Hunting, Gathering, and the Fluidity of Gender Roles

Hunting, Gathering, and the Fluidity of Gender Roles
 

Eshe Lewis: What makes us human?

Anahí Ruderman: Truly beautiful landscapes.

Nicole van Zyl:  The roads that I used every day.

Thayer Hastings:  Campus encampments.

T. Yejoo Kim:  Eerie sounds in the sky.

Eshe: What makes us human?

Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias: Division of labor.

Charlotte Williams: Colonialism.

Giselle Figueroa de la Ossa: The value of gold.

Dozandri Mendoza: Fun. Dance.

Justin Lee Haruyama: Cultural and social interactions.

Luis Alfredo Briceño González: Hopes for a better future.

Eshe: Let’s find out! SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human

[INTRO ENDS]

Eshe: In recent years, headlines have been buzzing with discoveries that seem to challenge some of the deepest assumptions about human history. The media has framed some of these findings as a revolution in how we understand gender roles between men and women.

While these studies highlight how women’s contributions have been underestimated, some anthropologists argue that they oversimplify the picture.

In this episode, I speak to evolutionary anthropologist Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias about the complexities of work, gender, and power throughout human evolution. We talk about whether dividing labor by sex is as universal as it’s often portrayed, and if the assumed inequality created by these divisions is as natural as we’ve been led to believe.

Eshe: Hey, Cecilia.

Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias: Hello.

Eshe: Can you introduce yourself, please?

Cecilia: Yes. So, my name is Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias, and I’m from Spain. I’m an evolutionary anthropologist, which basically means that I study human evolution. And at the moment, I work at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. And I broadly research how humans adapt to the very, very different conditions they inhabit now but also in the past. And, because for the majority of time humans lived as hunter-gatherers up until 10,000 years ago, which in evolutionary timescales is nothing, I work with both the few communities around the world that still practice this lifestyle, but also with evidence that we have from prehistoric societies.

Eshe: OK, can you tell me what hunter-gatherer means? Like, what do societies that are hunter-gatherers look like in comparison to maybe the societies that you and I live in?

Cecilia: So, of course it’s a very, very big umbrella term. And if you go back in time everywhere from the Arctic to the Amazon rainforest, people were hunter-gatherers, but of course they lived very differently. And it just basically means that you have very little or no storage at all, and that the majority of the food that you consume you obtain from hunting, gathering, fishing, basically, from foraging natural resources.

Eshe: OK, yeah, that makes sense. What made you interested in this topic of division of labor for this episode?

Cecilia: I think because research in these communities has been used in debates about things like gender roles, power dynamics, or in general, what we consider as “natural” behavior or the original behavior of humans. And specifically last year, there were huge debates both in the media and also in the anthropological community due to a scientific paper that was published in a journal called PLOS One by someone called Abigail Anderson and colleagues.

And in this paper, they were claiming that women in hunter-gatherer societies were hunting as much as men. And the media picked it up in a way that it interpreted as, women hunted as much as men, therefore, prehistoric women were empowered. So, everything that you think you thought of about gender roles being natural or so, this evidence of women hunting just completely overthrows that. And to me, that was a weird thing to do. First, because I’ve spent a bunch of time working with hunter-gatherer communities around the world, and, of course, I’m familiar with the literature and this idea of women hunting as much as men generally didn’t seem credible.

But also, I didn’t understand why women’s empowerment hinged on them doing the things that men did and especially hunting. I mean, the societies that I’ve worked with are super egalitarian. I would say that power is divided very evenly. But I didn’t understand why that needed to depend on whether women were hunting or not. So, yeah, I think that’s what got me interested.

Eshe: Yeah, it seems like a projection, maybe, of what we in non–hunter-gatherer societies think like where do women need to get to in order to be empowered? What’s the tipping point? And apparently, it’s hunting?

Cecilia: So, what’s interesting is that this paper generated also a big conversation within the anthropological communities in order to write a response to the original paper and more generally to think about these issues. And I didn’t participate there, but there is an anthropologist called Karen Kramer that I know from another project, and she was part of the paper and was part of this big conversation between people doing work in hunter-gatherer communities. And I thought talking to her would be a really nice way to get into the topic.

Karen Kramer: I’m a human behavioral ecologist, and I work with two traditional groups of people, a group of hunters and gatherers in South America and a group of subsistence farmers in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.

