Conventional wisdom out the window
Kim Ng, seen here in 2018, is the first woman to be named the general manager of a Major League Baseball team. Credit: TNS/Nuccio DiNuzzo
One of my favorite stories from 2020 was one that barely kissed the public radar before disappearing from view.
It was a story of discovery, as many of my favorite stories are. This one was paleontological in nature. And it was accomplished by a team led by researchers from the University of California, Davis who found a 9,000-year-old skeleton of a young woman about 13,000 feet up in the Andes Mountains in southern Peru.
The woman was 17 to 19 years old, and the significance of the find is that she was buried with a collection of projectile points and other stone implements archaeologists refer to as a "big-game hunting kit." In other words, she had with her the tools needed to hunt the vicuña and deer that were a major part of the diet for her people back then.
The discovery posed a challenge for those archaeologists and anthropologists who subscribe to a long-held view of the division of labor among the ancients known as hunter-gatherers. Namely, males hunted and females gathered.
The team in Peru came to a different conclusion. Their work, they said, revealed "that early females in the Americas were big-game hunters."
It’s an intriguing thought to contemplate, one that upends conventional thinking. And it surely will resonate with any woman — or anyone who knows any woman — who through the years felt most at home peering into a microscope, arguing a case before a judge, working through a complex equation, or rocking an electric guitar and never got a chance or had to fight extra hard to get the chance to do what was considered men’s work.
Wouldn’t it be interesting to know that in one long-ago realm, at least, women were doing the work all along?
The scientists in the Peru excavation pointed out in the discussion of their find that when such projectile points are found buried with males they are readily presumed to be hunting tools, but not so much when they are found with women.
So findings like this become tests of the status quo, and whether you conceive of them as threats or simply challenges, they are invigorating. They require real evidence before they can supplant accepted ideas, but when the proof is there it’s time for our thinking to evolve. That’s how we humans advance, how we refresh, how we grow.
We’ve had lots of opportunities to do that lately on this topic alone.
Consider Kim Ng, who toiled for three decades in the male-dominated domain of Major League Baseball before being hired last month as general manager of the Miami Marlins, the first woman to hold such a title in all of the major men’s leagues in North America. Though it was long known by old hands in the game that she could do the work, it took time to upend conventional thinking, an effort the 52-year-old Ng described with pithy brilliance: "You just have to keep plowing through."
Take Emily Harrington, a 34-year-old Californian, who last month became the first woman — and fourth person — to free-climb Yosemite National Park’s fabled El Capitan on the Golden Gate route in less than 24 hours.
And, of course, Kamala Harris, who next month will become the nation’s first woman vice president, as well as its first Black and first South Asian vice president. And Jill Biden, who plans to keep teaching full time even after becoming first lady.
We think of things a certain way. Then new facts arrive, the unconventional becomes conventional, and we see what before we could only imagine.
Michael Dobie is a member of Newsday's editorial board.
Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.
