In the decades after its publication,
Man the Hunter was critiqued by both sociocultural anthropologists and archaeologists. While conference attendees had stressed their studies of hunters and gatherers as a link to a Pleistocene past, historical particularists like Edwin Wilmsen and James Denbow critiqued this approach in what became known as the
Kalahari Debate. Another response from feminists like Jane F. Collier and
Michelle Rosaldo critiqued the gendered assumptions in
Man the Hunter, highlighting how masculine-coded activities like hunting were considered central to human development, whereas so-called women's work was devalued and considered evolutionarily unimportant. Finally, a strain of critiques focused on the ways that hunter-gatherer societies have been considered 'passive' landscape managers. Using archaeological evidence to show how landscape management strategies like fire shaped the landscape at a large scale, archaeologists like Kent Lightfoot, Rob Cuthrell, Chuck Striplen, and Mark Hylkema have shown how indigenous hunter-gatherers changed landscape ecology. There has been ongoing debates since about the framing of gendered divisions of labor in the deep past with human behavioral ecologists primarily emphasizing the ethnographic record as supporting a universal division of male hunters and female gatherers, and archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, and physiologists focusing more the lack of evidence in the fossil record and oft ignored physiological/anatomical advantages of women. There is also debate about bias in the ethnographic record. == Literature ==