Cecilia: Why do you think it’s useful to look at contemporary foraging populations when asking questions about evolution or human diversity?

Karen: Well, I think as anthropologists, we are interested in the range of human variation, either behaviorally or biologically. And we are so specialized just in the last 100 years in terms of our nutritional environment, our epidemiological environment, our energetic environment, our demographic environment, our reproductive environment. It’s all a very novel world that we’re living in. And if we’re to appreciate either our ancestry or the breadth of human diversity, we have to look beyond ourselves.

Eshe: OK, so this is really interesting. Karen mentions that we’re living in a world that’s highly specialized, and then that’s something that has come about in the last 100 years or so when compared to the environments that we’ve evolved in. Can you tell me a bit more about what she means by that?

Cecilia: I think it goes back to what we were discussing at the beginning. If we try to think about what ecological factors, what social factors, what natural factors shape the way in which humans are, we can’t really think of the last 100 years, where we live in hyper-industrialized societies. The way in which we produce foods are heavily artificial, full of machines and things like this. Of course, that’s not going to tell us much about what were the things that our ancestors needed to face in order to come up with solutions.

Eshe: Yeah, that makes sense. So it’s like saying that hunter-gatherer societies help us see a broader picture of human diversity and evolution, right?

Cecilia: Yeah, of course, neither Karen nor I are the first people to come up with this, already back in the 1960s, actually, where this whole debate comes from, there was a super big conference called the Man the Hunter Conference, and it was held in Chicago. And the idea was to put together people that had worked in hunter-gatherer societies around the world. But back then, it was estimated that 1 percent of the world’s population lived still from hunting and gathering. And the idea was to put together the commonalities and the differences between these societies to get insights about what kind of traits or what kind of behaviors emerged in these societies.

Of course, in this conference in the ’60s, I think there were like 67 people, and only seven were women. So, the interpretations of the behaviors that they observed were also heavily shaped by male perspectives. And, of course, many of them have been rethought in recent years.

But one of the things that I also asked Karen was specifically about this “man the hunter term” and why is it that the first ever conference of hunter-gatherer societies was called like this.

Karen: So the “man the hunter” or the hunting hypothesis has been around for a long time. First, perhaps articulated by Raymond Dart in the 1920s. And it’s changed and become more sophisticated with time, but it basically proposes that the dietary shift to meat in the past was a catalyst for favoring a whole suite of transformative behavioral traits as well as biological traits.

So things like food sharing, the division of labor, pair bonding, male parental care, cooperative breeding. All of those very specialized human behaviors have been tied to hunting and the shift to meat eating. So, the historic weight that’s been given to meat and to hunting really defines a lot of how we put together the story of human social evolution and by extension, the primacy of men in that story.

Cecilia: So, before we continue, you may have heard that Karen mentioned someone called Raymond Dart at the beginning of her response.

Eshe: Yeah, I was wondering who he was.

Cecilia: He was a paleoanthropologist that in the 1920s discovered the first ever Australopithecus. And Australopithecus is this human ancestor to which the famous “Lucy” fossil, for example, belonged. And what’s interesting about it is that in this particular species of hominin, males and females are very, very different. And males are much, much bigger than females, which is something that we don’t see in other of our ancestors. So, I thought it was interesting that, of course, he would come up with something like this idea that everything that makes us human depends on men hunting and women gathering, and that we must have evolved to become very, very different creatures when he saw this one ancestor. And, of course, at the time, many of the fossils that we now know did not exist. So, he probably thought that this specimen that he had discovered was representative of what humans really were somehow.

Eshe: Mm-mmm, OK, yeah, so the historical context helps here. So you said that the Anderson paper sparked your interest in the topic. What did Karen think of it?

Cecilia: So basically, just to give an overview of what this paper was doing. In it, the authors used a big online database that has just written information from ethnographers that have worked on hunter-gatherer societies, and they said that they looked for explicit mentions of hunting. So, from that, they concluded that about 73 percent of the 60 or so societies that they found mentioned explicitly women hunting, and that in about a third of those, there were mentions of women hunting large game. And from there, they concluded that basically, women from hunter-gatherer societies hunted as much as men.

So, I think reaching that conclusion from that sort of evidence is what surprised both me and Karen, who has done much more work in hunter-gatherer societies than I have. So when I asked her whether she was surprised, she answered this.

