Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour pages 61-62

The earliest tools of mankind, the stone axes, scrapers and flakes, were of an ambivalent character. They could be used to grind, smash and pulverize grains and other vegetable food, and to dig out roots, but they could also be used to kill small animals, and we can assume that they were used by men and women for both purposes. However, the invention of arms proper, of projectiles, of the bow and arrow, is an indication that the killing of animals had become a major specialization of one part of the society, mainly of men. The adherents to the hunter hypothesis are of the opinion that the first tools were invented by men. They ignore women's inventions connected with with their subsistence production. But, as was previously discussed, the first inventions were most probably containers and baskets made of leaves, bark and fibres and later jars. The digging stick and the hoe were the main tools for gathering as well as for early agriculture. Women must have continued with their technology while some men developed specialized hunting tools.

What is important here is to note that women's technology remained productive in the true sense of the word: they produced something new. The hunting technology, on the other hand, is not productive, that is, hunting equipment proper cannot be used for any other productive activity--unlike the stone axe. The bow and arrow and spears are basically means of destruction. Their significance lies in the fact that they cannot only b used to kill animals, they can also be used to kill human beings. It is this characteristic of the hunting tools which became decisive in the further development of male productivity as well as of unequal, exploitative social relations, not the fact that hunters as providers of meat were able to raise the standard of nutrition of the community.

Hence, we conclude that the significance of hunting does not lie in its economic productivity as such, as is wrongly assumed by many theoreticians, but in the particular object-relation to nature it constitutes. The object-relation to nature of man-the-hunter is distinctly different from that of woman-the-gatherer or cultivator. The characteristics of this object-relation are the following:

a. The hunters' main tools are not instruments to produce life but to destroy life. Their tools are not basically means of production, but means of destruction, and they can be used as means of coercion also against fellow human beings.

b. This gives hunters a power over living beings, both animals and human beings, which does not arise out of their own productive work. They can appropriate not only fruits and plants (like the gatherers) and animals, but also other (female) producers by virtue of arms.

c. The object-relation mediated through arms, therefore, is basically a predatory or exploitative one: hunters appropriate life, but they cannot produce life. It is an antagonistic and non-reciprocal relationship. All later exploitative relations between production and appropriation are, in the last analysis, upheld by arms as means of coercion.

d. The object-relation to nature mediated through arms constitutes a relationship of dominance and not of cooperation. This relationship of dominance has become an integral element in all further production relations which men have established. It has become, in fact, the main paradigm of their productivity. Without dominance and control over nature, men cannot conceive of themselves as being productive.

e. 'Appropriation of natural substances' (Marx) now becomes a process of one-sided appropriation, in the sense of establishing property relations, not in the sense of humanization, but in the sense of exploitation of nature.

f. By means of arms, hunters could not only hunt animals, but they could also raid communities of other subsistence producers, kidnap their unarmed young and female workers, and appropriate them. It can be assumed that the first forms of private property were not cattle or other foods, but female slaves who had been kidnapped.

At this point it is important to point out that it is not the hunting technology as such which is responsible for the constitution of an exploitative dominance-relationship between man and nature, and between man and man, man and woman. Recent studies on existing hunting societies have shown that hunters do not have an aggressive relationship with the animals they hunt...

This means that the emergence of a specialized hunting technology only implies the possibility of establishing relationships of exploitation and dominance. It seems that, as long as the hunters remained confined to their limited hunting-gathering context, they could not realize the exploitative potential of their predatory mode of production. Their economic contribution was not sufficient; they remained dependent for their survival on their women's subsistence production.