The tragic romance of this many-versioned Hadza story is a stark contrast to our early field experiences. Soon after we began our behavioral and ecological observations, staying in a camp and observing people's daily activities, we began to wonder why Hadza women kept husbands. Women toiled in the hot sun all day digging tubers, then came home and hammered baobab seeds until dark, while men sat in the shade talking, smoking, and fiddling with their arrows (Photograph 14.3). At about four o'clock, soon after the women had returned to camp, men would walk to their house, take a handful of tubers and march quickly back to the men's assembly place to eat the tubers. Seldom did men, avidly professed hunters, materialize with meat. Why did the women put up with this? Occasionally a man would arrive with a small bag of honey, or a game bird, or even a bundle of baobab pods and leave them at his wife's house for her to do the lengthy processing. Only rarely, a man would arrive in camp with meat over his shoulder, park it on the roof of his house, report that people could carry more meat if they cared to go and get it, and then retire to the men's place to smoke. Men, women, and children would rush off into the bush and come back an hour or so later, laden with meat. Every house, even the house of a single old woman, ended up with some meat. If waiting around for a hunter to succeed was a reason to keep a husband, then why not just wait around for someone else's kept man to announce a kill?

We still puzzle about this, and dispute with friends and colleagues over the fitness economics of hunting (Wood and Marlowe, 2013, 2014; Hawkes et al., 2014).