The economist devil on my left shoulder clashes with the feminist angel on my right shoulder

What to make of this argument by anthropologists Steven Kuhn and Mary Stiner of the University of Arizona that Neanderthals went extinct because women joined men on the hunt?

Recent hunter-gatherers display much uniformity in the division of labor along the lines of gender and age. The complementary economic roles for men and women typical of ethnographically documented hunter-gatherers did not appear in Eurasia until the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic. The rich archaeological record of Middle Paleolithic cultures in Eurasia suggests that earlier hominins pursued more narrowly focused economies, with women's activities more closely aligned with those of men with respect to schedule and ranging patterns than in recent forager systems. More broadly based economies emerged first in the early Upper Paleolithic in the eastern Mediterranean region and later in the rest of Eurasia. The behavioral changes associated with the Upper Paleolithic record signal a wider range of economic and technological roles in forager societies, and these changes may have provided the expanding populations of Homo sapiens with a demographic advantage over other hominins in Eurasia.

My feminist angel says, great, now every chauvinist wingnut on the planet is going to use this research to explain why women should stay at home taking care of the chillun'. Let's not go the way of the Neanderthals, they'll say. My economist devil says, all right, even anthropologists are coming around to the notion that division of labor is key to prosperity. Now if we can only convince them that the same argument explains why we should have our computer keyboards manufactured in China instead of the United States.