Hunting ‘Man the Hunter’

For a century, this theory of human origins has died and returned. To free it from limbo, we must disentangle its many meanings

by Vivek V Venkataraman + BIO

Stone Age (c1881-85) by Viktor Vasnetsov. Courtesy Wikipedia

is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Calgary, Canada. He is also assistant director of the Guassa Gelada Research Project in Ethiopia, and the co-founder and co-principal investigator of the Orang Asli Health and Lifeways Project in Peninsular Malaysia.

The most iconic image of human evolution comes not from science, but from cinema. In the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), apes shuffle across a desolate, windswept plain, scrounging for meagre pickings. One is mauled by a leopard. Then a large black monolith appears, whipping the apes into a frenzy and bestowing upon them a new form of intelligence. As Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra swells, one ape takes up a bone as a weapon and smashes it into a pile of bones: prey becomes predator. The ape later throws the bone into the sky and it morphs into a space satellite.

The message of Kubrick’s ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence is unmistakable. Humanity was forged by the predatory instinct. It is an evolutionary story in which modern life is traced to prehistoric hunting. This idea goes by the name ‘Man the Hunter’. In some versions of this narrative, hunting shaped not only our bodies and minds but the very structure of human society – including domestic life and gender roles. Men hunted, while women reproduced and tended the home.

It is a grand, all-encompassing theory, a vivid and morally charged vision of the Palaeolithic that lodged itself deep in popular culture. Throughout the 20th century, Man the Hunter was a story of our origins that many people took for granted. Nuclear families, breadwinning husbands, and looming violence in the Cold War era appeared to reflect the natural order of things. Variants of the idea remain pervasive today, appearing in everything from Paleo diets to online ‘manosphere’ communities.

Yet within anthropology, the idea had long faded. For me, an anthropologist who studies hunter-gatherer societies, Man the Hunter had always been little more than a background hum: it was something you knew of but didn’t take seriously. From a scientific perspective, the idea simply felt outdated – an old piece of disciplinary history, nowhere near the cutting edge.

In the past few years, however, Man the Hunter has returned as a target of critique – ‘debunked’, ‘killed’ or ‘dismantled’. Archaeological finds from the Peruvian Andes revealed women buried with hunting tools, suggesting they were big-game hunters; a cross-cultural survey found that women hunt in most contemporary hunter-gatherer societies; some researchers argued that women may be better suited than men for endurance hunting, and that sexual divisions of labour might have emerged only with the advent of farming. Yet many anthropologists reacted with scepticism – not only to the specific findings but also to the broader historical framing, especially since similar claims about the demise of Man the Hunter had appeared in previous years.

Man the Hunter bubbles up into popular consciousness every few years, in a recurring cycle. It is not just a matter of empirical science – something deeper seems to be at work. So, a few years ago, my colleagues and I began digging into the history of Man the Hunter. What we found was quite different from the story we are usually told. Debates over Man the Hunter rest on a fundamental confusion. Over the past century, the phrase has referred to three very different things: a popular myth, a scientific conference, and an empirical pattern observed among hunting and gathering societies.

These meanings were shaped in large part by two men – the dramatist Robert Ardrey and the anthropologist Sherwood Washburn – whose contrasting visions of human evolution set the terms for the debates that would follow. Conflating these meanings has allowed Man the Hunter to persist in a liminal state, hovering between myth and science in both public and scientific arenas. Until we disentangle them, the idea will continue to die – and return.

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Kubrick did not invent the story of the Dawn of Man that awed filmgoers. He was drawing on ideas that had been circulating for decades, most prominently those of the palaeoanthropologist Raymond Dart. In the mid-20th century, based on 30 years spent examining the fossils of early human ancestors known as australopiths in South Africa, Dart advanced a dramatic thesis: humans descended from bloodthirsty apes. In his 1953 article ‘The Predatory Transition from Man to Ape’, Dart wrote that ‘it was the ape-man’s instinct for violence, and his successful development of lethal weapons, that gave him his dominance in the animal world from the very beginning. Those instincts are with us today.’ To Dart, fossils were clues to epic historical dramas. And he taught his ideas with similar flair: in lectures, he would throw bones across the room, re-enacting scenes of ancient slaughter.

