Debunking Manosphere Evolutionary Psychology, Part 3: The Myth of the Male Provider

How natural are gender roles, and what do they mean for us today?

Artwork: “Penis in Furs” by the author, Joe Duncan

A quick perusal through the Manosphere will yield no shortage of discussions about men and women, sex and gender, gender and gender roles. The topic is ubiquitous to the point of inescapability. Central to these conversations is an idea that’s treated as gospel: that human relationships are governed by evolutionary imperatives. We all know the story. Women, so they say, evolved to prioritize security and resources, seeking men who can provide and protect. Meanwhile, men are “hardwired” to pursue youth and beauty, signs of fertility, shorthands for reproductive potential. The usual “sexual marketplace” jargon.

This idea, championed by figures like David Buss and David Geary, purports to perfectly distill millions of years of human and primate evolution into a neat little fable. Buss’ book The Evolution of Desire, and Geary’s book Male, Female: The Evolution of Sex Differences argue, that human relationships all boil down to a transaction, one buttressed by primal instincts that influence not just our romantic entanglements and desires, but the entirety of our macro-scale social structures. ¹

While the story superficially makes intuitive sense, it rests on a wealth of assumptions about gender roles—the most prominent of which is the myth of the male provider— and those assumptions have come under fire recently by academics from all over the spectrum. This raises the question, yet again: are men “naturally” hunters—and thus providers—for women?

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The Pre-Historic Gender Debate

Beginning in 2017, our understanding of human history was seemingly upended when a series of academic papers were published that challenged longstanding assumptions about the gender roles of hunter-gatherers. The first was a paper from Sweden detailing the body of a Viking warrior buried in a “well-furnished grave in the Viking Age town of Birka” that found a lack of a Y-chromosome, meaning the warrior, buried with traditional Viking warrior burial, was female. The next came in the form of a literature review, in 2020, that analyzed a gravesite in Peru and found several women’s bodies buried with big game hunting tools.

This opened the floodgates, and academics with grave sites across the world began analyzing the contents with a sharper eye. Then came the much bigger finding, in 2023, when a comprehensive study by Abigail Anderson and Cara Wall-Scheffler was published in PLOS ONE. The researchers analyzed data from 63 foraging sites spanning 100 years and found that women hunted in at least 79% of these societies. They noted that this female hunting was intentional, not merely opportunistic, and that women hunted game of all sizes with various weapons and strategies.

Then came another paper, this time in American Anthropologist, that had nothing to do with archaic graves and weapons, but physiological evidence showing that, anatomically, women are particularly well-suited for the kinds of long-distance hunts that were the most popular among our human ancestors.

Katie Jgln

excellently summarized much of this fascinating new research in Why Gender Norms Nostalgia is So Dangerous and So Insanely Potent:

A wealth of anthropological, archaeological, and ethnographic research also suggests that early humans weren’t especially hierarchical or violent. Instead, they lived in cooperative, relatively egalitarian societies with a flexible division of labour. Both women and men hunted — one study of Early Americas burial sites found that 30–50% of hunters were female — gathered, made tools, cared for children, and fought, although actual warfare likely occurred far less often than we once imagined. Recent studies also show that gender had little influence on the kinds of physical activities people engaged in, including at the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution.

At the time, it felt like something of a revolution in our understanding of our species’ distant past was unfolding. Predictably, these papers were immediately panned hard left and hard right, as both media coverage on and popular interpretation of them was divided. While not everyone was convinced by these, including many academics, they hinted that possibly, just maybe, women’s roles as passive gatherers had been overstated. But, as often happens in the world of scientific discovery, there was much more to this story than meets the eye.

Nonetheless, all of these amounted to extensive evidence that some, including the study authors, said threatened to upend the traditional narrative about human gender roles and the myth of the male provider, a narrative that spans at least to the ancient world, so it’s important to understand the history and research that led up to this.

Gender Norms, From Ancient to Modern

The very first full textual work in Western culture, The Iliad, depicts a Homeric Greece where women are regularly taken captive by male soldiers if the men of their city don’t protect them. The Iliad starts with a fight between the haughty, hubristic Agamemnon and swift-footed Achilles over a woman captive, soon to be a sex slave to one of them. Strict gender roles have been with us Westerners since the beginning of our written history.

