Customer Reviews

The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory

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As an anthropologist and a meticulous proofreader/copyeditor, I am dismayed at the poor quality of this publication from Smithsonian Books. When I first saw the book, I was excited, as we need a good solid book on this topic. The Invisible Sex does not serve. I suspect that Adovasio and Soffer talked to Jake Page, and he mostly 'wrote' the prose, and that no one familiar with the field (or good at proofreading) looked at the page proofs. Otherwise, some of the more ridiculous statments would never have made it into print. For example, "A scientific theory can be proved" (p. 29) and "There are in fact no truly scientific theories about [the evolution of language], for the very reason that any proposed theory is impossible to prove, meaning it is not a scientific theory." (p. 103). The authors claim that Taung was found by Raymond Dart (p. 39), and state that the foramen magnum is the lower part of the skull "where the backbone meets the skull" (p. 56) -- to these, my response is, "Um, NO." A theory is only scientific if it can be DISPROVEN (not proven), Raymond Dart did not find the Taung skull at the quarry himself, and the foramen magnum is, literally, a BIG HOLE, not a "part" of the skull. The explanation of Karen Rosenberg and Wenda Trevathan's work on human birth is completely botched (p. 65-71); a newborn's fontanelle is not formed by the forces of labor/delivery; Trevathan's last name is misspelled in the book and index, and she teaches at New Mexico State University (not UNM), while Karen Rosenberg teaches at the University of Delaware (not the University of Maryland). And this doozy from p. 91: "Genes are themselves made up of base pairs of amino acids." Um, NO. Elsewhere Acheulian is misspelled, as is Orrorin tugenensis and Wernicke's area of the brain, along with many other misspellings and inconsistencies in names. Sydney is the name of the city in Australia (not Sidney), 'without rhythm' is "arrhythmically" not arhythmically (p. 210); canines and incisors should not be confused with one another(p. 139), diminution is the correct spelling (not "dimunition)," and the Grandmother Hypothesis is incorrectly described (p. 164). One can't see the Thames from Boxgrove. A world with fluctuating seasonal resources is not "bipolar" (p. 212). On p. 172 & 259, the author's fundamental misunderstanding of the weaning process is made clear by their description of a mother 'weaning' her 4 year old onto a soft boiled mush of wild seeds. When people write of 'weaning gruels,' they are referring to the very first non-breast milk foods a child gets at age 6-8 months; they are not using the term 'weaning' to mean the end of breastfeeding at age 4 years or older. A four year old child is very likely still breastfeeding, but they also have 20 teeth with which to eat all solid adult foods. Just as a modern human child might go to morning kindergarten, get a Happy Meal lunch on the way home, and then nurse to sleep for a nap. The more serious flaw of the book, however, is the authors ongoing confusion between/among sex, gender, and sexual orientation. On p. 277, they refer to three genders: "male, female, and gay." The first two are biological sex categories, and the third is an American English term for a particular sexual orientation. Genders consiste of masculine, feminine, and a number of others, depending on the culture. "Manly-Hearted Women" were uber-females, married to men, not lesbians. One expects people who study sex and gender in prehistory to understand the distinctions! The bibliography is a complete disaster, with many references having missing or incorrect information. Again, it obviously was not proofread by anyone. Shame on Smithsonian Books for publishing this in such bad shape. The Invisible Sex does not in any way uncover the "true roles" of women in prehistory -- gender does not preserve in the archaeological record, no matter how much we may wish it did. In addition to the Hopi, across West Africa, adult males do the weaving and sewing. Even though in most cultures weaving is women's work, we shouldn't make ANY assumptions about the chromosomes, internal anatomy, external genitalia, sexual orientation, or cultural gender constructions of the individuals who wove cloth, who made baskets, who made stone tools, who hunted, and/or who gathered. We know the women got pregnant, gave birth, and breastfed the children. That's about all we can know. The Invisible Sex is archeological story-telling from a perspective which I vastly prefer over the "Man the Hunter"/Owen Lovejoy perspective, but it is still just archeological story-telling.

