The question that comes to me is: centrality of meat for what?
Gatlin & Cabana (Oct, 2008):
> [I]t is clear to see how these mainstream ideas continue to dominate
> the popular mindset. In the past, scientific and academic
> explanations often subjected partiality from the culturally defined
> gender role norms for behavior. Therefore, many past and dominant
> archaeological interpretations regarding the lifestyles from our
> prehistoric ancestors reinforce the in situ cultural notion of the
> traditional male-dominance. Archaeologists often impose these
> cultural biases into how they construe prehistoric life ways by
> emphasizing the sexual division of labor and the placement of the
> males in the "more prestigious" subsistence activities. In these
> depictions, Frances Dahlberg (1981:1) summarizes the typical imagery
> for hominids two million years ago, "five thin, wiry men who carry
> spears for throwing at game or enemies walk rapidly away from the
> group ... the women walk more slowly; they are pregnant, carrying
> toddlers, and besides they are not going anywhere that day."
> Clearly, the men exist as the active defenders for the sedentary
> females with their children. This clear tendency to place men as the
> aggressive sex clearly exists within the accepted archaeological
> interpretations. For example, in "The Evolution of Hunting,"
> Sherwood L. Washburn and C.S. Lancaster (1968:293) stae, "human
> hunting ... is a way of life, and the success of this adaptation (in
> its social, technical, and psychological dimensions) has dominated
> the course of human evolution for hundreds of thousands of years."
> Thus, the evolution of man stems from this activity alone as it gave
> way to the evolution of the distinctly human behaviors.
Gatlin and Cabana continue:
> Popular belief still maintains the "man as a hunter" ideology as
> support for the "status quo" of gender roles. Washburn and Lancaster
> (1968:299) propagate the justification of man as the hunter by
> explaining how "part of the motivation for hunting is the immediate
> pleasure it gives the hunter ... evolution builds a relationship
> between biology, psychology, and behavior, and, therefore, the
> evolutionary success of hunting exerted a profound effect on human
> psychology." Hence, the dominant stereotype [as well as the endless
> repetition of biological "data", passed around gleefully, such as
> "the male brain is 15% larger than the female" --ravi] also tends to
> place intellectual capacities in males rather than females[.].
Even if one is able to convince oneself that these questions in anthropology or human history are settled matters (http://press.princeton.edu/books/stanford/chapter_2.pdf ), there is continued reason to remain suspicious of the political dimensions of any extension of arguments that appeal to nature.
--ravi
-- Support something better than your ancestors ;-) PeTA => http://peta.org/ Greenpeace => http://greenpeace.org/ If you have nothing better to read: http://platosbeard.org/