How Our Grandmothers Made Us and Saved Us

In this lyrical Orion essay, which is excerpted from The Evolution of Fire: Essays on Crisis and Becoming, Angela Pelster blends science, archaeology, and personal experience to argue that older women—grandmothers—are responsible for everything the human species is today. Pelster writes about the discovery of a 9,000-year-old female hunter buried in Peru, whose tools archaeologists initially assumed must have belonged to a man. Looking to evidence in our ancient past, Pelster finds hope in the fact that all bodies were once valued, that we once had equality, and that, perhaps, the same evolutionary force that made us will continue to move us forward.

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?