If, as many scholars assume, early human societies divided tasks according to gender roles, assigning most hunting to males and most food gathering tasks to females, women must have made most of the important contributions in the development of the new way of life. Women probably discovered how to plant rather than merely gather seeds; women must have developed key parts of the techniques required for processing and preparing food; and women no doubt played vital parts in transforming and adapting hunter-gatherer cultures to sedentary life. While we can never reconstruct the story of those changes in great detail, there can be no doubt of the significance of women's pioneering contributions.