. Or, as we
have joked on at least one occasion, perhaps given so many coincidences, a cabal of Paleolithic Venuses got sick and tired of being
thought of as either madonnas or whores, and imperceptibly
pushed us to . . . well, none of us really believes in that kind of
thing.
Authors’ Preface
xv
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THE I N V I S I B L E SEX
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introduction
A famous archaeologist once said that science is not truth; it is, instead, a method for
diminishing ignorance. It is simply in the
nature of scientific inquiry, not to mention
other methods, that the frontier between
understanding and ignorance is in constant
motion. And science is a human enterprise
practiced by people whose feet can easily be
clay—and usually are. Scientists live in their
particular era and usually share unconsciously in the many common underlying
and often unspoken beliefs or biases of their
time. When you realize that until recently
the field called archaeology (along with geology, paleontology, and all the other specialties involved in our story) has been
practiced almost exclusively by men, it will
be no surprise that the story they have told
has been largely free of females, of women. This book is an attempt to rectify that.
Many people consider such a female-less picture as merely
another example of the cosmic putdown of the female in the
long-running, overweening, and basically felonious patriarchy
that has ruled the world since the agricultural revolution. This
view (to which we return later on) is an extreme position, and
not a very likely one, either. It is also a bit Eurocentric. Yet, there
is a less extreme version that has to do with the invention of the
deep past. Humans, of course, create the past. For every creature
from a virus to a wolf to a chimpanzee, there is no past that extends backward before one’s own life. And for thousands of years
after humans invented writing (about 5,000 years ago) and could
describe events that we would define as history, there was no prehistory as such. There was mythology, of course—events that occurred at some unspecified time earlier: myth time, it is called:
dream time. Later in this book we will look back at the transition
from a mythological past to the origins and progress of archaeology and the other ways of scientifically uncovering (and then
creating) the past.
It is, as we said, our intent to rectify the situation in which
females and women have been excluded from this creation. We
will first examine some of the common narratives about prehistory and point out their flaws, looking briefly as well into the
development of the very idea of prehistory and how it came
about. We will go on from there to produce a new version of the
story of human evolution—one that is neither HERstory nor
HISstory (a word game that is more politics than science or linguistic sense). If anything, the goal here is to OURstory—a past
2
The Invisible S E X
populated by a full range of actors who lived and loved, hunted,
gathered, learned to speak, cooked, sewed, built, thrilled children
with fabulous stories about mythical beings, played, laughed, got
sick, got wounded, mourned the dead, invented religion. They
were a diverse lot: young, old, female, male, brave, cowardly,
dreamers, and doers.
In the retelling of this long story, we explain much of what
has emerged in the past few decades about the roles of females,
of women. Thanks to the work of numerous scholars in several
fields, it has come to light that female humans have been the chief
engine in the unprecedentedly high level of human sociability,
were the inventors of the most useful of tools (called the String
Revolution), have shared equally in the provision of food for
human societies, almost certainly drove the human invention of
language, and were the ones who created agriculture.
From the work of many types of scholars, the long-invisible
sex of human evolution and the gender roles of Homo sapiens are
beginning to emerge. The full story will never be known, and the
story as we have it today cannot be told in the manner of a complete motion picture. Instead, it is more like a slide show, with
gaps to be filled in by future archaeologists, paleontologists, geneticists, linguists, and others.
Introduction
3
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PART 1
the beginnings
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1
the stories we have been told
In which the authors present tales of male derring do and explicate their failures in accounts of
the deep past, along with a bit of the history of
science and the reasons why women have not
been found in those old tales.
Since the beginning of archaeology, stories like the following
three have been told, illustrated, and taken as the true way in
which our ancestors lived and worshipped and fed themselves.
They are in much the same vein as most museum dioramas of
ancient times and are matched by most magazine and book illustrations as well. Warning: these tales can be dangerous to your
understanding of the human past.
THE PLACE: A hill overlooking the Vezere Valley in southwestern
France, not far from a cave called the Grotte de Rouffignac.
THE TIME: 14,000 years ago.
A group of men makes its way single file along a steep and narrow
path that winds up a limestone hill. It is dusk, and the day has
been stormy and dark. Impatient gray clouds have commanded
the sky, and from time to time they have sent spring rains down,
turning the path to mud and making footing difficult. The weather
is yet to feel the true onset of spring—that day when the sun
begins to warm the earth and the winds turn kind.
The men climb silently in the gathering dusk. Some of
them are slender, in their teens. Others are filled out, in their
prime, having lived thirty or even a few more years. Among them
are three boys, alert and excited but subdued with apprehension.