This is a stimulating and intriguing book and before I get into the review proper, I would like to include you in a discussion that is, I believe, very important for appreciating it.

We have had a great many conferences about the origins of society with experts in many fields. Most believe that civilization develops as a kind of protection against chaos and fear. Therefore it is hard to believe that societies could have developed and prospered without leaving much in the way of artifacts.

So in that view, history and pre-history are mapped by the weapons, forts, castles, cities and statues that have survived the centuries. My counter to that is to ask whether societies could have developed not as a response to fear, but out of cooperation: people working with the world around them, rather than being scared of it. After all, people right now are suggesting that we should leave less of a footprint in the world. So surely it is conceivable that highly advanced civilizations could have arisen in the past, but history fails to remember them because they did not leave monuments to their own glory.

It reminds me of the comment in Chapter 23 of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:
"On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons."

This issue is at the center of this intriguing new book. James Adovasio is the founder and director of the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute in Erie, Pennsylvania, Olga Soffer is professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois and Jake Page is a distinguished science writer.

They begin by challenging the whole field of archaeology for its focus on hard artifacts such as stone tools and, they claim, systematically ignoring more perishable artifacts such as fishing lines, nets and string. They argue that around 26,000 years ago, somewhere in central Eurasia, a quiet but far-reaching innovation was born, that is often called the String Revolution, but which they rename the "fiber revolution." They point to arts of the world where dry caves have preserved these perishable artifacts, and then fiber and wood products can account for 95% of all the artifacts recovered.

The book is broken into three parts and thirteen chapters, and it is worth mention some of the chapter titles because they give a clear flavor of the engaging way in which the book is written:

Part One: The Beginnings
1. The stories we have been told
2. Origins
3. The importance of being upright
4. Who brought home the bacon?
5. Gray matter and language

Part Two: The Road to Thoroughly Modern Millie
6. Leaving the African cradle
7. Almost altogether truly modern humans
8. The fashioning of women

Part Three: Peopling the World
9. Cakes, fish and, matrilineality
10. Seamstresses of the far North
11. Settling down in America
12. The agricultural evolution
Conclusion: Not invisible after all

The main conclusion of the book is that the introduction of nets, baskets and clothing had profound effects on the destiny of humanity. Along the way there are many fascinating excursions into such questions as the oldest profession. No, it's not that one: they suggest that it might have been midwifery, because of the growth of the brain and the inherent problems of fitting a large head through a small pelvis. There are speculations about why we decided to get up on our hind legs, how language and writing developed and why our ancestors decided that it was time to settle down and start farming.

The writers take many of their colleagues to task for under-estimating the contribution of women to the development of civilization, because it is they who were primarily responsible for the care and production of string, nets and baskets, and also had broader responsibilities, particularly in hunting, than is supposed in most standard textbooks.

The weakest part of the book is a series of arguments about sex bias of anthropologists: that there are not many women in the field and that this has lead to an under-estimate of the role of women in evolution. They could be correct, but it felt as if there was a bit of overkill in their discussion,

So have the authors proved their central point? There we would have to say "no." The reason is that they are making a number of grand inferences based on fossil fragments and artifacts to draw conclusions about gender and social structure. As an example, they infer that women are more likely to be the weavers and braiders, while men would be busily making weapons and heavy tools. On the other hand they also dispute the notion that weapons are merely toys for boys, and suggest that women were involved in hunting. On the basis of one amazing archaeological find in Kentucky, where women were buried with bannerstones - weights used on spear launchers - they propose that women were not only involved, but were respected, perhaps lead hunters. Perhaps they were, and it is high time to move on form the silly "weaker sex" stereotype. But in terms of evidence, it is certainly no slam dunk. It is not difficult to think of some other explanations.

This kind of speculation makes for enthralling reading, but is not, of course, proof.

This is a fascinating book for anyone curious about our origins that might make some good summer reading.

