Are women responsible for the evolution of culture and language?

If it were true, isn’t all the war and death and all of the other negatives by necessity the fruit from “the hand that rocks the cradle”.

Actually, @stanleybmanly all violence can be traced back to efforts of the male of the species to gain and control access to breeding opportunities with the female.

I have heard of the theory @LostInParadise. Not sure as I put that much credence in it as the only or even a major reason. I am not discounting it as a factor, I feel certain it was. Hunting, particularly large prey, using sticks and rocks also requires communication and cooperation. Being in a situation where survival of the group and of the individual members necessitated communication and cooperation whether it was wherever a plant based food source was located or how we are going to bring down this big honkin’ hefalump with only the four of us or even the possibly dire consequences of getting too close to the edge of that there cliff.
My personal opinion is that if it were not for women providing, somehow, the necessary impetus we would still be living in caves and the rocks in said caves would still be where we originally found them. But, as I say, that is just my opinion.

So the female influence either didn’t take or is overwhelmed by testosterone?

It’s a “chicken or the egg” question.

One doesn’t survive independent of the other so it’s a symbiotic relationship in all respects. Language and war both exist because of both women and men, equally because it takes both sexes to reproduce in humans.

Gay guys, on the other hand, invented culture! ~ ~

Gay guys invented fabulous culture.

I do not have time to read the links in the OP. I have to add my voice that it was probably mutually evolved by both sexes. However, I have absolutely nothing to indicate causation. To say one gender predominately influenced seems to beg the question.

I am undecided on this. I did a google search and everything that I have found so far supports the theory. I would have to see the evidence, if there is any.

There is another theory that I am equally undecided on. In the animal kingdom, infanticide is rather common. Usually it is the male that kills the prior offspring of a female in order to favor the children that he has with her.

The theory goes that humans and some other animals use female promiscuity to eliminate the advantages of infanticide to the male, since the children that he is thinking of doing away with might be his own. There is evidence that species with promiscuous females have less infanticide. I would need to see the mathematics for this. If a female has a large number of partners then it seems to me that the chances of the offspring belonging to a given male would be small, and in that case infanticide might be a reasonable evolutionary strategy for him.

I can’t imagine that it is an either/or scenario.

I honestly kind of doubt it. Seems like an overly simplistic theory and a politically motivated one. I don’t think we really know why language developed. Hunting likely took a great deal of communication using the tools and methods of the day. All of the toolmaking, and clothing, jewelry is also kind of ignored. That likely took cooperation, trade and planning as well. Language and culture likely evolved to encompass all of these things and very slowly. We probably can’t point to any one thing that caused it. I also don’t think there was a sharp division of labor between the sexes either. I’d be surprised if that was the case. Whatever was practical and allowed us to survive would have been the situation.

I don’t think that any one factor can be given full credit for the evolution of language and culture. We see little bits of proto-language in primates, so the earliest humans very well could have had a jump start on at least using gestures to convey information. It doesn’t take much to add sound to those gestures, and then to move on to just using the sounds. That’s one of the ways that children learn to speak, so it’s not even unreasonable to think that it could happen within a generation. What seems more likely is that shared child-rearing and collective gathering provided a rich environment for the expansion of existing linguistic practices.