Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour pages 58-59

Women's productivity is the precondition of all other human productivity, not only in the sense that they are always the producers of new men and women, but also in the sense that the first social division of labour, that between female gatherers (later also cultivators) and predominantly male hunters, could take place only on the basis of a developed female productivity.

Female productivity consisted, above all, in the ability to provide the daily subsistence, the guarantee of survival, for the members of the clan or band. Women necessarily had to secure the 'daily bread', not only for themselves and their children, but also for the men if they had no luck on their hunting expeditions, because hunting is an 'economy of risk'.

It has been proved conclusively, particularly by the critical research of feminist scholars, that the survival of mankind has been due much more to 'women-the-gatherer' than to 'man-the-hunter', in contrast to what social-Darwinists of old or of new preach. Even among existing hunters and gatherers, women provide up to 80 per cent of the daily food, whereas men contribute only a small portion by hunting. By a secondary analysis of a sample of hunters and gatherers from Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas, Martin and Voorhies have proved that 58 per cent of the subsistence of these societies was provided by gathering, 25 per cent by hunting, and the rest by hunting and gathering together. Tiwi women, in Australia, who are both hunters and gatherers, got 50 per cent of their food by gathering, 30 per cent by hunting and 20 per cent by fishing...

It is obvious from these examples that, among existing hunters and gatherers, hunting does by no means have the economic importance which is usually ascribed to it and that the women are the providers of the bulk of the daily staple food. In fact, all hunters of big game depended on the supply by their women of food which is not produced by hunting, if they want to go on a hunting expedition... If they refused to give the men the necessary supply of food for their adventures, the men had to stay at home.

Elisabeth Fraser gives us further examples of still existing foraging peoples among whom women are the main providers of the daily food, particularly in the temperate and southern zones. But she also argues that the gathering of vegetable food was more important for our early ancestors than hunting. She refers to the study of coprolites, fossile excrement, which reveals that groups that lived 200,000 years ago on the southern French coast mainly survived on a diet of shellfish, mussels and grains, not meat. Twelve-thousand-year-old coprolites from Mexico suggest that millet was the main staple food in that area.

Though it is obvious from these examples, as well as from common sense, that humanity would not have survived if man-the-hunter's productivity had been the base for the daily subsistence of the early societies, the notion that man-the-hunter was the inventor of the first tools, the provider of food, inventor of human society and protector of women and children persists not only in popular literature and films, but also among serious social scientists, and even among Marxist scholars.