“The Mushroom Hunters,” a poem by Neil Gaiman, is a feminist paean about science, inspired by history. Some commentary about the history behind the poem: in evolutionary human behavior, much is speculative. “The Mushroom Hunters” draws from many hypotheses made by anthropologists, several of which I have featured stories about. Here are some of them: that women were the primary gatherers, that slings were used to carry babies as one of the earliest tools (and the need for mothers to be in contact with their babies might have cultivated human language), that some of the earliest cave paintings were done by women, that psychedelic mushrooms cultivated the expansion of the human brain, that human thought has relied on pattern recognition, that men were the primary long-distance animal hunters. This list contains theories that run the gamut from pure speculation to generally agreed upon, but in no specific order. Neil Gaiman is, after all, an artist. I think it is worth listening to, and here is a link to a six-minute reading of it in a short film narrated by Amanda Palmer:
https://youtu.be/ak6sdSAcNkw