They shiver, though not from the remnant cold of winter. They
know they face an ordeal, but they have not found out its dimensions yet, which makes it all the scarier. Tonight they will become
men. Later they will learn the arts of hunting, of mating, of being
responsible providers for their yet unborn sons and daughters.
Some of the men carry branches that will be used as torches
once they have been surrounded by the oncoming dark. Others
carry spears with shafts of rare hardwoods, topped with serrated
bone points affixed with cord or sinew. One of the men in the
front of the line struggling up the path has a leather pouch slung
across his shoulder. It is full of red and black powders ground
from local minerals like hematite or magnetite. Another, the
oldest one with white in his hair, carries a knife of flint and a flat
soft stone with a depression hollowed out of it. In the depression
animal fat has solidified. In it lies a fiber wick. When lit, it will be
the first light into the depths of the sacred cave whose entrance
they now are nearing.
Below them, the last of the day’s light glints off the river, a
shining serpent that lies along the length of the valley still brown
with the winter’s dead grasses. The three boys take their last
glimpse of the valley and apprehensively follow the men into the
8
The Invisible S E X
dark mouth of the cave, the flint knife gleaming in their minds’
eyes. The older man has led the way, his tiny flame glowing.
Behind him, the man with the leather pouch walks gravely, followed by the men with torches, who alternate with those carrying spears. Huge shadows leap wildly on the rocky walls, and a
low chanting like a distant wind begins to fill the cave—words
the three boys can barely make out, words they have not heard
before. For all they know, it is the cave itself that sings. They see
the forms of animals emerging from the walls and the ceiling as
the shadows dance past.
Deeper into the magic cave they go, and the ceiling begins
to come closer until the men ahead stoop over, crouch, their torches’
flames blackening the stones. The smoke from the torches burns
the eyes of the three boys, but they say nothing. Soon the ceiling
has lowered to the point where everyone must crawl, scraping
their bellies along the mud and stone of the floor.
At last (it seems a very long time but it has only been a
short trip), they reach a chamber where they can all stand, the
men in little groups. The boys huddle in the middle. All around
them are the sweeping figures of the great bison, graceful horses,
the grand mammoths, all looming high above on the walls. In the
flickering light of the torches and the gathering murk of smoke,
they come alive. They seem to move.
Preparations begin. The oldest man selects an empty spot
on the wall while the man with the leather pouch of powders—
the one they now start to call the Painter—prepares his paints.
The boys are taken to the unpainted wall, where the oldest man
begins to sing. His flint knife is nowhere to be seen. He sings
a story about hunting, about the habits and the wiles of the
The Stories We Have Been Told
9
animals they hunt, about great hunts where everyone rejoiced in
the bounty, and about failures: times when the hunters themselves were hunted and fell prey in the great and bloody exchange
that sustains the world. The old man sings of times when the
animals left, disappeared, because the hunters forgot to honor
their spirits and give due homage to the Owner of the Animals.
All the while the Painter works. He takes the black mineral
powder into his mouth, mixes it with his saliva, and blows a spatter of black onto the wall, making a dark line. As the songs gather
momentum and the hypnotic power of the chant turns the men
to stomping and dancing, the boys are amazed to see a mammoth
materialize on the wall before their eyes. The Singer carries on,
an insistent monotonous song that properly asks the Owner of
the Animals to share them. He chants the secrets and prayers for
killing the huge beasts respectfully, the prayers that these boys
will memorize along with so much else this night. The magical
mammoth glistens on the wall, as suddenly a long shriek arises in
the gloom and the best of the group’s hunters leaps forward to
hurl a throwing spear at the image.
Its ivory point snaps. A mark is gouged from the mammoth—a gouge that marks the beast’s heart—and the spear clatters to the ground. The old man, the Singer, hands it to one of
the boys and bids him throw it. The boy hesitates, looks about
him at the grinning men, shrieks as best he can, and throws.
The ritual continues until dawn. Some time thereafter, the
boys emerge into the light on the hill overlooking their valley.
They bear the reddening welts and incisions of ritual, they bear
the beginning of the hunters’ wisdom, and they have become
men—untested yet, but men nonetheless.
10
The Invisible S E X
Home beckons, and from the high ground amid the aroma
of dew they can see that a small herd of reindeer, seven in all, has
left the cover of the trees and, in the early morning mist, is drinking from the river far below, skittish, lovely in the thin light of the
morning.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THAT PICTURE?
