Among human hunter-gatherer societies, males and females are responsible for the acquisition of different types of foods and shared them with each other for a mutual or familial benefit.
[2] The few remaining hunter-gatherer populations in the world serve as evolutionary models that can help explain the origin of the sexual division of labour.
According to life history theory, males and females monitor costs and benefits of each alternative to maximize reproductive fitness;[5] however, trade-off differences do exist between sexes.
From the 1970s onward, the dominant paleontological perspective of gendered roles in hunter-gatherer societies was of a model termed "Man the Hunter, Woman the Gatherer"; coined by anthropologists Richard Borshay Lee and Irven DeVore in 1968, it argued, based on evidence now thought to be incomplete, that contemporary foragers displayed a clear division of labour between women and men.
[6] However, an attempted verification of this study found "that multiple methodological failures all bias their results in the same direction...their analysis does not contradict the wide body of empirical evidence for gendered divisions of labor in foraging societies".
[9] Archaeological research done in 2006 by the anthropologist and archaeologist Steven Kuhn from the University of Arizona suggests that the sexual division of labour did not exist prior to the Upper Paleolithic and developed relatively recently in human history.
[10] Notable hunter-gatherer groups in the recent or contemporary eras known to lack a distinct sexual division of labour include the Ainu, Agta, and Ju'/hoansi.
The traditional explanation of the sexual division of labour finds that males and females cooperate within pair bonds by targeting different foods so that everyone in the household benefits.
This model proposes that hunting functions mainly to provide an honest signal of the underlying genetic quality of hunters, which later yields a mating advantage or social deference.
Shuttleworth states, "two traditional tropes are here combined: Victorian medical textbooks demonstrated not only woman's biological fitness and adaptation to the sacred role of homemaker, but also her terrifying subjection to the forces of the body.
At once angel and demon, woman came to represent both the civilizing power that would cleanse the male from contamination in the brutal world of the economic market and also the rampant, uncontrolled excesses of the material economy.
The sexual division of labour provides an appropriate explanation as to why males forgo the opportunity to gather any items with caloric value- a strategy that would seem suboptimal from an energetic standpoint.
The OFT suggests that the sexual division of labour is an adaptation that benefits the household; thus, foraging behavior of males will appear optimal at the level of the family.
"[43]He continues to add that with the same set of established resources such as education, training and teaching, it creates an atmosphere of equity which helps to further the cause of gender equality.
[47] These combined conditions are rare in nonhuman vertebrates but common to currently-existing populations of human foragers, which, thus, gives rise to a potential factor for the evolutionary divergence of social behaviors in Homo.