Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for September 17, 2019

The list needs to be a long longer than that, even for a Neanderthal.

So this is how agriculture had it’s beginning! Guys trying to escape their nagging wives.

Prehysterical prehistory.

I thought the women did the gathering.

Hunting came before gathering, but you couldn’t make beer out of mastodons, and plants can’t stomp you in the ground. Hmm, but avoid the shrooms unless you’re feeling lucky.

“We never should have invented written words last month.”

Gather what? Food, plants, more women to gather. You have to be specific.

This needs “multi-tasking skills”. Something my wife says I, and men in general, don’t have.

He gathers that she wasn’t pleased.

First you hunt, then you gather up the kill and bring it back. Looks like they forgot step two last time out.

Rather presumptuous of some folks to assume that the list was written by a woman.

It does not matter how long the “To Do” list is, he will never get it right in her mind because she starts from the premise that everything he does or says is wrong and it is her duty and passion to point it out. As Geffrey Chaucer wrote in The Canterbury Tales, “It is every women’s true desire to dominate her situation”. She must be unhappy to be truly happy…

been there done that….

Some of the very latest findings re: ancient female skeletons show that some females were strong enough to be hunters. In fact, some female skeletons unearthed in the Scandinavian countries were buried with hunting/fighting equipment, leading archaeologists to speculate that there were, indeed, female hunters.

And to think that, before I got married, I thot that the “honeydew list” was just a clever pun.

He makes his to do list. I make my to do list. We each work on our own list. That method has worked for us for several decades now.

Repeat.

“Alright, since women have invented writing, we men must discover fire so we can burn this.”

Since Adam and Eve the women did all the work and the men just hunted. That, however, didn’t mean that the women did not ‘Rule the Roost’ so to speak. Women have always been able to get men to do what they wanted.

Ah, a list. My dear departed, who was an excellent cook, sent me off to the store about 25 years ago for some things, including “balsamic”. Seeing about 40 products (finally) in the salad dressing section, I called her for a little more specificity. She told that story for years, getting more pleasure out of it than I. These days, I just get one of the Newman’s Own dressings, but I would rather still be getting something for her. Love the one you’re with.

“My wife sent me over to ask if we could borrow a cup of wooly mammoth.”

Hunting was a risky prospective – with weapons that consist only of spears, you have to get really close to a big dangerous animal to kill it and get much meat – but gathering was a reliable and dependable source of food.

In modern day hunter/gatherer societies (there are a few left in the less traveled corners of the world) the gatherers contributed > 80% of the calories to survival. Both genders gathered. The only place this doesn’t hold is where fishing is a big part of the culture (unless you consider fishing to be gathering, not hunting – then it still holds).

All modern hunters should be required to hunt “Ted Nugent style” – with just a knife to kill the deer. Predator and prey on equal footing.

After the Hunt, you have to remember to Gather up the Meat and bring it back to the Cave.

Stopping by that Tree with all the Fermented Fruit lying around under it is NOT a good excuse.