Karen: I don’t think anyone who works with hunters and gatherers would be particularly surprised or not expect it. So, there’s a real difference between observing a behavior once, and it gets the tick mark as this society does this behavior and its frequency. It’s not unusual that older women will go out with the guys hunting. I mean, we know that those exceptions are certainly out there or whatever we want to call them. Women perhaps in some societies when they don’t have certain kinds of constraints engage in hunting. That’s completely within the frame of thinking about hunting and gathering, that it is so magnificent and so persistent of a way of life for tens of thousands of years because they are so flexible.

Eshe: Karen mentioned something that is staying with me. She said that observing a behavior occasionally isn’t the same as that behavior being a regular part of life. Can you tell me why that distinction is so significant?

Cecilia: Yeah, that’s one of the main things that raised the alarm bell of the people actually doing research in this regard. Going back to this idea that people that live from hunting and gathering are people that need to adapt to changing environments because their day-to-day food, shelter depends on whatever it is that is happening on that specific day.

So, of course, that kind of lifestyle requires you to be very flexible and requires you to adapt to constraints that may be happening in your day, in your life. You may have kids at some points, you may not at others. You may be feeling physically exhausted at times and not at others. So, what she’s saying is that, it’s normal that within this framework, someone has written that a woman hunted or, of course, you will hunt when you need to hunt. But that doesn’t mean that you’re doing it on a regular basis.

And I guess that is the core thing: to say that hunting is equally important in the lives of women than in the lives of men would be that it’s equally likely for them to wake up one morning and go out hunting. And simply that kind of conclusion you cannot reach from someone writing in a text that they’ve seen a woman hunt.

Eshe: OK, so it sounds like Karen’s issue is with how the paper conflates occasional participation with equality in roles over time.

Cecilia: Yeah, exactly.

Karen: I think for many people who actually work and live closely to hunters and gatherers or other kinds of small-scale societies, their analysis just didn’t seem to experientially ring true. And then once we started looking under the hood, the whole kind of fabric of evidence started to unravel.

I’m hoping that there’s really been an emphasis in the last 20 or 30 years to not come up with kind of rules of human behavior or universals, but to try to incorporate the range of variation. It was kind of a surprise that this came back because to me, it’s a little bit of a throwback that we’re polarizing this discussion again. And it was really a surprise that the media picked up on it.

Cecilia: Yeah, that was my next thing, because for me, one of the striking things about the Anderson paper is like how widely the media picked up on it. Three hundred and seventy-six news outlets worldwide, including Scientific American, National Geographic, CNN, and every single Spanish newspaper had reported on this, and they had reported these very, very big overarching claims about human history.

And I was wondering, yeah, why do you think that these studies attracted so much media attention?

Karen: Well, I think it’s easier for the media to pick up on arguments that are polarized. This is true. This is not true. And I think it’s just simpler to report on it and for maybe people to digest that in a sound bite. No, women have traditionally been characterized as never hunting, but now, women do hunt. And it also fits kind of with the times.

But I do want to say, I think it is an odd or a funny feminist position that in order for women to have value, they basically have to do what men do, which is usually either hunting or warfare.

So, much of what is called feminist archaeology or feminist anthropology is trying to prove that women engage in roles equivalent to men, but that seems like flawed as a true feminist perspective, because why should putting food on the table day in and day out and taking care of kids be any lesser than hunting or warfare?

Cecilia: I mean, this is the reason why I wanted to write this episode, because I also thought that it was such a shame that we get caught up on this idea that in order for women to have the same power as men we have to act in the same way or even I think that’s how we ended up with the double shift.

Karen: Right, right. Good point.

Cecilia: That’s just my opinion.

Eshe: OK, so you said something right at the end, that you think we ended up with a double shift. What is the double shift?

Cecilia: Well, I think what Karen is also mentioning is that we have this idea that for women to have the same power as men, we need to do the things that they do already. But men are not expected to do the things that we do already in order to attain more power. So I think this dynamic is what makes women in the West, and I think there’s a lot of research showing that on average, they work more in general, that they have less leisure time. So, I thought that it was very much, yeah, Western mentality, being extrapolated to hunter-gatherer communities.

Eshe: So, it sounds like you’re saying that the idea that women need to do the same job as men in order to be equal is more of a reflection of what our culture thinks than reflecting an actual universal truth?

