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As the weather starts to warm across the country, throngs of people will take to the great outdoors to bask in the sun, crack open a cold one and, inevitably, fire up the grill.

It's a pattern we all know well. But it tends to overshadow another often overlooked pattern, concerning who is holding the tongs?

Traditional masculinity continues to have a stronghold on BBQ. Even as other forms of cooking are (unfairly) treated as "women's work," cooking meat on an open flame is largely framed as an activity for men.

How might we explain these gendered dynamics?

Which came first, the human or the fire?

According to English anthropologist Richard Wrangham, the ability to , and therefore cook food, was the key driver of human evolution. In Wrangham's words, "we humans are the cooking apes, the creatures of fire."

Gender division in food and cookery is nothing new. Our prehistoric ancestors structured their around food. There's a that these early societies were simply split into two groups of "."

Reality, however, was far more , with many experts suggesting communal well-being overrode distinct . And increasing evidence suggests that, despite their , would have , just as men would have .

Today, it is women who do the majority of in Australia.

The original barbies

In terms of food preparation, butchering predates cooking, and can be traced back to about .

Filleting meat into smaller pieces made it easier to chew and digest large mammals such as mammoths, which allowed meat to become part of early on. There is indirect evidence that homo erectus' diverged from some 1.9 million years ago because of this shift in diet.

While it's when humans started to control and manipulate fire, evidence of cooking in the goes as far back as 780,000 years.

There was even an entire around the end of the (27,000 years ago), which involved procurement, carcass transport, butchery, food preparation and storage.

Meat was cold-smoked in smokehouses, allowing it to be consumed fresh, or stored long-term. But experts are divided as to who did the cooking. Did the hunters bring their catch back to the group to cook, or did they cook it at the kill site? The is it was probably both.

Why are BBQs such a sausage fest?

Not only do women do most of the cooking today, they also spend the most time (from the supermarket). However, this —particularly in certain .

The remains strong in the retail industry, and extends to advertising and marketing. When did you last see an ad that showed a woman in charge of the BBQ?

Barbecue cookbooks consistently have covers featuring men. There's not a single woman to be found on the covers of the top 50 best-selling books on Amazon.

And just as you're more likely to see cake mixers on special for Mother's Day, you're more likely to see BBQ-related products on sale for .

This is also noticeable in the professional .

Chef Lennox Hastie of Sydney's restaurant is someone who knows a thing or two about fire. Hastie told us: "There's no denying that, historically, fire has been wrapped up in a kind of rugged mythology—primal, elemental, often masculine. But some of the oldest, most enduring fire traditions have always been in the hands of women—it's the industry that's been slow to catch up. […] Fire doesn't care who you are. It doesn't respect ego. It requires attentiveness, intuition, patience—qualities that aren't gendered."

Although deliberate fire starting, or arson, is a , there's no evidence men are biologically wired, or pathologically driven, toward fire-setting.

Their over-representation in arson may be better explained by social, behavioral and psychological , including peer influence, antisocial personality traits, and a lack of emotional regulation.

Peacocking at the grill

Backyard BBQ, as we know it, is a relatively recent thing, gradually in the 1950s and becoming firmly embedded with the introduction of the gas BBQ in the 1960s.

In many ways, it is the modern equivalent of the Sunday roast; it fulfills the role of and reflects aspects of prestige, generosity and patriarchy. All of this plays into , which frames men as the dominant sex in society: the provider, the carver, the griller.

In contrast, everyday cookery tends to be seen as , more in service of family well-being than a show of social status. It is an unpaid and often undervalued part of the that still falls largely on women.

It's difficult to give precedence to just one of the that try and explain mens' dominance over the BBQ. But there is a high chance historical and gendered have a role to play.

Either way, best to keep a fire extinguisher handy.

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