As an academic, I'm almost embarrassed to say this, but I wish the book were about 1/4 as long as it is. I understand and appreciate the need to include the evidence in detail, but I would have gleaned much more had the authors made their points more succinctly. Or maybe it would have helped if they had included a summary of their main points at the end -- or even the beginning -- of each chapter. Two of their main points are not new: (1) that human history has been written by men and therefore with a male bias, and (2) archaeology is less likely to uncover evidence of women's tools, because so many do not survive like instruments traditionally attributed to men's work. As a professor of the psychology of women, I anticipated learning something exciting and new. The authors are apparently excellent researchers and evaluators of hypotheses, but I was not as excited by the content as the title had led me to hope.

Every decade or two a book comes out that attempts to define what the "women's role" was in prehistory, antiquity, even more recent well documented history. A lot of what comes out of the effort is another "just so" story that attempts to explain how we all got where we are. As these authors point out, every generation of anthropologists, sociologists, archaeologists, and others approaches the past with a different set of cultural baggage. As a result of this bias, the interpretation of the role of women through time takes on a different character too. Anyone who doesn't believe this should read some of the biographies of Lucrezia Borgia. Renaissance authors saw her as something of an incestuous, husband murdering monster. The Victorians saw her as a poor helpless pawn in the power struggles of her father and brothers as they dealt with the aristocratic families of renaissance Italy. More modern authors tend to see her as a power broker herself and as a thoroughly acculturated woman of her time and circumstance. Aren't we all?

The present authors do a very good job of keeping their own biases in check and of examining possible reasons for the absence of specifically female presence in the past. Their idea that it is because of the perishability of the material remains of their endeavors is probably true, but hardly "proof." No one has actually even proven who manufactured the lithic remains of prehistoric culture, so one might say that the male gender is absent from prehistory as well. Even when material does survive, it does not really say anything about gender roles, however archaeologists sometimes do. I once visited the archaeological site of Ban Po in China. The site is one of the earliest settlement sites in the country and is now a site open to tourism, which is how I came to see it. The site markers indicated that much had been determined from the excavation, including the fact that men and women lived in separate houses, this from what amounted to little more than a confusing set of post-holes.

The effort to bring in the !Kung and the San--everyone does--and the Hopi/Navaho lifeways as an illustration of customary men's and women's roles in society, certainly gives a clearer picture of what might have been the case in our distant ancestor's time. However, one must always remember that any possible way something can be done probably has been done at some time or other in human history. We are very inventive animals. Trying to say that men "did this" and women "did that" is probably overlooking the fact that they may have been doing different things in different localities. Much of what is done and by whom depends on who can and who has the time.

I think the author's best point is that the concepts of male/female and man/woman are entirely different; the former being an immutable biological fact, the second a social construct. One might think of this in terms of what males and females think of and expect of one another as opposed to what society expects of each. Another interesting facet of the roles of men and women in society is the effects of economics--by which I mean the broader notion of making a living, that is staying alive--on the expectations of both roles. The change in Amerindian women's role and status in their society when the tribe moved from a settled agricultural economy to a more nomadic and hunting based economy has been mentioned in other books on the development of prehistoric and early historic behaviors. These changes arose as a result of external pressures on indigenous people. This type of external effect is many times difficult to find in prehistoric data let alone interpret it when it is. The fact that the American Indian moved from "prehistoric" to "historic" almost instantaneously is one of the reasons that their behavioral changes have been recorded. It is this fact that allows some of the archaeological data to be more easily interpreted. Furthermore recent archaeology has verified some of the on the spot reports by European witnesses, particularly pertaining to the Amazon river basin societies.

The authors are good at bringing in as many points of view as are available--which can be many--and about the biases in the past interpretation of women's role. They discuss especially the notion of "man the hunter" and dissect the likelihood of this interpretation. I suspect that the "man the hunter" role would be far more reliable as a description of Neanderthal behavior. Certainly their skeletal remains exhibit some major and repeated bone breaks that suggest close encounters with large and dangerous animals, while, so far as I am aware, this type of injury is found much less often among the bones of modern humans. This suggests that caution was the best solution in dealing with these animals. And after all, when you consider it, it was our own species not the Neanderthal that survived to modern times.

