Spear and digging stick: The origin of gender and its implications for the colonization of new continents

A division of labour between sexes/genders in which, although there is some overlap, men hunt large game and women collect smaller. game, shellfish and most plant foods is a characteristics of all documented hunter-gatherer, societies. We argue that there is no biological reason for this behaviour and that it must be a social construct. These gender roles became, art of the structure of societies at the same time as other forms of symbolic behaviour associated with anatomically modern humans.(Homo sapiens sapiens). Established gender, roles were important for the first colonizers of a new continent, Australia, because it allowed the colonizers to tackle a completely new environment.