Cecilia: Yeah, I think also again, as Karen mentioned, we should regard equality as doing the same amount of work, and people that have different types of work being valued equally. And actually, if we think about it in many situations, perhaps the only way to distributing work in equal packages is for people to do complementary things, if not, you would never manage to do all the things that you need to do in order to survive.

And in the grand scheme of things, also thinking about human evolution, actually, maybe this ability to do complementary roles is what has made humans be able to live in so many different and so many tricky environments like we live because we can rely on things like cultural solutions, we can learn from other people and we can take objects that other people make in order to be able to cope with whatever it is that we need to cope with. And the only other species actually that manage to live in such widespread environments are perhaps bees or ants that also have very, very strict, I mean, from a completely different perspective, but that also have very, very strict divisions of work.

I do think, however, talking about a gender perspective in this whole debate that there is a dangerous extension to this kind of reasoning, which is to take this idea of men generally doing more hunting than women, for example, to then say that men evolved to hunt and women evolved to gather or to do domestic labor or whatever else.

Eshe: OK, right. So this is how we get to that thought process that men must just naturally be better at running and have better spatial navigation and that kind of thing. Is that right?

Cecilia: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that we take these things as common knowledge that, of course, men are better at getting around or men are stronger because they were hunters for hundreds of thousands of years. So I also thought it was important to ask Karen in this case what she thought about this particular extension.

Karen: So, I mean, my view is that the human adaptation is complex because we have this very diverse diet that is nutrient dense. And that means that resources are located in different places across our landscape. We are also dependent upon tools. And we also process our food, and that means that the water that I need might be over there, the firewood I need might be over the other direction. The roots that I need are someplace else than the berries that I need, and the fish are some 10 kilometers that direction, and the nuts are 10 kilometers that other direction.

I mean, basically, it created a situation that we can’t all do everything ourselves in order to survive and reproduce. On top of that is taking care of children. And so, the simple sort of economy of that is that we cooperate in terms of a division of labor, and we share the fruits of that labor, and that is not, I mean, other animals do that. Mostly it’s eusocial insects, but it’s not unique to humans, and it is economically efficient, and there’s no real value judgment. I mean, I think we have to also be mindful that, you know, how we divide up what we’re going to do just makes logical sense in terms of certain kinds of constraints that we each have, depending upon our age and depending upon our gender.

Cecilia: And within those constraints, for someone that has never read anything about hunter-gatherer societies, can you give an idea of how flexible those arrangements can be? Like what are we talking about in terms of constraints?

Karen: Well, for me, what works is the testable expectation that women do work that does not compromise competent maternal care. We would never expect that. Evolutionarily, you wouldn’t survive as a species if you were constantly compromising your maternal care. So, in some cases, that might mean that hunting does not conflict with competent maternal care, but in most circumstances, it does. If you’re a prime aged reproductive aged adult.

Eshe: So, if I understand correctly, what Karen is saying is that people evolve to adapt their activities or match their activities to the circumstances around them.

Cecilia: Yeah, basically, I think she’s just saying that these general patterns that we observe in behavior emerge from recurring constraints, not necessarily because you’ve evolved to do a particular activity because you’re hardwired to it, but because you’re regularly faced with the same kind of constraint. And I think the other interesting thing that she says is that it’s not just gender. It’s also your age, your physical status. It can be many other things that make you act in one way or another.

Eshe: Yeah, it sounds like it’s not even really about hunting versus gathering, like maybe that’s what our society is really focused on, but by focusing so much on those two categories, or running, or jumping, or whatever we think the battleground activity is, it’s like we’re missing out on the fact that there are a lot of different ways to be flexible and a lot of different activities and tasks that we need to share or split up or tackle.

Cecilia: Yeah, I mean, that’s also one of the things that she kept mentioning that there are many other things beyond hunting and gathering, that there’s taking care of children, that there’s preparing food, that there’s a million other things. So, that also raises the question of why it is that we are putting so much focus on hunting to begin with.

Karen: Other than lithic tools, tools don’t endure in the archaeological record or the very deep archaeological record with any kind of persistence. Plant foods don’t endure in the archaeological record. And so there’s just a huge natural bias to seeing large game lithic tools, especially when we’re going way back in time.

So, there’s some natural biases in the archaeological record. There’s some biases coming from who is actually studying these people. And I think temporally, you know, this is the time of the big World Wars. We had to have a way to justify that sort of warring, bloodthirsty part of ourselves, and the hunting hypothesis fits right into that.