Dart’s ideas were controversial from the start. In 1957, Washburn published a pointed critique titled ‘Australopithecines: The Hunters or the Hunted?’ Dart had argued that the abundance of skulls in South African cave sites showed that australopiths were selective, trophy-keeping predators. Washburn countered that hyenas, which preferentially consume bodies and leave skulls behind, were more likely responsible. As Washburn coolly concluded, it is probable the australopiths were ‘the game, rather than the hunters’.

It is Ardrey’s image of the Palaeolithic that has shaped recent debates about gender, labour and evolution

Scientifically, Dart’s theory was losing ground. But he held an ace card in the battle for the public imagination. If the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, then Ardrey was Dart’s. Ardrey was not a scientist but a dramatist. With slicked hair, a square jaw and a taste for sweeping narratives, he had enjoyed a successful career as a playwright and Hollywood screenwriter before returning, in the late 1950s, to his undergraduate interest in anthropology, calling himself the ‘Rip Van Winkle’ of the discipline. Ardrey embraced Dart’s ideas with evangelical zeal. In 1961, he launched a bestselling book series called The Nature of Man that brought Dart’s ideas to a mass audience: ‘we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels,’ he wrote in the first book African Genesis, ‘and the apes were armed killers besides.’

Kubrick kept African Genesis on his desk while writing 2001. Before filming began, he gave the actor Dan Richter, who played the lead ape Moonwatcher, copies of Ardrey’s and Dart’s writings. ‘I’m interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it’s a true picture of him,’ Kubrick told The New York Times in 1972. ‘And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.’ Ardrey’s influence lay less in evidence than in storytelling. His books – along with The Naked Ape (1967) and The Human Zoo (1969) by the zoologist Desmond Morris – offered a comprehensive story of human origins that has become the most prominent meaning of Man the Hunter.

It is this image of the Palaeolithic – far more than the scientific arguments of mid-century anthropology – that has shaped recent debates about gender, labour and evolution. A revealing example appears in an article from 2023 by the biological anthropologists Sarah Lacy and Cara Ocobock. To illustrate what they take to be the popular meaning of Man the Hunter, they invoke a scene from Mel Brooks’s slapstick film History of the World: Part I (1981), in which a caveman hits a woman over the head and drags her into a cave (‘the first Homo sapien marriage,’ the film announces). This is an explicit parody of 2001. Such imagery belongs to a lineage that runs from Dart to Ardrey to Kubrick, and then into popular satire.

Ardrey pursued promotional opportunities with zeal, delivering speeches around the globe, spreading the gospel of the ‘killer ape’. Yet, tucked into the quieter quarters of academia, a second meaning of Man the Hunter was taking shape. In April 1966, a conference was held at the University of Chicago. It brought together dozens of anthropologists who had lived with the remaining hunter-gatherers around the globe. They assembled to address a simple question: what could contemporary hunter-gatherers tell us about human evolution? As the conference co-organisers Richard Lee and Irven DeVore – both former graduate students of Washburn – later explained, hunting was used as a shorthand to refer to the hunter-gatherer way of life: small, mobile bands subsisting on wild foods, which characterised most of human history.

The collected papers presented at the ‘Man the Hunter’ conference in Chicago in 1966

Today, the conference is seen as a turning point in hunter-gatherer studies, a changing of the guard. As he delivered his keynote address, the doyen of anthropology Claude Lévi-Strauss remarked that he hardly recognised anyone, that ‘the age bracket had changed’. The conference saw vociferous debates about hunting, violence, sexual divisions of labour, and more. Together, it led to a radically new picture of hunter-gatherers, one in which women and plants contributed more to human evolution than previously believed, in which male-based bands were not the norm in human evolutionary history, and in which hunter-gatherers worked only a few hours per day, living lives of what the conference speaker Marshall Sahlins called ‘Zen’ affluence.

What explained the distinctive features of humanity? For Washburn, hunting fit the bill

If the conference was forward-looking in many ways, its name was certainly not. Sol Tax, a professor at the University of Chicago who first conceived of the conference, suggested to Washburn, the conference lead, that it be called ‘Man the Hunter’, a name it would share with the conference volume published two years later. Ironically, then, the title Man the Hunter belies the actual contents of the book, a historical particularity that has chafed at Lee for years. He once remarked that Man the Hunter could just as easily have been called Woman the Gatherer. Lee recently told me that he objected to Washburn at the time: ‘with a title like Man the Hunter, we’re going to get a lot of negative feedback from feminist anthropology, can we get another title that doesn’t put “man” at the centre of it?’ ‘Oh no,’ Washburn replied. ‘That’s not a big deal. No, this is perfectly OK.’

