What is your basis for saying that the books I’ve quoted from, which in turn quote anthropologists and archeologists or are written by anthropologists (both Nancy Bonvillain and Christopher Boehm), are biased? Just because what I’m saying rattles your preconceptions doesn’t make it not true. Mostly, you don’t know the first thing about any of my references but are just lamely casting aspersions because you don’t have any substantive rebuttal.

You haven’t provided any specific refutations of anything I’ve said. You’ve made general assertions that either refer to things that aren’t related, such as the Better Angels book, which speaks to a time much later than I am speaking about, or don’t otherwise directly speak to my specific assertions. The fact that hunting takes place now has no bearing on what our ancient ancestors who didn’t yet have hunting tools did.

We did not hunt from the beginning of our species. We were bipedal for thousands of years before hunting tools come into the archeological record. And I quote a bunch of anthropologists on that. Ergo, hunting behavior is not what drove us to stand upright. And I didn’t claim that hunting increased with agriculture. I said that hunting larger game and agriculture were two factors that led to men becoming primary providers. As already discussed in another story that I know you read, in modern hunter-gatherer tribes where men hunt larger game, men tend to have greater status than women, which is not the case in tribes that hunt smaller animals together.

We’ve gone over the war thing before. There is no archeological evidence of war before about 12K years ago, about 4% of human history. Look at the dates from your own chart. There’s nothing on that older than 14K BCE. Please give it up on that front. You haven’t a leg to stand on.

But those conditions and the warlike cultures they generate became common only over the past 10,000 years — and, in most places, much more recently than that. The high level of killing often reported in history, ethnography or later archaeology is contradicted in the earliest archaeological findings around the globe. (emphasis mine). Scientific American

Early Paleolithic people didn’t eat a lot of meat. That’s a well-established thing — because they were mostly eating carrion. You haven’t read what I’ve said very carefully and instead have claimed I’ve said things that I didn’t. And eating carrion is not hunting. It’s scavenging, which doesn’t create the same kinds of evolutionary leaps as developing tools.

I’m a very careful researcher and I only use reputable sources. You ought to be aware of that by now. As a scientist, you ought to also be aware that there are few things in the scientific world that are 100% agreed upon. If you’d like to do the research which would allow you to intelligently discuss other theories, be my guest, but your not quite on topic pot-shots are getting a little bit tiresome.

When you make blanket unsupported statements like “And evidence for human hunting goes back to the beginning of our species” it makes me grind my teeth because I’ve just quoted several anthropologists who said that we didn’t have the tools to hunt in our earliest phases, and then you yourself point out that early humans scavenged meat (which is also not hunting). You don’t think; you just react.

In your emotional zeal, you’ve completely glossed over this part of the OP:

The point of this is not to marginalize the contributions of males to our survival and evolution as a species but to recognize that contrary to popular belief, females played a very important and even intrinsic part — something that has largely been unrecognized outside of scientific circles.

From Khan Academy:

There are competing theories about whether hunting or gathering contributed more to group nutrition (of Paleolithic peoples), but both seemed to have played an important role.

So, as I said before, you are welcome to present actual competing research, but in the absence of that, how about you give it a rest?