But it is a shame because if you do look archaeologically, even like in the American [Great] Plains, where we think of them as being bison hunters, and if you actually look at the archaeological record, an awful lot of what they’re eating are rabbits, rodents, lizards. We eat a lot of little game that just is not going to show up in the archaeological record, and even kids are very successful at getting that little stuff.

Eshe: So, Karen was talking about historical and archaeological biases that lead to this focus on hunting. How does that influence the way we interpret the past now?

Cecilia: I mean, I think it’s inevitable. In a sense, the only thing that we have in order to study past societies is what we can find in the archaeological record. And if the only thing we can find is hunting tools and, and remains of big mammals, we almost define these societies by their hunting tools.

So, we ascribe their identity through whatever it is that they use to hunt. And on top of it, if societally, we have the end of these big wars, and we tie hunting to narratives about male power and courage and all these values ascribed through fighting, of course, we’re going to further reinforce this idea of societies being defined by this kind of behavior. But the deeper we dig, the more we find that the lives of prehistoric people, like the life of people today, were way more complex than just based on hunting.

Eshe: We’ll be right back with more from this interview after a short break.

[BREAK]

Eshe: Welcome back. Picking up our conversation, I asked Cecilia what she observed during her own fieldwork with hunter-gather societies in Central Africa.

Cecilia: I’ve done most of my ethnographic fieldwork in the rainforest of the Republic of Congo. And there, actually, the flexibility is not even between places, but it’s across the seasons because the rain changes a lot from the dry to the wet season, and everything changes with it. So, in the dry season, people live in, kind of, villages that are quite large, and they mostly do fish and whenever they go hunting, actually men and women go together. And then when the wet season comes again, people go back to the forest in much smaller camps. And it’s basically only men hunting with spears.

So, the entire social world of these people changes with the season. So, from a scenario like that, how can we conceive of “natural” doing one thing or another? And Karen, who has worked mostly in South America, her version of this division of labor looks actually completely different.

Karen: For example, South America, there’s just not very much big game compared to Africa. So certainly, if you bring in something big that those are shared. And so there is certainly creds that get given to generosity and to sharing. We value that in human societies tremendously. Many hunters and gatherers have lots of ethics about men not drawing attention to themselves when they do dispatch something large. So, we have a great deal of modesty in many hunters and gatherers about not taking credit for that, but everyone knows, everyone knows. That was the hunter. And there certainly, it’s easy to see how you get status and cred for being a good hunter. There’s no question about that.

But there’s also many other ways that hunters and gatherers have status and build reputations. The hunters and gatherers that I work with, for example, the really good healers, they are known far and wide. You can go to a town that is hundreds of miles away, and they have heard of a particularly good healer or singer. They won’t have heard of a particularly good hunter, but certainly, within one’s band, you certainly know who the healers are. You also know who the productive women are.

So I would say in the hunters and gatherers that I work with, because it is a pretty pauperate terrestrial environment, there’s not a lot of really sumptuous game. And they rely heavily on women’s foods and being part of a productive matriline is probably the highest status.

Cecilia: So, would you say then that rather than how work is divided being the thing that determines power, if I’m interpreting you correctly, it would be more how well you do whatever task you’re doing that makes you have that power, or there’s a mix of the two?

Karen: In hunters and gatherers, I don’t think it is specific to specific resources. I think it is how much you put into the pot, how hard you work to put what you put into the pot, whatever kind of resource it is. I mean, it’s a delicate balance. Everybody needs to pitch in.

Cecilia: Yeah, so then you would say, and again, for people that might not be so familiar with these groups, that in a way that these assumptions of patriarchy and large game hunters, especially in prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies, may have nothing to do with the kind of work that they were doing. Or not tied to that. Almost that we cannot even infer whether they were more patriarchal or less patriarchal based on their tasks that they were doing.

Karen: Yes, I would agree with that. I think there’s really no evidence except for our assumptions that patriarchy was the predominant structure in the deep past. I think we can’t know that. And from my point of view, it’s actually groups of probably related females that really pushed human social organization at the very beginning.

Eshe: So, Cecilia, what do you take of that in terms of power? Do you think that Karen means that power was divided evenly at a certain point in time or maybe certain points in time?

Cecilia: Well, I think she means that we can’t tell from this evidence that if we look at how power is divided in hunter-gatherer communities, there’s a lot of research saying that between the sexes, but also between ages, that every person has the same say in terms of where to sleep, what to do, who gets the share of whatever food has been harvested or hunted that day.