He would say such a thing. Growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Washburn was always the smallest boy in his class. Zoology, he later said, had been his way of making a life compatible with his lack of physical prowess. Yet Washburn’s theory of human evolution placed physical prowess at centre stage. What explained the distinctive features of humanity? Our upright posture, our large brains, our culture, our capacity for cooperation? For Washburn, hunting fit the bill.

Washburn didn’t present his own paper at ‘Man the Hunter’. A year or so later, he submitted a co-authored chapter titled ‘The Evolution of Hunting’ that became part of the published volume. It read: ‘In a very real sense our intellect, interests, emotions, and basic social life – all are evolutionary products of the success of the hunting adaptation.’

On the surface, Washburn’s ideas in the chapter seem close to Ardrey’s. Both emphasised hunting by men and saw violence as biologically ingrained to a certain extent. Both imagined women as largely confined to the domestic hearth.

So how exactly were Washburn’s ideas distinct from Ardrey’s? One thing is clear: no one was more vocal about their differences than Washburn and Ardrey themselves.

Coming of age in the 1930s, just as the modern evolutionary synthesis was taking shape, Washburn established himself as a theorist of method, concerned with how claims about human origins should be tested. Physical anthropology at the time was still preoccupied with racial typologies and classification. Washburn pushed the field in a different direction: toward evolutionary theory, variation, and hypothesis testing. His approach transcended disciplinary boundaries, helping transform anthropology into a real science. He called this programme the ‘new physical anthropology’.

Washburn visited the Kalahari Bushmen, but he did no sustained fieldwork with hunter-gatherers. Nevertheless, he had the vision to understand that they had a critical role to play in the study of human evolution. For him, contemporary hunter-gatherers were not living fossils, but imperfect and historically contingent sources of comparative data. The goal of the ‘Man the Hunter’ conference was to bring this accumulated evidence into view.

Ardrey disagreed. He was hostile to the strategy of reconstructing the past through the study of contemporary hunter-gatherers. Instead, he was interested in earlier, precultural phases of human evolution, emphasising comparisons with wolves and other primates. Hunter-gatherers, in his view, were too altered by the modern world, too technologically advanced to be useful in prehistoric reconstruction. In The Hunting Hypothesis (1976), Ardrey wrote: ‘The “living fossil” fallacy is accepted by observers who take as their model contemporary hunting peoples to inform us as to our ways in ancient times.’ Hunter-gatherers were, as he put it in The Social Contract (1970), ‘human evolution’s losers’. Critically, in his books, Ardrey mentions the ‘Man the Hunter’ conference only in passing, and mostly disparagingly.

Ardrey told a good story, but his account of human nature is, ultimately, scientifically hollow

For their part, professional anthropologists either ignored or disparaged Ardrey. To them, Ardrey was terribly dismissive of culture. Culture was not just some layer that could be peeled off to get to the real core of human nature. No: culture is human nature. The volume Man the Hunter contains only a single, critical mention of Ardrey, and none of Dart. As Sahlins put it in his review of African Genesis, Ardrey offered a vision of human nature that ‘does not make relevant the accumulated anthropological evidence of man’s behaviour’. The anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote that Ardrey’s book The Territorial Imperative (1966) was ‘best left alone altogether’. Washburn also thought little of Ardrey’s work, calling him a ‘populariser of data he does not understand’.

But perhaps the greatest difference between Washburn and Ardrey was in their mode of scientific practice, and it is here that we see the difference between making science and making myths. Washburn’s chapter in Man the Hunter, though it does promote hunting, is starkly different from Ardrey’s books in character and tone. The problem is approached from multiple angles, objections are probed, and speculations clearly identified. Stated another way, Washburn’s views were evolvable, subject to the slings and arrows of the scientific process that propel research forward. To put it plainly: Washburn was a good scientist.

Ardrey told a good story, but his account of human nature is, ultimately, scientifically hollow. His writings freely cite supporting evidence while ignoring contradictory evidence. He seems uninterested in generating testable claims. Ardrey’s views were etched in stone from inception, nursed in paranoia; his pariah status from the anthropological community was proof of his rightness. DeVore taught Ardrey’s work in his graduate courses at Harvard just to show how not to do science.

