The problem? It’s untrue. As the evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Hrdy put it to me, “Except for blips in history, men have never really been breadwinners, supporting a woman at home.”

Even now, globally, “the male breadwinner–female homemaker division of labour is… unusual,” writes evolutionary behavioral scientist Rebecca Sear. “Childcare is not the exclusive preserve of women in most societies and, even more so, productive labour is not the exclusive preserve of men.”

That includes during our hunter-gatherer days, which account for some 95% of human evolutionary history. The idea of “man the hunter, woman the caregiver,” widely popularized by (male) anthropologists in the 1960s, is, Hrdy notes, a massively “mistaken trope.”

There’s growing evidence that, in many hunter-gatherer cultures, women hunted. How common this was is debated, but it may not matter—because either way, women were key in provisioning food for their community. In fact, in several foraging societies in sub-Saharan Africa, often considered the closest likenesses to our shared evolutionary past, women’s average contribution to their community’s calorie intake range between 60 and 80%. These societies could survive without the sporadic acquisition of meat, anthropologists note. But they could not survive without the tubers and other plants reliably, and consistently, dug up or picked by women.