The period between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s saw a tremendous emphasis on the baboon model and Man the Hunter hypothesis for human evolution. Haraway has pointed out the deep postwar anxieties that fueled this image, anxieties about the fate of civilization, social stability, the stress of urban environments and the potential instability of the modern family.
37 Popular books of this period, including Robert Ardry's African Genesis (1961), The Territorial Imperative (1966), The Social Contract (1970), and The Hunting Hypothesis (1976); Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox's The Imperial Animal (1971); Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape (1967); and Konrad Lorenz's On Aggression (1966), brought these images of male aggression, dominance and social control to a wide readership. 38 During this period, a number of popular books contested these images of territorial and aggressive males and passive females as the ordering force of hominid society. Jane Goodall's In The Shadow of Man (1971), Elaine Morgan's The Descent of Woman (1972), and Evelyn Reed's Woman's Evolution (1975) challenged the zeitgeist of male dominance and hunting ability as the starting point of a heavily gendered account of the hominid transition. 39 It is to these contestations of the primacy of male agency as central to the hominid transition that Ashley Montagu turns in his discussion of the human past. He indicts the "putdown" of women as implicit in the Man the Hunter model and cites some of the important texts contesting the model, such as Dahlberg's edited volume Woman the Gatherer (1981), Nancy Tanner's On Becoming Human (1981), and Richard Lee's work on the San of the Kalahari (1979, 1974). 40 Montagu argues for the importance of women's gathering of up to 80% of the food consumed by modern food foragers, and against the obfuscation of the significance of their economic and social roles in the androcentric evolutionary models of the 1960s and 1970s.
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