I HAVEN’T BEEN SLEEPING MUCH LATELY. I’ve read that those of us who don’t sleep well might be the descendants of our ancestral night watchers—those who learned to stay awake or sleep light to keep the rest safe from the ravenous animals or other humans who would harm us. That would be nice. To believe there was something within me tuned toward this watching. A generous purpose in the tossing and turning. But it doesn’t do much good these days. There isn’t much to watch for in the dark anymore aside from the occasional garage break-in—our doors locked, porches lit, my baby grown, in their bed, sleeping through the night, or not really sleeping so much as making art, texting with friends, listening to podcasts, playing games, readying to leave home for college soon. I’m up and watching for the internal things instead—the fear of having not been a good enough mother, the fear of not getting to hold my sweet kid every day, the fear of living in a country bent on controlling women, the fear of my growing powerlessness, the fear of further erasure and increased vulnerability, the fear of a future that’s disinterested in a woman’s contributions to the world, especially as she ages into old.

So, I’m not sleeping, but I’m not watching for lions either. Or bears. Or dire wolves. It’s a different kind of fear from our ancestors’. Harder to stab to death. But it lives inside my body anyway.

I’ve started to listen to podcasts about early humans when I can’t sleep. About evolution. About how we got to be who we are now. What it means that this planet made us this way. Shaped us to be the creatures we are. What that tells us about why we do what we do.

My body is already far older than many of our early ancestors would have lived to be; if we keep the planet from burning up (another fear!), I can expect to live more than twice as long again. It’s not fair, I know—the different timelines we’re born into. I think about that at night, too, when I can’t sleep. What it would be like to expect to die at twenty, thirty, forty if I were lucky. If such shortened lives would feel even remotely similar to what we have now. If we could accomplish anything know-ing how little time there was, or if we would have the same art, music, books, and technology that we do now. Without time to fail and try again, and fail and try again, where would we be? Who would we be?

When I was a kid, I was taught that “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” Meaning that no one could say it wasn’t their fault for not believing in God. God was in all of creation. God’s nature was in nature. Found there.

I wish someone would have told me that I could be found there too. That I was nature. Born of it.

RICHARD CALLS THE PODCASTS MY VOICES. “Are you going to listen to your voices tonight?” he asks me after we kiss and reach for the lights. He always asks it teasingly, with a smile. My voices because I don’t wear headphones, and sometimes he wakes to them coming at him through his dreams, but he says he doesn’t mind. He sleeps like a stone. Clearly not a descendant of the Watchers. Maybe every family gets only one of us.

But I like that—my voices. Like Wisdom come down to explain to me in the dark that Neanderthals had bigger brains than Homo sapiens; that we evolved to gorge on high-fat, high-sugar food (so go easy on yourself if it’s hard to control, OK?); that we have been tender and violent right from the start. That we have always needed one another for survival. That we’re social animals. That we are animals. That we are animals.

A few weeks ago, I cried in bed instead of falling asleep when I learned about the grandmother hypothesis. When scientists talk about evolution, it becomes obvious pretty quickly that a lot of it is about trying to determine the defining thing that made us human—leaving the trees, walking on two feet, eating meat, cooking food, big game hunting, controlling fire, the grandmother hypothesis.

For more than thirty years, a woman named Dr. Kristen Hawkes has been studying grandmothers, and her hypothesis says that we owe our humanity to them. Most mammals die around menopause. We used to. The big apes, our closest living relatives, still die at around forty-five years old. But not us now. Once, the hypothesis goes, there were females who occasionally lived past menopause, and because they did, and because their own children were grown with babies of their own by then, they were able and willing (big ape grandmothers are not willing) to help gather more food for everyone, and they were also able (and willing) to help care for their grandbabies, freeing their daughters to have more grandbabies—healthier, better-fed grandbabies—and so also passing on their genes that favored longevity through those grand-babies. Because grandmothers helped out, we, as an entire species, grew to live longer and longer and developed our big brains, tiny jaws, shorter guts, conceptual art, chamber music, cars, poetry, split-level houses, novels, this computer I write on.

“When scientists were focused on the importance of big game hunters [to explain how we became human], women were overlooked, especially older women,” said my voices. “And what makes Hawkes’s work so remarkable is this fundamental idea that older women, grandmothers, might be responsible for everything we are today.”

Because grandmothers helped out, we, as an entire species, grew to live longer and longer and developed our big brains, tiny jaws, shorter guts, conceptual art, chamber music, cars, poetry, split-level houses, novels, this computer I write on.

RESTING INSIDE A HEART-SHAPED PIT the color of sand, eighty-five centimeters belowground, a woman’s skull sits inside the top left curve, mostly visible now that the archaeologists have paused their work for pictures. Bits of her tibia and fibula remain there, too, though much of the rest of her has returned to dust. Around the site, the earth is wide and empty, wind-whipped, dry, and dotted with the blond scrub grass of high altitude. Peruvian Andes edge the land like the rim of a bowl in the distance.

