Gendered division of labor shaped human spatial behavior

Navigating, exploring and thinking about space are part of daily life, whether it’s carving a path through a crowd, hiking a backcountry trail or maneuvering into a parking spot.

• For most of human history, the driving force for day-to-day wayfinding and movement across the landscape was a need for food. And unlike other primates, our species has consistently divided this labor along gender lines.
• In new research published in Nature Human Behaviour, scientists including James Holland Jones of Stanford and lead author Brian Wood of University of California, Los Angeles, argue that the increasingly gendered division of labor in human societies during the past 2.5 million years dramatically shaped how our species uses space, and possibly how we think about it.
• Underlying these conclusions is a huge and detailed trove of travel data revealing stark differences in the ways men and women among the nomadic Hadza people of Tanzania use space. A contemporary hunter-gatherer society, the Hadza provide a window into a highly mobile lifestyle, which was the norm for our species before the widespread adoption of agriculture.

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