They just accepted the ideas they'd inherited from past work. Besides, humans could not have survived on a diet of 90 percent meat, as the old school maintains. According to recent nutritional studies, humans who get more than half their calories as lean meat will die from protein poisoning. Carbohydrates are needed to promote human life. Linda Owens, who specialized in the microscopic analysis of tools, took a closer look at those Upper Paleolithic tool piles and found among the spear heads and clubs large quantities of pounding stones and other tools used to gather and process plants.
Researchers agree that women harvested and prepared plants.
At question is how much this contributed to the diet. She found fragments indicating that women had dug roots and cooked them. They were hardly male pornography. The new view is that the statues were probably made by women to use in rituals recognizing the huge contribution made by women's work. To this day in Paleolithic studies we hear about Man the Hunter doing such boldly wonderful things as thrusting spears into wooly mammoths, or battling it out with other men.