And again, this idea that actually, people do tend to enjoy the same amount of free time than other people. And that’s, I think, something very particular about these kind of societies that research in the Western world or even in agricultural communities hasn’t shown, where you actually see huge disparities into how much free time different people have.

Think about the West, whether we have the same amount of free time than someone that is super, super rich. And of course, I think the other point that Karen is saying is, again, highlighting this idea of diversity, that probably in the past, there was a lot of flexibility and diversity, and there were societies where power was more evenly divided than in others.

Eshe: Yeah, I guess the point is that knowing whether a woman hunted or not is not gonna get us closer to the answer, right?

Cecilia: Yeah, I think it’s just looking at the completely wrong type of evidence. I do think there are things that we can learn about human diversity and human evolution from working in a diverse array of communities, including hunter-gatherer societies. And I did ask Karen what she thought this type of research could tell us about the evolution of perhaps gender roles in human societies.

Karen: Well, I think, hunting and gathering is incredibly flexible, and hunters and gatherers know that. And so once you double down on any one thing, like a division of labor, you’ve boxed yourself into a corner. And hunters and gatherers, I think, are fully aware of that, that that would be curtains to them to not maintain their flexibility.

So, they do everything they can to maintain the broadest set of options, including things like backup foods, alternative strategies. And men know how to do women’s stuff, and women know how to do men’s stuff. It just, most of the time makes sense to take on particular roles.

Cecilia: You said before, which makes a lot of sense, that this big conference, Man the Hunter, came at the time of the Second World War, when we needed a certain way of explaining certain human tendencies, which I agree, like, I’m sure, there’s this feedback between political ideologies and what we think of people in the past. And I was wondering, where do you think anthropology or human behavioral ecology falls into that? What can we do as a field to prevent our research to end up as a stereotype, or is it just something that the media picks up and there’s nothing we can do?

Karen: Well, I do think that the onus is now on us to basically convince the media that we’re capable of much more nuance than these black and white debates. That, to understand what we are as humans, we have to be far more nuanced. And that, really what we’re all trying to do is solve this basic time allocation problem, which is that our lives are too complex for us to do everything. Even more so in today’s world, we can only divide and conquer in terms of doing what we need to do to survive and to reproduce.

So I think we are poised as a field, and I think we’ve been there for a while, actually, to further theoretic development and empirical studies that basically push beyond these polarized ways of thinking in these polarized debates.

Eshe: And so, Cecilia, Karen is a very strong, convincing speaker, but I would love to know what your thoughts are. What are your final thoughts on this debate and this obsession with our society, you know, this war of figuring out what it is that tells us about ourselves, what we can glean from hunter-gatherer societies about like who we were or who we are.

Cecilia: I think in general we are struggling societally to cope with diversity in many ways. We’re trying to simplify things to make things one way or another. And that’s one of the reasons why I like working on evolutionary anthropology, because actually, most of the time, to understand something, you need to understand that there are many, many different ways in which things can be done in different times.

So, for me, it’s just a lesson into how, actually, even us with all the technology in the world need to take a step back when we interpret really basic pieces of evidence or of stories.

Eshe: Yeah. And more free time. I think we need to spend more time thinking about our free time and how we can get more of it. All of us.

Cecilia: Yeah, I mean, that’s one of the things that also the media picked up a lot about hunter-gatherer societies, that in basically all of the ones that they had studied, they had much more free time than in any other Western society.

Eshe: I mean, I feel like that’s the real lesson.

Cecilia: Maybe, yeah.

Eshe: Cecilia, thank you so much for sharing your work with me and for talking to me.

Cecilia: Thank you, Eshe.

Eshe: Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias is a postdoctoral researcher in evolutionary anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her work combines genetic, ecological, and archaeological analyses with ethnographic fieldwork in the Republic of Congo.

Eshe: SAPIENS is hosted by me, Eshe Lewis. The show is a Written In Air production. Dennis Funk is our program teacher and editor. Mixing and sound design are provided by Dennis Funk and Rebecca Nolan. Christine Weeber is our copy editor. Our executive producers are Dennis Funk and Chip Colwell. This episode is part of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program, which provides in-depth training for anthropologists in the craft of science communication and public scholarship, and is funded by the John Templeton Foundation.