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Recommended Reading
When I taught Human Biology A Level one topic I always enjoyed was Human Evolution. Enjoyed mostly that is except for the particular text book that we had to use. I have no memory of its name or author, which is probably just as well, because at a certain point it would always make me growl. It was the part that dealt with the evolution of speech and language, a vital stage in our development, a defining achievement of our species. The development of language, it said, must be linked to the importance of the vocabulary of the hunt.
The hunt! The book had already stated that there must have been in our earliest ancestors some division of labour between the sexes. Based, presumably, on modern Hunter/Gatherer societies, hunting was the province of the males of the group and gathering that of the females. Now what always infuriated me was that hunting does not seem to be an activity that needs an awful lot of vocabulary. In fact, it probably works better with silence and hand signals and creeping up on prey sneakily. There may, I suppose, be some words involved perhaps in deciding when, where and what to hunt, but the activity itself seems, bar a little bit of shouting at the end, to be more efficiently conducted with limited conversation.
Compare that with gathering where a wide range of different plants must be remembered, the location of those plants and the season in which they are found committed to memory. Not only that, but the characteristics of those parts that are good to eat and the comparison with plants that are inedible or poisonous must be identified and described. Which comes down to many, many words; the beginnings of descriptive Botany, the first inkling of geography and a full and working knowledge of the seasons.
If women were the gatherers then I suspect they were also the ones who developed vocabulary and language. The book then went on to credit men alone with the development of farming. Now which sex would have had working knowledge of the conditions necessary for germination and growth through practical observation?
I'm not even going to get started on that one.