Centuries later, during the Golden Age of Athens, the social structure of the Greek city-states prioritized free, adult men as the sole “citizens,” while women, slaves, and children were excluded from meaningful participation. The women were the supposed housekeepers. Plato believed that women were capable of the same roles as men, but were “deficient” or “inadequate” in all of them. ² ³

Aristotle believed that men were “by nature” rulers and women “ruled,” that this was an unchangeable fact of life, and that women are “deformed” men. ⁴ He echoed the familiar trope that men are more rational and women are more emotional. This, even though, in the ancient world, warrior women weren’t unheard of. ⁵

The Romans had their Paterfamilias, whereby the male head of household made the rules and his word was, in some ways, quite literally, law. ⁶ The Roman woman was considered incapable of advanced learning and rhetoric (a few modern women astrophysicists would like a word). This, even though there were famous Roman women poets, as well philosophers and mathematicians, and astronomers.

The trend continued up through the Middle Ages and into the Early Modern era, when it developed into the prototype for our modern conception of “the male provider” in chivalrous knights. This, even though a colossal amount of physical labor was required to take care of a Medieval household. Women baked, brewed, were barmaids, cooks, and artisans; they made the clothing and tended to the farm—far from light work for fragile souls.

Clearly, the myth of male superiority has taken different forms in different eras, with different complaints about the supposed “deficiencies” of women. The Greeks emphasized women's supposed biological and intellectual deficiencies, while the Romans fixated on their legal and moral weaknesses, with morality and frailty dominating by the Middle Ages. Women’s capabilities were overshadowed by cultural restrictions.

But, what about our era? We like to think of ourselves as enlightened, having moved beyond archaic forms of arbitrary sexism—but have we? Back to modern science.

The 20th-Century Hunter-Provider

By the start of the 20th century, the idea of women being “naturally” less capable of certain things took on a more academic tone, one decidedly less about morality and more science-y. It evolved from the “men are for work and war, women are for household” narrative to “Men hunted, supplying the bulk of the nourishment for the tribe; women foraged to supplement the diet and watch the children.” The idea of “man the hunter” was born.

Anthropologists and social theorists like Lewis Henry Morgan and Edward Tylor speculated about "primitive" societies, often assuming men were hunters and women were gatherers or homemakers, based on then-current Victorian gender norms projected onto the past. These assumptions were reinforced by later work by ethnographers (cultural scholars) focusing mostly on men’s activities in cultures worldwide, ignoring or marginalizing women’s roles.

By the 1940s and 1950s, the “man the hunter and provider” ideal had solidified, becoming the dominant explanation for human evolution. Academics insisted that hunting was a central, driving force in the development of the human intellect and social structure. This idea fit nicely—perhaps a little too nicely—with the then-budding concept of the nuclear family, which would take root in the United States in the postwar era. Sherwood Washburn ⁷ and Chet Lancaster ⁸ claimed that the sex-based division of labor must’ve been the “natural” basis for the nuclear family:

When males hunt and females gather, the results are shared and given to the young, and the habitual sharing between a male, a female, and their offspring becomes the basis of the human family. ... In a very real sense our intellect, interests, emotions, and basic social life – all are evolutionary products of the hunting adaptation.

This was based on extremely thin scientific evidence, like analyzing women’s bodies and saying, “Those would be bad for hunting,” and it was this that was at least partially overturned by the physiology paper in 2023. ⁹

Man the Hunter

The theory would arguably peak in the late 1960s with the Man the Hunter conference. Academics from various fields met for a conference to discuss the evidence for the idea of man as a hunter and provider. The next year, Richard Lee published a book of the academic takes on the subject under the same name, which echoed the familiar sentiments of the time: men were the hunters and providers, women were the gatherers and caretakers tasked with the responsibility of caring for the children and the old.

But this wasn’t taking place in a vacuum. The 1950s-1960s weren’t as cozy as today’s media depicts them. Writers of the era were panicked, writing about the “masculinity crisis.” We seldom consider that the ubiquitous 1950s propaganda showing picture-perfect, smiling families was a backlash against wartime feminism. U.S. women rushing to fill men’s roles at laborious jobs was startling to many U.S. men.

For media and research to be successful, it had to cater to the insecurities of men and Lee’s book did just that, sometimes covertly, often overtly. Contributors like William Laughlin wrote lofty, self-serving lines, like “Man’s life as a hunter supplied all the other ingredients for advanced civilization.” The conclusion of the book and conference was that human evolution was driven by men (thanks to hunting meat) and everyone else better be thankful that male prowess caused humans to be intelligent. ¹⁰

Richard Lee would go on to publish a follow-up book in 1979, after spending many years with the !Kung San tribe in Africa titled The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society, where he painstakingly detailed the day-to-day lives of the !Kung San tribe of the Kalahari Desert, describing everything from their workloads to their diets. Most of the research from then on seemed to confirm that narrative—until 2017.