She was seventeen years old when she died. Or eighteen. Or nineteen. Like my first-year college students, I think when I see an artist’s rendering of what she might have looked like. Like my own child now simmering on the edge of the life that is to come, and my heart pains at the thought of it. In the case of these bones, this woman, “the life that is to come” might have been only another ten or twenty years. Such a small handful of time for a woman to mark her days. But she didn’t have even that.

I’m surprised by the tenderness that rises within me when I see what is left of this woman, practically a girl, after time has blown through her. How I want to gather and arrange her. Tuck her back into the earth and let her rest.

Nine thousand years ago, someone buried her (tenderly, I hope) lying on her side, slightly bent, facing mostly west, with twenty-four tools beside her—spear tips, thumbnail scrapers, knives, burnished stones, and red ochre—in the country we now call Peru.

There’s no explanation for her death yet, young as she was. There might never be one. So many things came for her every day—hunger and thirst, clawed and fanged animals, cold and illness, infection and accidents—that maybe those specifics matter less, are less mysterious than the rest. The rest being the “extensive toolkit” she was buried with.

The men who found her said they first thought the remains were from “a really great hunter” or a “great chief.” But then the analysis of proteins in her dental enamel came back, and it was revealed that she was female.

A female big game hunter.

And so now, flying in the face of scientists’ assumptions, there is a new theory gaining momentum that our ancestors hunted and gathered and wove and built and parented and cooked and lived outside our contemporary gender-role expectations. Except that the theory is not actually new. “We’ve been saying this for years,” the (mostly) female anthropologists and archaeologists have commented when asked about the discovery of this hunter and her tools. “Sigh,” they’ve given as response in a variety of ways to a variety of reporters. “Sigh, sigh, sigh.”

But not everyone is convinced—there are those who don’t believe the tools were hers. “The interpretation of grave goods, as a cultural, symbolic act, is not simple or straightforward,” says anthropologist Robert L. Kelly. They could have belonged to someone else. Her mating partner, for instance. Her brother. Some man she traveled with, he suggests.

“If the same artifacts had been associated with a male skeleton, there would be no questions that the individual was a hunter,” sighed Marin Pilloud, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada.

So, the debate continues. On her tool-owning.

I’ve decided to believe they were her tools until there’s evidence to convince me otherwise. What I really want to know is which was her favorite. Red ochre has been used around the world for millennia to tan hides and paint cave art and decorate bodies. So, sometimes I imagine she was an artist. Sketching the vicuña she stalked and chased and killed, or tracing an outline of her hand with it. Or an image of the sun, or birds, or people, drawn in a hidden place that we will never find. Her own secret kept safe.
Or maybe her favorite was the thumbnail scraper, a small, sharp blade she would have used to skin the vicuña. I know how good it feels to take a blade and pull it along a surface, watch the peeled skin curl in like a wave as I pass a knife along it. Mostly, I’m talking about potatoes here. Or cheese. Or carrots and apples. I don’t eat meat, even if someone kills it for me. But I can imagine that. How good it would feel to skin a hide. To take care of yourself with the skill of a knife and your hands. Almost meditative. That scrape and peel, scrape and peel, scrape and peel, a little red ocher, and then ta-da! You have a new bag for your tools. New skirt. New boots!

Or maybe she loved using those spear tips the most. She would have learned how to fasten one to the end of a stick and launch it with an atlatl as a kid. All of them did. Boys. Girls. Gender nonconforming because maybe there was no conforming. Two-spirit kids. Trans kids. Like my kid. All of them together like no one cared about anything except getting enough food to survive. Arm back, hands clenched, legs apart, and then whoosh—she’d send a spear flying through the air, and then there was dinner, bleeding on the end of it. She probably had to track the vicuña for hours before the kill. Sometimes for days. Studies have shown that humans have evolved to be the best long-distance runners of all the animals. We can even beat horses on a hot day—there are yearly contests to prove it. And women are, on average, better runners than men at very great distances.

But they probably weren’t her tools.

Want more writing from Angela Pelster?

Revisit her essay on learning to live with and love ants

“YOU COULDN’T PAY ME ENOUGH TO BE A GIRL,” my dad used to say when I was a girl and tampon commercials popped on TV with cottony white cylinders that sucked up vials of blue liquid before he could change the channel. “Gag me with a spoon, right?” he’d say, and then look to me for a laugh as if it hadn’t been my body he’d just been disgusted by, so confident I’d pick up on a revulsion of it to match his own. But when the years passed and I didn’t, we’d rage through family dinners.

“If women are as smart as men,” he’d say at the head of the table some nights, “why are so few of them scientists?” And I’d push my peas around my plate and never let on that I wasn’t sure why, only that I knew it wasn’t because we weren’t smart enough. “If women are as smart as men, why does the Bible say they shouldn’t be teachers?”

“If women are as smart as men, why aren’t they in history books?”

“If women are as smart as men, why haven’t they invented anything important?”