This critical difference in scientific practice can be seen in the intellectual legacies of the two men. Washburn’s students, many now famous, went on to conduct cutting-edge research in experimental biomechanics, primatology, palaeontology and archaeology. His intellectual lineage is vast, accounting for nearly 40 per cent of existing biological anthropologists working today, myself included.

It is this legacy that points to the third and final meaning of Man the Hunter: an empirical regularity that emerged during and after the 1966 conference. ‘Man the Hunter,’ Lee and DeVore wrote in their introduction to the subsequent volume, ‘raised more questions than it answered.’ The conference marked the birth of hunter-gatherer studies as a distinct field. It inspired anthropologists to undertake systematic fieldwork on hunter-gatherer behaviour. Combined with new theoretical work on the evolution of social behaviour, including sociobiology, it helped give rise to human behavioural ecology in the early 1980s, a research tradition focused on variation, ecology and decision-making. This approach has helped the science of human evolution to move far beyond the dichotomies that prevailed when Man the Hunter was first coined. For decades, hunting has been understood not as a single defining adaptation, but as one component of a broader evolutionary commitment to a high-risk, high-reward diet requiring extensive cooperation.

Man the Hunter survives because it is ambiguous. It can be made to mean almost anything

As fieldworkers fanned out across the globe, anecdotal observations became systematic patterns: men tend to hunt, and women tend to gather. This is the sexual, or gendered, division of labour. Anthropologists now talk about this very differently from scholars of the 1960s, who often framed women’s domestic and childcare focus as a kind of disability or burden: females were helpless, waiting for men to come home with the meat. New theories, by contrast, see women as individual actors pursuing their own goals. Strength is not the main thing that keeps women from hunting, and any notion of bloodlust is not taken remotely seriously anymore. Instead, a gendered division of labour emerges because men and women differ, on average, in their tolerance for foraging risk. The qualifier ‘tend’ is critical. Even at ‘Man the Hunter’, it was noted that women sometimes hunt – a point that has never been in dispute.

With this history in mind, we can now see more clearly that confusion surrounding Man the Hunter arises when its multiple meanings are collapsed into one. Because Washburn was so influential – and because his chapter in Man the Hunter aligns so neatly with the book’s title – it has often been taken as a programmatic statement of the conference. For example, in his book Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional (2017), the anthropologist Agustín Fuentes characterised the thesis of the volume as: ‘Early man (and they meant only males, not females) made a place for himself and his group in the world by banding together and using sharp sticks and edged stones to hunt down animals, kill them, and consume them.’ Similarly, Lacy and Ocobock argued: ‘The term “Man the Hunter” and its modern connotations were coined at a conference and then promoted in an edited volume of the same name.’

These claims conflate distinct concepts. As we saw, it was Ardrey who was primarily responsible for these ‘modern connotations’. Moreover, the ‘Man the Hunter’ conference was not a monolith of belief; it is difficult to point to any single hypothesis or agenda the participants shared.

The issue isn’t whether hunting shaped humanity. It’s that evolutionary explanations are only as good as the linguistic vehicles that carry them. As debate over evocative phrases like ‘the selfish gene’ show, Man the Hunter is just one example of a broader phenomenon, in which critique is levelled at caricature rather than actual science.

When the media erupted over the most recent demise of Man the Hunter between 2020 and 2023, the gulf between the scientific consensus and its public portrayal was disquieting. The phrase Man the Hunter has survived precisely because it is evocative, its cultural images of violence and sex – Kubrick’s bone-wielding ape or Brooks’s slapstick caveman – far more memorable than the nitty-gritty details of scientific debate. More importantly, it survives because it is ambiguous. Its multiple meanings bridge science and myth, so that in practice it can be made to mean almost anything.

In this sense, the contrast between Ardrey and Washburn is a microcosm of the problem. Ardrey’s sweeping, dramatised vision of human origins and Washburn’s more cautious scientific programme became ensnared under the same phrase – Man the Hunter – blurring the boundary between myth and science.

And this is the real danger: that a concept can become so malleable that debates no longer rest on evidence, but on whichever interpretation proves most rhetorically useful.

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