The Myth of the Male Provider Dies

Now, here’s where the plot really thickens. Much of the new research from 2017 onward has been framed by the media as “women hunted just as much as men did in prehistoric society, and that’s a fact. The man-the-hunter-and-provider hypothesis must be wrong.” There’s an urge for the idea of men as the privileged hunter and provider not to be true because there’s something repulsive about self-appointed superiority. People love an underdog. ¹¹

But, get this…while this research is fascinating—and may profoundly reshape our understanding of human evolution and gender—it’s not the death blow to the man-the-hunter-and-provider myth people often think it is. You see, women being hunters doesn’t need to disprove the man-the-hunter-and-provider hypothesis because the hypothesis defeats itself.

Whether men were the hunters or women, hunting was never providing, and it never facilitated the wonders of human evolution. The proof is in the mid-20th century research itself, and Richard Lee himself would wind up being the hypothesis’ executioner.

In that 1979 follow-up book, Richard Lee explained that the !Kung loosely practice gender roles. He documents a clear, though not absolute, division of labor, where men primarily hunt and women primarily forage for plant foods. Lee writes that women “very occasionally hunt,” but it’s far from the norm for this particular tribe. The division is not strictly enforced—men sometimes gather, and women sometimes hunt or assist in hunting. However, the overwhelming pattern is that women focus on gathering, while men focus on hunting.

Lee also notes that the women contribute the vast majority of the food because hunting is an extremely inefficient way to obtain food. Today, we envision prehistoric humans going out for the hunt and bringing back an antelope or, sometimes, a much bigger game if they were lucky. This isn’t the reality. Lee noted that women gathered 80% of the food by weight, mainly through gathering (children gathered too, after a certain age). He pins the success of the mostly male hunts at a paltry 10% (1 out of 10 hunts were successful—the rest came back empty-handed). Hunters only managed to bring back “two to three large antelope per year.” This is totally at odds with the “male hunter as provider” fantasy pushed by popular media. Thus began a rift on the subject between what academics were learning and what popular culture portrayed. This severely damages the myth. But there’s still more to the story.

The research beginning in 2017 would cause academics to reanalyze the data more thoroughly. Later, more in-depth research on various hunter-gatherer and similar tribes would only further disprove the man-as-hunter-and-provider hypothesis.

Hunter-Gatherer Studies

A 2019 comprehensive paper by Kristen Hawkins, James O’Connell, and Nicholas Blurton Jones covered the topic in-depth, providing a comprehensive overview of decades of research in anthropology. It shows that even Lee’s 10% number is extremely optimistic.

Researchers analyzed different types of hunting strategies across many hunter-gatherer tribes. They don't explicitly give a neat, clean "percent of successful hunts" figure because we've updated how we measure hunting success to “hunter-days”—how much a single hunter catches per day (e.g., a group of 10 hunters on one hunt = 10 hunter-days).

They analyzed various tribes around the world and found that success rates ranged from the 0.034 per hunter-day of the most effective hunters, which amounts to one carcass every 29 days, to the least effective hunters, who had a rate of 0.022 carcasses per hunt-day, which is basically one carcass every 45 days. That amounts to a 2-3% success rate.

We must also consider that much of this was small game, not the biannual antelopes that Lee mentioned in his work. For tribes that survive on the margins and live just above subsistence, this is a really big deal. Pound for pound, gathering yields significantly more precious calories than fruitless hunts. ¹²

Now, pay attention, because this is important. Whether a tribe has the 2-3% success rate of contemporary research or, generously, the 10% success rate of Lee’s 1979 findings, there’s simply no way possible that hunting made men a “provider” for women, let alone a whole tribe. It simply isn’t efficient or successful enough. ¹³ ¹⁴

This begs the question: is the man-the-hunter-provider myth just the modern iteration of the same old falsehoods of the ancients? This begets a further question: if the prehistoric men in hunter-gatherer tribes weren’t really the hunters and providers, and women the gatherers, where does that leave the evolutionary theory loosely based on the idea? How would women “evolve” to marry up to secure husbands who were good providers if men overall weren’t great providers?

What is for sure is this deals a grievous blow to the idea of a “sexual marketplace” rooted in evolutionary psychology that’s so popular today. After all, if hunting didn’t bestow tangible, concrete benefits for people to consider in mate selection, how did women evolve to prefer men who could signal that they were good providers? Similarly unanswered by evolutionary psychology is how, if people always hunted in groups, any one man would signal to women that he’s “a good provider.” Is it possible that some people today are interpreting radically different cultures through the Western lens of individualism? I think so. ¹⁵

Thanks for reading.