“How about humanity, motherfucker?” I could shout back now, but back then, I had nothing. No proof but my own deep knowing and a rage that pulled me forward. Or, not only that. I had an army of grandmothers behind me. Inside me. I had a billion other women. I just didn’t know it yet.

And I had her, lying patiently in the ground with her tools. And I had a father who loved   me but said these things still.

A father of three daughters. And he loved us all. He didn’t know about any of it either. Or he hadn’t wanted to hear it.

Because they probably weren’t her tools.

Knowledge about our own bodies has been filtered through so many millennia of contempt for them that there’s so much to sort through. We’re only just beginning to trust them again.

MY MOTHER-IN-LAW CALLS MENOPAUSE “the Change.” My own mother calls it “no big deal—I just got a little hot sometimes.” I don’t have a real sense of it yet, what it will mean to be so guided by my body again, a different body from the one I’ve grown accustomed to—like another puberty, I’ve read, another marker of life moving through its moments and a reminder of my own impermanence.

The literary world is finally starting to pay aging women a bit of attention, and friends have started to talk about it. We know it’s coming for us, even while not knowing what it will mean, exactly, and we tell stories about it like we once did about period cramps and chamomile tea, about breast exercises and emergency rolled toilet paper: “It was like coming into my power,” an older friend says. “The hormone that makes you care about what other people think just disappears,” another tells me. One friend suggests that sex can even get better. Knowledge about our own bodies has been filtered through so many millennia of contempt for them that there’s so much to sort through. We’re only just beginning to trust them again. These gifts of change, the possibility for it that our grandmothers gave us.

If I were a chimp and not a human, I’d be dead or dying in the next few years, but instead, maybe thanks to our grandmothers, I am packing Jack up for college and have stopped dyeing my hair so the white will show. How could I not cry to learn that? This forgotten story of the grandmothers gifted to me inside my fearful nights. Because that’s how it felt—an unexpected narrative shift where I was yanked midair from my scheduled hurtling toward mid-life invisibility and tucked deep inside something meaningful instead. Into a story that’s foundational and ancient and necessary. Because who else is telling that story? Of how our grandmothers saved us and made us? Of how much we owe older women? How necessary they are? Because look around. The stories are gone—if they were ever even recorded. But I want my stories, damn it, and what have they done with our fucking tools?

WHAT SOME PEOPLE HAVE DONE with the ancient Peruvian woman’s fucking tools is compare them to other archaeological finds of other women buried with tools, and it turns out that she’s not alone either. That 30–50 percent of big game hunters buried with tools in the Americas were female, meaning that based on these finds, gender parity in hunting was likely.

I don’t know if it feels better to learn that once in human history, gender didn’t determine what we did with our bodies, that all bodies were valued as tools for communal survival and that grandmothers were central to our evolution, or if it’s more painful to realize that we once had that equality and have changed so much, lost so much, created something so unrecognizable in ourselves that we can hardly believe equality ever existed, let alone could exist again.

If there’s hope for different ways to be a human body in the world again, I find it in my own kid and their friends, in their refusal of binary declarations of male or female for themselves, neither of the two options fitting quite right. They have no use for categories that land them in an either-or world, so they’re building something else. And why shouldn’t they? The world has always been ours for the making because we are of its making. It made and remade us over and over again from single cells to vertebrates, to crawling fish, to bodies of fur and homes in the trees. We used to swing from our tails. Who are we to imagine we could outimagine the world?

I don’t know if it feels better to learn that once in human history, gender didn’t determine what we did with our bodies, that all bodies were valued as tools for communal survival…or if it’s more painful to realize that we once had that equality and have changed so much…

SOMETIMES, I LIKE TO IMAGINE that the Peruvian hunter had a child too. That against all odds, that child grew to adulthood and had a child of their own, and that child did too, down and down the generations until today, some part of her is still alive. It’s not so impossible, I guess; all the rest of us have traveled that long way to this moment. So many lives poured into each one of us to get here. Sometimes, that fact makes it easier for me to love people—to imagine all the bodies, the striving, the near misses, the work, the desperation, the sicknesses overcome, the hardships endured to create this person in front of me here. So many things could have happened instead, and yet here they are inside this body of theirs. And me in mine.

So, I lie in the dark at night, unsleeping again, and I watch. I’m trying to own my watchfulness now, imagine it tying me back and back and back to those who came before. Some nights, I hum with it all—all those lives tucked inside me. All the grandmothers who got me here and all the ways we’ve been bodies in this world. What has been and could be still. Evolution keeps coming for us, our crises and the changes they wreak. It is unstoppable and always has been. I spin my heart out into the universe these nights, held tight by those who brought me here, and I reach out for the ones to come, trusting in this body, in its wild changeability, how it calls our descendants into existence even now, how it draws us on.

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Excerpted from The Evolution of Fire: Essays on Crisis and Becoming by Angela Pelster, 2026. Used with permission from Milkweed Editions.

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