The Grotte de Rouffignac is one of the richest sites of prehistoric
images in Europe and the world. It contains more than 250 engravings and paintings of prehistoric animals, the work of people
who lived toward the end of the last Ice Age. This astonishing
exhibition extends some 500 yards from the cave’s entrance into
the labyrinths beyond. One hundred and fifty-four mammoths
are pictured, including one enormous specimen today called
Grandfather. Although the cave is privately owned, the public is
still welcome to visit it.
The story told here is typical of many that have arisen, at
least in outline, from about a century and a half of study and
guesswork about these astounding images found principally in
western European caves. Most scholars and most people call
these images art; we shall return to this topic later on. Many
scholars say that it is when these images began to appear—about
30,000 years ago—that anatomically modern humans finally
reached the height of brain power and creativity that characterizes today’s human beings. This is most likely true.
In this story, there are of course no women present, no girls
being initiated. For decades, artistic achievement was seen as a
man’s world, as was hunting: the procurement of meat. The presumption has been that the extraordinary caves like Lascaux and
The Stories We Have Been Told
11
this one not far from the town of Les Eyzies, which some take as
the “capital” of European prehistory, were a man’s world. The
implication was (and still is in many such accounts and illustration) that women of the period may well have never set foot in
such places and, if they did, certainly were not actively involved
in their creation. There is absolutely no evidence, however, that
women and girls were not participants. Indeed, there is not even
any evidence that men were involved.
THE PLACE: A promontory overlooking the confluence of two small
rivers that, a half day’s walk toward where the sun rises, empty
into a larger river known today as the Dnieper. The landscape all
around is flat, hardly rising above the riverine flood plain in today’s Ukraine. Steep-sided ravines slice through the surrounding
cold dry grasslands. In the river valleys themselves, stunted
trees—mostly pine and birch—grow in stands. For nine months
a year this is a landscape of awesome desolation and temperatures that can drop to 40 degrees below zero, but in the three,
sometimes two, months of summer it warms to the low 70s and
teems with fecund life.
THE TIME: 14,000 years ago, a late summer day when the breezes of
morning foretell the long season of cold to come. People must
now ensure that they have the needed stores of meat and clothing to see them through the dark cold days ahead.
Some 15 families have gathered in a group at the confluence of
the two rivers. They are dressed in their summer furs: tailored
parkalike tops with hoods thrown back, and lightweight suede
12
The Invisible S E X
trousers that end as form-fitting boots. In the warmth, some of
the men have bared their bodies to the waist. On the promontory above, several of the men keep a lookout lest the nearby herd
of mammoths moves down river. The mammoths, a herd of some
30 adults and younger animals, graze on the lush grasses of the
river’s edge. They rarely move far from a river, needing mammoth amounts of water to quench their mammoth thirst and to
cool down their shaggy bodies.
Below the lookouts, the camp bustles with preparatory activity. Many of the men are going over their hunting gear, making
sure that their ivory throwing and thrusting spears are sharp and
in order. The working edges are polished with pieces of gneiss or
sandstone. One hunter, an expert stoneworker, knaps (chips)
long flint blades from a specially prepared core. These he will
turn into keen-edged knives for skinning and butchering the
animals killed. There is an air of suppressed excitement among
these hunters, men in their prime and a few younger ones whose
tasks will call for less expertise than the experienced leaders of
the hunt. Another group of men is readying the beaters: flat
mammoth shoulder and hip blades that the younger men will
strike with long thin shin bones topped with bits of soft fur. The
fearsome noise, along with the flaming torches some will carry,
will drive the mammoths into the range of the great hunters once
the sun has reached the height of the sky.
As planned, the band of hunters rises and moves stealthily
in various directions down the river toward the unsuspecting
herd. Within the hour, they have all taken up their positions, surrounding the herd, each as close as he can get without being
detected by the naturally near-sighted beasts. The mammoths,
The Stories We Have Been Told
13
having drunk their fill from the river and feeling drowsy in the
midday heat, have earlier moved into the shade provided by the
low trees along the river.
Torches are lit. The drumming begins. Fifteen screaming
hunters leap up and race toward their prey, closing in on the herd
and driving it toward the nearby ravine. The animals, terrified by
the noise, the fire, and the missiles that rain down on them,
charge ahead into the ravine, tumbling thunderously over one
another, bellowing in pain and fear, legs broken, helpless. The
men descend into the melee and, with their powerfully built
thrusting spears, deliver the coup de grace to mammoth after
mammoth, young and old, until within an hour all the animals
are dead. Their warm carcasses lie ready for butchering.