1. I’ve discussed Buss’ 1989 “thirty-seven studies” study at length in Part 1 of this series, The Myth of Hypergamy, and

Renata Ellera

landed the second blow of the one-two punch with the second part, David Buss.

2. “…πάντων ἐνδεεστέρα γυνή ἀνδρός”

3. Plato spoke of the roles of men and women in his Republic:

Γυναικῶν καὶ ἀνδρῶν αὐτῶν φύσις ἡ αὐτὴ πρὸς τὴν τῆς πολιτείας φυλακὴν, πλὴν ὅσον ἡ μὲν ἀσθενεστέρα, ὁ δὲ ἰσχυρότερος.

Women and men have the same nature in respect to the guardianship of the state, except insofar as the one is weaker and the other is stronger.

4. He also believed that all forms of sex besides procreative sex were “unnatural” because it was a “waste of brain matter,” believing that having an orgasm would cause you to literally shoot parts of your brain out—and that women’s monthly discharge was female semen—so let’s not take Aristotle too seriously.

5. During the Siege of Sparta in 272 BCE, the Spartan women helped fight off the invasion. The ancient troublemaker Πύρρος (Pyrrhus of Epirus) invaded Sparta and attacked the city while the male Spartan army was campaigning in Crete. He expected an easy victory with few male troops present to defend the (wallless) city of Sparta. Rather than abandon the city and flee to Crete, the women stayed and fought. Untrained Spartan women (along with 2,000 Spartan men) repelled Pyrrhus’ 27,000 troops until reinforcements could arrive. Pyrrhus was no spoiled boy-prince who inherited a throne and had no idea what to do with it, too. He won an impressive string of victories before finally losing to the Romans in Southern Italy.

6. The word “imbecile” has its roots in how the Romans felt about women; the Latin imbecillitas mentis used to describe women’s supposed mental weakness. It means “the weakness of mind is pitiable.” Early Christian Church father St. Augustine was a Roman and clearly viewed women as “less than.” He emphasized the “carnal” nature of women and said that women weren’t “fully” in the image of god until they married their husbands, that they were less rational and thus more susceptible to temptation, and that they were made for procreation, not companionship. They believed women were too mentally weak to hold office or manage property, and that they needed male guardians to do just about anything. Women weren’t even given their own names. They adopted the feminized form of the male name in their household.

7. That’s a helluva name

8. That’s also a helluva name.

9. This reminds me of the “women can’t compete like men can in sports because of bone density” and “trans women have an unfair advantage ‘cause biology” stuff you hear today. People are extremely confident in their assumptions based on shaky evidence.

10. Today, we know that women drive human evolution through sexual selection according to evolutionary biology.

11. I caution against this polarized conclusion for several reasons. First, this hypothesis and evidence is pretty new, and faces the uphill challenge of undoing well over a century of the aforementioned conclusions, no matter how objectively terrible they were (and they were objectively terrible). More importantly, I think this framing does a disservice to women, implying that women’s value is based on their ability to do things like men. Last, because many in the field—some of whom work with hunter-gatherer tribes every day—are themselves cautious about the findings. They caution that we don’t fall into the same trap as the “man the hunter” crowd by insisting that finding some evidence for some tribes where women hunted or engaged in combat must mean it’s a human universal. There’s still much to learn.

12. Those same researchers proposed the "Showoff Hypothesis" to explain the persistence of hunting. According to this theory, men hunted not primarily to feed their communities but to gain social status. In many societies, successful hunters are celebrated and admired, even if their contributions to the tribe’s nourishment are minimal. This phenomenon mirrors contemporary capitalist structures, where CEOs and other “high-status” individuals are often valorized despite their limited direct contributions to productivity.

13. The paper’s authors note that their main hypotheses (they put forth several new ones) aren’t the consensus, but the numbers are still robust and this doesn’t affect the argument much. As I mentioned above, whether you use the 2%-3% figure from 2019 or Richard Lee’s 10% figure from 1979, if hunts were only successful 10% of the time or less, they wouldn’t be major, consistent providers. As the authors hypothesized, the yields of hunts were likely celebratory feasts shared by all members of the tribe, not reliable means of nourishment.

14. For reference, while there was no official population head count of the !Kung alone, and they were lumped in with similar tribes under the blanket term “bushmen,” the 1970 census pinned the “bushmen” population at 15,121, so even if the !Kung were only 1/100th of that population, that would still be 151 people you’d need to feed with an antelope you caught once every four months. There’s just no way hunts were successful enough to radically change human evolution.

15. Perhaps a deep dive on the archaeological research and how it relates to the idea of the “sexual marketplace” will be next up in the series. I’ve still got the others on the back burner.