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devoting all my attention to mak-ing sure that they did not get run over, fall, wander off, or suffer some other mishap. Traditional New Guinea men had to be even more attentive because of the greator risks facing their children and wives. Those seemingly carefree men strolling along beside a heavily burdened wife were actually functioning as lookouts and protectors, keeping their hands free so that they could quickly deploy their bow and arrow in the event of ambush by men of another tribe. But the men's hunting trips, and the sale of women as wives, continue to trouble me.
    To ask what men are good for may sound like a flip one-liner. In fact, the question touches a raw nerve in our society. Women are becoming intolerant of men's self-ascribed status and are criticizing those men who provide better for themselves than for their wives and children. The question also poses a big theoretical problem for anthropologists. By the criterion of services offered to mates and children, males of most mammal species are good for nothing except injecting sperm. They part from the female after copulation, leaving her to bear the entire burden of feeding, protecting, and training the offspring. But human males differ by (usually or often) remaining with their mate and offspring after copulation. Anthropologists widely assume that men's resulting added roles contributed crucially to the evolution of our species' most distinctive features. The reasoning goes as follows.
    The economic roles of men and women are differentiated in all surviving hunter-gatherer societies, a category that encompassed all human societies until the rise of agriculture ten thousand years ago. Men invariably spend more time hunting large animals, while women spend more time gathering plant foods and small animals and caring for children. Anthropologists traditionally view this ubiquitous differentiation as a division of labor that promotes the nuclear family's joint interests and thereby represents a sound strategy of cooperation. Men are much better able than women to track and kill big animals, for the obvious reasons that men don't have to carry infants around to nurse them and that men are on the average more muscular than women. In the view of anthropologists, men hunt in order to provide meat to their wives and children.
    A similar division of labor persists in modern industrial societies: many women still devote more time to child care than men do. While men no longer hunt as their main occupation, they still bring food to their spouse and children by holding money-paying jobs (as do a majority of American women as well). Thus, the expression “bringing home the bacon” has a profound and ancient meaning.
    Meat provisioning by traditional hunters is considered a distinctive function of human males, shared with only a few of our fellow mammal species such as wolves and African hunting dogs. It is commonly assumed to be linked to other universal features of human societies that distinguish us from our fellow mammals. In particular, it is linked to the fact that men and women remain associated in nuclear families after copulation, and that human children (unlike young apes) remain unable to obtain their own food for many years after weaning.
    This theory, which seems so obvious that its correctness is generally taken for granted, makes two straightforward predictions about men's hunting. First, if the main purpose of hunting is to bring meat to the hunter's family, men should pursue the hunting strategy that reliably yields the most meat. Hence we should observe that men are on the average bagging more pounds of meat per day by going after big animals than they would bring home by targeting small animals. Second, we should observe that a hunter brings his kill to his wife and kids, or at least shares it preferentially with them rather than with nonrelatives. Are these two predictions true?
    Surprisingly for such basic assumptions of anthropology, these