托福考试易错题（2019/9/12）

New Women of the IceAge
The status of women in a society depends in large measure on their role in the economy. The reinterpretation of the Paleolithic past centers on new views of the role of women in the food-foraging economy.Amassing critical and previously overlooked evidence fromDolni Vestonice and the neighboring site of Pavlov, researchers Olga Softer, JamesAdovasio, andDavid Hyland now propose that human survival there had little to do with men hurling spears at big-game animals. Instead, observes Softer, one of the world’s leading authorities on IceAge hunters and gatherers and an archeologist at the University of Illinois inChampaign-Urbana, it depended largely on women, plants, and a technique of hunting previously invisible in the archeological evidence--net hunting. "This is not the image we’ve always had of Upper Paleolithic macho guys out killing animals up close and personal," Softer explains. "Net hunting is communal, and it involves the labor of children and women.And this has lots of implications. "
Many of these implications make her conservative colleagues cringe because they raise serious questions about the focus of previous studies.European archeologists have long concentrated on analyzing broken stone tools and butchered big-game bones, the most plentiful and best preserved relics of the Upper Paleolithic era (which stretched from 40,000 to 12,000 years ago). From these analyses, researchers have developed theories about how these societies once hunted and gathered fooD、Most researchers ruled out the possibility of women hunters for biological reasons.Adult females, they reasoned, had to devote themselves to breast-feeding and tending infants. "Human babies have always been immature and dependent," says Softer. "If women are the people who are always involved with biological reproduction and the rearing of the young, then that is going to constrain their behavior. They have to provision that chilD、For fathers, provisioning is optional. "
To test theories about Upper Paleolithic life, researchers looked to ethnography, the scientific description of modern and historical cultural groups. While the lives of modern hunters do not exactly duplicate those of ancient hunters, they supply valuable clues to universal human behavior. In many historical societies, Softer observes, women played a key part in net hunting, since the technique did not call for brute strength nor did it place young mothers in physical peril.AmongAustralian aborigines, for example. Women as well as men knotted the mesh, laboring for as much as two or three years on a fine net.Among nativeAmerican groups, they helped lay out their handiwork on poles across a valley floor. Then the entire camp joined forces as beaters. Fanning out across the valley, men, women, and children alike shouted and screamed, flushing out game and driving it in the direction of the net. "Everybody and their mothers could participate," says Softer. "Some people were beating, others were screaming or holding the net.And once you got the net on these animals, they were immobilizeD、You didn’t need brute force. You could club them, hit them any old way. "
People seldom returned home empty-handeD、Researchers living among the net hunting Mbuti in the forests of theCongo report that they capture game every time they lay out their woven traps, scooping up 50 percent of the animals encountereD、"Nets are a far more valued item in their panoply of food-producing things than bows and arrows are," saysAdovasio. So lethal are these traps that the Mbuti generally rack up more meat than they can consume, trading the surplus with neighbors. Other net hunters traditionally smoked or dried their catch and stored it for leaner times.
Softer doubts that the inhabitants ofDolni Vestonice and Pavlov

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