Philobiblon

… and the occasional slice of critical thinking.

From the New York Review of Books, which really should know better, a potentially interesting review of two books on paleolithic art. But then you get to this:

Cold temperatures, along with scant precipitation, sustained very few plants suitable for human consumption. So however important gathering vegetable food may have been in warmer places, it became trivial on the Mammoth Steppe. Women’s work concentrated instead on tanning animal hides, sewing warm clothing, maintaining campfires, and tending children, while men went off to hunt large-bodied, hairy herbivores that fed on the moss and grasses of the steppe.

So here we have nice little housewives staying home and making the cave nice for hubby, while he goes out and collects the mammoth bacon…

Except of course there is no evidence for such a gender divide in paleolithic times, and it would seem both author and reviewer don’t think this is is a claim they need to justify or explain in any way. That’s just how it was – they feel it in their (male) bones…