A very interesting book.

J.M. Adovasio is an archaeologist. Olga Soffer is an anthropologist, and Jake Page is a science writer. They have put together in "The Invisible Sex" a book that attempts to

(1) Bring the general reader up to date on the latest developments in archaeology or paleo-anthropology;

(2) Uncover the True Roles of Women in Prehistory (as in the subtitle); and

(3) Provide a corrective to a male-dominated view of the prehistory.

The main image they want to correct is that of the great male hunter bravely slaying mastodons and in general bringing home the bacon to an adoring and appreciative family or band. What the authors want readers to see is that women weren't just tag-alongs on the way to our becoming fully modern humans, but at least equal partners. The authors refer to nets, threads, garments, basket weaving, cordage, digging sticks, the famous "Venus" statuettes, and other cultural artifacts to demonstrate the enormous role that women played culturally. They speculate that women invented farming, that they too engaged in the hunt, as well as producing works of art as important as the famous cave paintings.

The main method used by the authors is to infer the past from a study of recent hunter-gatherer societies while comparing ancient artifacts with more recent ones. This method certainly ought to provide insight into human life in prehistory, but of course there are some problems. The main one I think is that the "primitive" societies extant today or in the near past are not necessarily typical of those that existed in prehistory because today's tribes occupy marginal lands since the best lands have long been given over to modern societies.

Personally, I never had any doubt about the significant role females played in the history of the species. Indeed, my feeling has always been that women are the default human being, and men an appendage, a necessary evil if you will. (Ha!) I don't think we need to study archaeology to understand that the central role in human culture is and was occupied by women. There is a sense of pandering and begging the question in the way the authors insist on the obvious. I think it stems from the fact that women in some of the sciences have and still do feel like second class citizens.

But that is changing. As the authors point out, most anthropologists today are women. The old male-delusional interpretations of culture in paleo-societies or in modern gatherer-hunter societies are a thing of the past. Instead we are in danger of having female-delusional interpretations. Here are a couple of examples of "reverse" sexism in the text:

From page 209: The authors imagine that "Aboriginal men" may have sniffed "contemptuously at the shell hooks and...strings that their women were using, making invidious comparisons of those little toys...with their mighty, multipointed, barbed, aerodynamic spears and other large instruments." Actually the men may have looked admiringly at such tools since such tools increased their subsistence.

On pages 248-249 in pre-Columbian New Mexico: While the women were farming, "The men had continued to spend much of their time roaming the surround, hunting (or goofing off?)." I think time spent "goofing off" applies to both sexes.

Frankly I am a bit weary of books that focus on sexualism in one form or the other to the exclusion of the science itself. This book would have been a lot better had the stance been devoid of sexism and just concentrated on what the authors have learned and understand. Their various interpretations of the enigmatic Venus of Willendorf figurine, from goddess to porn star, is a case in point. Clearly the figure, which the authors quite naturally attribute to a female artist, is a symbol in some sense of fertility, not just the fertility of the female, but of the earth itself since no woman could have gotten so corpulent except during a period of plenty. And that is what probably enamored those who made and kept such figures--the idea of the season of plenty. Such a woman not only had plenty to eat, but was a heavy favorite to survive whatever winter may come. Her personal sexuality is secondary to the generalized idea of fertility.

As for bringing the general reader up to date on the latest developments in archaeology or paleo-anthropology, the authors provide some interesting material. What has happened is that because of new technologies and more professional care taken by the scientists themselves, we are now able to unearth and be aware of artifacts such as threads, baskets, nets, etc., in a way previously not possible. And, it is true, it helps to see these artifacts from a woman's point of view, that is, as a gender female looking at what happened and assessing the importance of the artifacts, and drawing conclusions that did not occur to the old guys who once dominated the social sciences. Of course even better would be a balanced perspective, a fully human perspective, but we still have a ways to go to achieve that.

