Variations in Subsistence Activities of Female and Male Pongids: New Perspectives on the Origins of Hominid Labor Division [and Comments]

Abstract

"Division of labor" has traditionally been regarded as an exclusively human economic institution. Serious consideration of the possibility that incipient forms of labor division may occur in various primate species has been hampered by the conviction that its present expression and prehistoric origin are linked only to human ancestry and society and that it is therefore not susceptible to cross-species analysis. Now that sex differences in the performance of subsistence activities have been documented in a broad spectrum of living primates, new speculations about the evolutionary emergence of this trait can be examined in a wider comparative framework that includes hominids, pongids, and cercopithecids. Here we focus on prevalent commonalities in pongid and hominid approaches to range utilization and resource explotation, using evidence assembled mainly from long-term studies of chimpanzees and orangutans, in order to recast labor division as one of the many evolutionary continuities binding humans to other primates. Recongnizing that the most complicated contemporary forms of labor division are, to a great extent, culturally modulated in modern human societies, we explore the possibility that incipient forms of labor division had a firm biological/ecological foundation in the nonhuman primates well before a social/cultural overlay developed in the hominid line.