Man The Hunter Is Dead.
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
Sorry boys, you may be able to thwart women's education for almost 4,000 years, but we finally won our rights and have spent a hundred years studying history from a perspective rarely considered before. There will be revisions!
And they will be world changing.
Three years ago the man the hunter theory was proved to be bullshit.
The team of Dr. Cara Wall-Scheffler, a professor and Co-Chair of Biology at Seattle Pacific University, spent over 20 years dismantling the misconception by conducting a global survey of foraging societies. They found that women explicitly hunted in 79% of documented groups. This data "flatly rejected a long-standing myth that men hunt, women gather, and that this division runs deep in human history".
But wait there's more... Wall-Scheffler's work on physiology proves that women are not just capable of hunting — they are biologically optimised for it. Her research shows that women's bodies, with their unique methods of thermoregulation, relatively high surface area, and broader pelvises, make them exceptionally efficient at long-distance endurance activity. Oestrogen and fat oxidation, she argues, are not a weakness but a superpower for the long-distance tracking required in big-game hunting. As she notes, "Grandmas were the best hunters of the village".
This should come as a huge relief to 49% of the population, it takes a huge weight off men's shoulders.
And it's not just women saying this.
"We are not naturally violent. On the contrary, we are deeply averse to it." States historian Rutger Bregman in his book HumanKind where he revisits the groundbreaking research of the American military historian and brigadier general, S.L.A. Marshall. During the Second World War, Marshall conducted extensive post-combat interviews with frontline infantrymen. His findings were startling.
In the Pacific and European theatres, Marshall discovered that only 15 to 25 per cent of soldiers actually fired their weapons at the enemy. In one battalion of over 300 men, he confirmed that a mere 36 individuals had pulled the trigger in combat.
These non-firing soldiers were not cowards. They remained at their posts, exposed to the same mortal danger as their comrades. Many were expert marksmen in training. Yet when faced with a living, breathing adversary, something visceral prevented them from pulling the trigger.
Bregman quotes Marshall's own conclusion:
"The average and healthy individual... has such an inner and usually unrealised resistance towards killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility."
Then Bregman uses all this evidence to launch a direct assault on what he calls 'veneer theory' – the centuries-old belief, championed by thinkers from Hobbes to Freud, that civilisation is merely a thin veneer covering a savage, brutish human nature.
"The veneer theory is not just wrong; it is dangerous. If we believe that people are fundamentally selfish, we will design our societies accordingly – with rigid hierarchies, harsh punishments, and endless surveillance. But if we believe that people are fundamentally decent, we can build schools, workplaces, and communities that bring out the best in us."
Man the hunter is a construct and war is an invention. The archaeological record shows the consequences clear as day. Mass graves, fortified walls, skeletal trauma at scale. They appeared almost simultaneously across the ancient world around 3,000 BCE. A thousand years after the birth of cities with a temple to the goddess at their heart.
But what has all this history got to do with the present day?
EVERYTHING!
The myth of 'Man the Hunter' justifies male privilege, but ultimately hurts men.
At its core, it posits that they are innately hunters, providers, and protectors. This constructs a rigid division of labour based on perceived biological differences – the 'natural' model where men work outside the home and women tend to domestic duties.
I grew up when trad wives were practically every wife and the fact they raised, educated, and fought for the first generation of women with equal rights tells you everything about why things had to change.
Because these stay at home mums trapped in an empty nest with no open horizons knew the men they loved were suffering too.
I saw it with my own eyes, my dad was a marketing manager who never rose up the ranks. The social pressure was enormous, especially at the golf club, he was a very good player so that made him a contender, but all his friends had bigger houses, flashier cars, took holidays he could only dream of and they never let him forget it.
I know how much this upset him and how he over compensated for it.
But here's the thing, he was taller, better looking, more refined and had a bigger dick than all of them (I know because I grew up in a house where nudity was the norm). But most of all, he outranked them, they were all conscripts in the 50s who never rose above lance corporal, Dad was a Captain.
He was the leader their money couldn't buy and they followed his every command.
There has been quite a discussion on Twitter about this recently,
"It’s so interesting observing men feel like they always need to find a leader or have one. As a woman I don’t innately feel like I needed anything to lead me but myself. I suppose it’s why society tries to ingrain it in our minds that we need men as “protectors and providers” Clarine @BIGPIKLIZ
"This is 100% true generally. Men yearn for the mines of hierarchy. It's an identity issue for men under patriarchy. They tend to not know who they are, or where they belong, unless they are in relation to other men in some kind of linear status-based system. They are literally in a perpetual prison of forms of dick-measuring. The really funny part is that if you are a woman with any form of power -- whether money, or title, or followers, or beauty -- men will start measuring your dick too. A woman having power of any kind can only be understood by them as being within the male hierarchy, and it makes them spiral." Heidi N. Moore @moorehn
The archetypal hunter is strong, rational, and unfeeling. This forbids men from expressing vulnerability, sadness, or fear. In too many cases bottling everything up turns the protector and provider against the very people they're supposed to protect.
Because a hunter always needs prey 'weaker' than himself.
Just last week after England's 2-1 defeat in the World Cup there was a surge in Emergency Calls: In one hour alone, between 10 PM and 11 PM, West Mercia Police received 127 calls, 73 of which were emergencies. This was "around double" the usual volume for that time.
On social media a 999 call handler reported the night was "brutal", with "non-stop fights and domestics" from the moment the final whistle blew. Another domestic abuse support worker said their first call came in just one minute after the final whistle.
So what's the answer? That's also in Dr. Cara Wall-Scheffler's groundbreaking research,
"Grandmas were the best hunters of the village".
They've been stalking their prey for 4,000 years, leaving markers and clues for all of us to finish the job when the target is in sight.
Now the patriarchy is in our cross hairs and it is weak. Thousands of years of living the lie of male supremacy has taken its toll. Just look at the state of the alpha males who think they're in charge - Trump, Musk, the Tate Brothers and everyone in the Epstein files.
And look at the suicide rate: In the UK in 2023, three-quarters (75.1%) of all registered suicides were among men. That's 3,906 unnecessary male deaths.
We don't need to attack, fight or smash the patriarchy that's patriarchal thinking and what they expect. But we can't simply wait for it to self-destruct either. Waiting just gives the psychopaths time to take us all out from the safety of their bunkers.
What we do is what we've done since the start of civilisation but couldn't prove till this century. Our hormones were seen as too erratic for scientific evaluation so medical experiments weren't conducted on women until legally mandated in 1993. In 2000 a team at UCLA put the fight or flight reflex to the test with women and female mice and a whole new response to danger was revealed.
Tend and befriend.
Yep, this radical feminist is telling you to make men a sandwich, or buy them a beer, chat to them at the water cooler, send them an email, slide into their DMs or call them home for Friday night dinner or Sunday roast.
Because a fifty year old woman with a partner and two children has direct loving influence over 120% of the population.
We also have a massive sway outside the home, matriarchs don't have to be mothers, she is the most senior woman in the room and we have women in rooms our ancestors could only have dreamed of.
Our network spans the globe from council houses to palaces.
It's time to bust the myth of man the hunter wide open with love, logic and real alternatives. Woman to man, mother to son, sister to brother, friend to friend, colleague to colleague, lover to lover and the hardest one of all, 'enemy' to 'enemy'.
Because we are at a crossroads where tech could take us to an age of freedom, but if the Bronze Age ideas of domination, destruction and extraction aren't met with a balance of love, community and preservation, we're heading to a very dark age indeed.
We don't want that on the shoulders of the men we love.
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