Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

by Angela Saini

But there are other explanations. “Part of it may lie in the sex of the researcher,” Crittenden admits. “Science is supposed to be objective,” but it’s possible that their sex affected how they collected their data, she adds. Hawkes and Marlowe now have their own scientific camps, each with their own versions of the past, one favoring powerful old men and the other favoring grandmothers. “The one I’m betting on really does make grandmothering the key to this special characteristic of our longevity,” states Hawkes. For the patriarch hypothesis to work, she explains, there would have to be at least a few old men alive in the beginning to make these patriarchies happen in the first place, and the fact that our primate cousins don’t have any elderly chimps or apes among them raises the question of where on earth these older men might have come from in large enough numbers.