Perhaps the most glaring omission in the book is the failure of the authors to mention war (or what I like to call "the war system") as a reason for the rise of patriarchy during the transition from mostly hunter-gatherer societies to agriculture ones. Before there were storehouses of grain and large settled communities, the profits of war were meager. Once war became a viable occupation, men increased their power over women. Indeed the current religions of the Middle East, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, are all warlike and patriarchal.

So indeed, the authors do help uncover the true roles of women in the prehistory for those of us who had any doubt. However, whether women went on the Big Hunt or not, or whether men ever acted as "midwives" (which the authors identify as the real "oldest profession") is of secondary importance to the fact of hunting and midwifery.

The authors have assembled a lot of data for their quick survey of both primate evolution and the prehistory of our own primate species. In such a short book, they can do no more than pass lightly over their sources, but the book does contain a good bibliography for further research. Reading it left this reviewer with the unavoidable conclusion that our current social system of interlocking patriarchies is a historical aberration. For most of our species' evolution, we have lived not with patriarchy, nor with matriarchy, nor with gender "equality" -- though the authors use this rather abstract term -- but in a state that I'd term "gender parity." In the dangerous conditions of the Paleolithic and early Neolithic, when human populations were so small and existence was so fragile, the contribution of every member of a group, whether male or female, was too valuable to ignore or denigrate. The book's only real flaw is the prose style -- breezy, bubbly, and filled with bits of slang like "more bang for the buck."

I am impressed by the work of J.M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, and Jake Page in their innovative investigation of the work of pre-historic women. While they don't always agree with one another, the authors are always cordial and witty. The result is a book that tells a lot about women in prehistoric times, and a bit about the collaborative process of writing THE INVISIBLE SEX: UNCOVERING THE TRUE ROLES OF WOMEN IN PREHISTORY. The study is published by Smithsonian Books, under the aegis of Harper Collins, 2007.

Growing and preparing food, working with fibers to create cord, birthing babies, honoring higher powers by carving goddess figures, fashioning tools: all these important aspects of communal life, as it was lived by women in collaboration with men, have been scientifically investigated and cleverly written, sometimes in story form, always in an engaging narrative style.

Two of the authors are scientists, and one a journalist. It is a dynamic combination, and their book a fascinating read.

This book provides a good overview of women's role in human prehistory, while appropriately acknowledging that there is much that scientists still do not know about the social culture of our species and its predecessors. For example, the book proposes that men (and some women and adolescents) hunted small game rather than large game, and that the famous "Venus" figures of prehistory represent something other (it's still not clear what) than fertility or "Goddess" worship.

On the negative side, some readers may be put off by the authors' more personal remarks, coming from a feminist perspective, that too-frequently interrupt the book's presentation of scientific theory and evidence. Also, the absence of footnotes is regrettable in a book of this kind.

Overall, though, there is a lot of good information here, that will be of interest to the many readers who want to learn more about the biological and cultural origins of humanity. That makes it a positive recommendation, as far as this reviewer is concerned, in spite of its one-sided perspective and sometimes distracting rhetoric.

J. M. Adavasio is an archeologist with the firm belief -- and research to prove it -- that people were on the American Continent far earlier than the 10,000 years that is "Gospel."

Jake Page writes of Indian lore, flora and fauna, and mystery novels centered in the American West with equal verve.

Here they discuss women's roles in developing tribes marvelously. Read this, and note the bibliography, and then seek out each's other works. You'll be richer for it.

Why can't these pop science writers at least try to avoid inserting egregious errors? Towards the end of this book the authors actually say that "linguists and geneticists are coming to the conclusion that the Anatolian hypothesis is correct," and that a 6500 B.C. date for Proto-Indo-European "accords better with the linguistic dating"! That is precisely the opposite of the case. The Anatolian hypothesis is, as Mallory put it, the wrong place at the wrong time. On linguistic grounds it doesn't even begin to stand up, and never has.

Of course the book isn't about Indo-European, and the authors would have done well to stay out of a topic with which they are clearly unfamiliar. Foolish errors like this undermine the book's credibility.