By the end of the afternoon, choice pieces of mammoth
meat have been sliced away from the bones of a few of the dead
beasts, and a grand feast begins. All in the group—some 70
people in all, young and old—fill their bellies with meat roasted
over sizzling fires while the hunters retell the high drama of the
chase, the adrenaline-filled thrusting and leaping of the kill, the
spouting of warm blood. Later that night, stomachs full and
hearts content, the group will sleep. Tomorrow they will busy
themselves hacking their bountiful harvest into smaller packets
of meat that can be stored in pits dug for that purpose, stores that
will see them through yet another windswept, freezing winter.
The larger bones of the mammoths will be used to rebuild their
bone houses; others will feed the fires that warm them in the
cold. Little will go to waste. The prayers made so earnestly to the
Owner of the Animals have been answered, and the people will
survive another year in this place.
14
The Invisible S E X
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THAT STORY?
The village built of mammoth bone houses on the promontory
above the two small rivers—the Ros and the Rossava—was discovered by archaeologists in 1966 and called Mezhirich. The site
is still under study, but the remains of some 150 mammoths were
found in the vicinity. Adult mammoths weighed in at about three
tons, of which more than a ton was pure animal protein. The first
archaeologists at this site assumed that the Paleolithic people of
Mezhirich, with their specialized mammoth-hunting culture,
lived in this same place for as much as an entire generation, so
plentiful were herds of mammoths and other large prey animals
in the neighborhood of the rivers. In other river valleys in this
large region, they assumed, either the hunters were not as adept
or the herds were less plentiful, and those Ice Age groups needed
to move more often, leaving behind less impressive ruins for the
archaeologists to discover.
Today one can see dioramas of such hunting villages with
mammoth bone houses in many museums, including the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Chicago’s Field
Museum, the Hot Springs Museum in South Dakota, and Le
Thot in the Dordogne region of France. The first such house
excavated has been reconstructed in the Museum of Paleontology in Kiev, Ukraine.
In hunting “scenes” such as the story above, and the dioramas, there is little sense that women are present except as passive
consumers. That they might have assisted in the butchering, if not
the hunting itself, was not considered until recently. But more to
the point, we will see later in the course of this book that such hunts,
in which huge numbers of these enormous beasts are slaughtered,
The Stories We Have Been Told
15
probably never happened. Such hunts appear now to be mythmaking on the part of the paleoanthropological community.
THE PLACE: A narrow rocky canyon in the foothills east of the
Grand Tetons in present-day Wyoming.
THE TIME: 11,000 years ago.
Seven men stride into the mouth of a canyon and descend into
the shade. It is midsummer, hot, and the men wear only skins
around their loins. They carry long thrusting spears tipped with
finely chipped points of chert, some longer than a man’s hand.
The hunters are an advance party, headed north, exploring new
country. Where they have come from, farther to the south, the
game has grown sparse. No longer do the great elephantine mammoths still roam in large herds, and, with the rapid drying of the
world in the south, the vast herds of giant bison have all moved
north. It has been some time now since these men have enjoyed
a successful hunt, and the women and children they left on a
promontory a few miles back have been complaining for days.
The canyon narrows as it deepens, and an even narrower
side canyon opens to the north, a slight trickle of water reflecting
the sun. The men slow down, chatter quietly among themselves,
and then turn up the side canyon. They have seen the droppings
of mountain sheep and horses alongside the water. Some 15 minutes later, they reach a place where the canyon turns west toward
the high mountains. Cautious now, having seen the whitening
bones of a few bison and sheep, they follow the canyon west and
are brought up short by the sight of a huge bear lying in the shade
16
The Invisible S E X
Figure 1-1.
Prehistoric hunters
in America battling
a giant bear.
andre durenceau/
National Geographic
Image Collection,
Image ID 613071
below the canyon wall, gnawing on the carcass of what appears to
be a freshly killed bighorn ram.
In a brief whispered conference, the men decide to scare
the bear away from its prey. They approach silently, bare feet on
rock, ducking behind boulders, moving forward. Now, within
some 30 yards of the bear and his distinctive pungent musky
smell, they leap out as one, screaming, rushing at the creature.
Enraged, the bear rears up and roars. His huge head with its wide
mouth rises some 14 feet; he towers over the attacking band of
hunters. A huge paw at the end of a long and slender arm slashes
the lead hunter across the chest, sending him hurtling backward
The Stories We Have Been Told
17
onto the rocks. The other arm reaches for another attacker, who
jams his spear at the bear’s stomach, and the other hunters leap
and duck, feinting, thrusting, screaming.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THAT STORY?
This advance party is known today as Clovis Man, from the exquisitely made spear points that were first discovered near the
town of Clovis, New Mexico, in the 1930s. Clovis Man arrived in
North America, it seemed
