W. BRUCE CAMERON - June 10, 2010

When the Hunter Meets the Gatherer

As George Santayana famously said, those who fail to study history are condemned to repeat it — unless they get lucky on the final. This is especially true for “pre-history,” which is a combination of the suffix “pre,” meaning “before,” and “history,” meaning “what has occurred” — so “pre-history” literally means “things that happened before they occurred.”

Pre-history tells us that our species used to be a hunter-gatherer society. This means that the job of raising a family was split 50-50 between the men and the women — the man’s 50 percent share was to sit...