evolutionary explanations for variation in maternal and infant physiology.
Miller applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Thicker Than Water: A Social and Evolutionary Study of Iron Deficiency in Women, and reported the following:
Readers, my book, Thicker than Water: A Social and Evolutionary Study of Iron Deficiency in Women, absolutely fails the Page 99 Test. You will only get a tiny idea of the entire book just by reading the 99th page. However, this page provides a brief discussion of a neat anthropological concept, which, I am pleased to say, is a consistent feature throughout the book. Page 99 discusses Sally Slocum’s classic 1975 article, “Woman the gatherer: Male bias in anthropology.” In her article, she critiques the old hypothesis “Man the Hunter,” which states that the evolution of human features – like big brains – occurred because men hunted animals for meat with the stone tools that, of course, they used their big brains to make. Slocum uses this article as a springboard to discuss how there is gender bias not just in who is studied in human evolution, but who is doing the studying and the types of questions they ask. Since she wrote the article, the “Man the Hunter” hypothesis has been discredited for several reasons. However, it lives on in the popular imagination.Learn more about Thicker Than Water at the Oxford University Press website.
The reason this particular story is on this particular 99th page is because it is embedded in Chapter 5, a wide-ranging chapter that broadly addresses the role of diet and the microbiome in the absorption of iron. Page 99 is part of a discussion of gendered foods. Frequently, meat is seen as food for men. It’s not a human universal, but it is common to see more meat consumed by men across cultures for a variety of reasons. This is a big problem for women’s iron levels. Meat contains high quantities of bioavailable iron, and women, especially pregnant women, need lots of iron. Gendered beliefs about meat eating may be keeping women from the nutrition they need. This is why hypotheses like “Man the Hunter” have broader social ramifications beyond the ivory tower – they confirm already-existing biases about the types of food women should eat.
This is only a tiny point in a whole book about women and their iron physiology. Why is it written by an anthropologist and not a nutrition scientist or a physician? The answer is inspired by Sally Slocum: I ask interesting questions that are unique to my experiences as a scientist. Why not see what I have to say?
--Marshal Zeringue
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