Secrets pf the Dead: “Lady Sapiens” (3BM Television, Channel 4 Television, Mentorn Barraclough Carey, WMET, PBS, 2021; re=edit of a British TV documentary from 1999)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The show that came on afterwards was a Secrets of the Dead episode called “Lady Sapiens,” a challenge to the usual depictions of prehistoric societies that held that in so-called hunter-gatherer cultures the men did the hunting and therefore were the most important, higher-status members of the tribe. The women in this scenario stayed behind, did the gathering and raised the kids. This consensus apparently started to unravel with the discovery of a set of fossils in the Canigliare cave in northern Italy: a 24,000-year-old set of bones from a person who had been buried in full regalia and with objects important to them included in the tomb so they could have them in the afterlife. The remains were discovered in 1872 and, under the prevailing sexist assumptions of the time, were assumed to be those of a man – but in 1995 a female anthropologist re-examined the bones and realized that the pelvic bone in this set of remains was definitely female. The idea that not only did people have a conception of an afterlife, and therefore some sort of spiritual belief system, that early but a woman could be sufficiently high-status to be given such an elaborate burial challenged a lot of assumptions about human culture and the division between the sexes. There’s a certain golly-gee-whillikers quality to the narration in this program that is common in documentaries of this type (and gets even worse when the History Channel does shows alleging influence on human culture, or even human existence, from space aliens, with lots of words like “maybe” and “could have” in the narrations), but it was also eye-opening to think that primitive societies were considerably more gender-equal than we’ve been led to believe all these millennia.

One thing that fascinated me about this show was how few of the talking heads were speaking English – most of them were speaking French, Italian or German (and most of the discoveries were in southern France, so naturally that language predominated), which made me wonder if European paleontologists are more open to re-examining women’s roles in early human history than American ones. Some of the most interesting points made in the program were from studies of modern humans who are still living the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, including a tribe in Tanzania where a large part of the work in maintaining the society is done by grandmothers, who not only look after the kids while the men (and some women) are out hunting and the women are out gathering but essentially provide the glue that holds those societies together and are respected and venerated. (Years ago I read an intriguing feminist article on what the author called “the crone,” the elderly woman who kept her civilization together and preserved the knowledge that had to be passed down from one generation to another for the tribe to survive.) There was a fascinating segment about tribes in southern France who survived by hunting large flocks of reindeer (I had no idea reindeer had ever lived in France – when you think of reindeer you think of considerably colder and farther-north climates than France!) and had a division of labor in which the women stripped the reindeer carcasses and preserved the meat the only way they could back then, essentially by drying it and turning it into jerky.

Like the NOVA episode, this one did what a science show should do: present the natural world in a new way that forces you to re-examine your previous assumptions about the world, how it works and how it should work – and an obvious sub-theme of “Lady Sapiens” is how much our understanding of primitive cultures was shaped by the sexist assumptions of the 19th century and what effect they had on the conclusions the anthropologists and paleontologists of that time, who read the heavily sexist conceptions of the role of women into the evidence and came up with distorted conclusions. There was even a segment on how women themselves might have been hunters, including a few shots of a living javelin athlete in France that pointed out female remains from the paleolithic era show the same kinds of bone wear that afflict modern javelin throwers. Since the javelin is a direct descendant of the hunting spear (javelin is one of the Olympic events that date back to the beginnings of the games in ancient Greece, and they obviously adapted it from the spears they used in hunting and also in warfare), this indicates that at least some prehistoric women didn’t just stay home, gather nuts and berries, and have kids: they went out hunting right along with the men.