Until now, historians and scientists assumed that prehistoric men hunted while the women gathered. The recent discovery of a 9,000-year-old grave site questions this assumption. Researchers with UC Davis found the grave of a woman hunter in Peru, in a high-altitude site called Wllamaya Pathxa.
UC Davis IET Academic Technology Services | Matthew Verdolivo
9,000-Year-Old Remains Show Women Were Big Game Hunters, Too
The researchers suspected that the body was female.
The anatomy of her bones matched female characteristics. Later, they confirmed her sex with dental protein analysis. The analysis also revealed that she was 17 to 19 years old. It was clear that she was a hunter because she was buried with big-game hunting tools. In early societies, people were buried with objects that they needed in their life.
One female hunter could be an anomaly.
UC Davis | Forager Complexity Lab
So, the researchers looked at other burial sites to determine if female hunters were common in this early society. They found 429 graves, 27 of which had tools to hunt big game. Of those sites, 11 were female hunters and 15 were male. Researchers estimate that about 30-50% of big game hunters in that society were female.
These findings question long-standing beliefs about labor practices.
UC Davis | Forager Complexity Lab
Randy Haas, a UC Davis Professor, said in a news release:
“Labor practices among recent hunter-gatherer societies are highly gendered, which might lead some to believe that sexist inequalities in things like pay or rank are somehow ‘natural.’ But it’s now clear that sexual division of labor was fundamentally different — likely more equitable — in our species’ deep hunter-gatherer past.”
Researchers found evidence that females hunted before this finding, but the evidence was largely dismissed.
Hass said:
“Among historic and contemporary hunter-gatherers, it is almost always the case that males are the hunters and females are the gatherers. [...] Because of this – and likely because of sexist assumptions about division of labour in western society – archaeological findings of females with hunting tools just didn’t fit prevailing worldviews. It took a strong case to help us recognise that the archaeological pattern indicated actual female hunting behaviour.”
Research is ongoing.
UC Davis | Forager Complexity Lab
This new finding opens more questions about the sexual division of labor in early societies. The researchers plan to complete comparative studies to understand how roles have changed in different locations over time.
h/t: UC Davis
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