Prehistoric female hunter discovery upends gender role assumptions

[Eugene]

Related: Female hunters of the early Americas (Science Advances)


An artist's depiction of what hunting may have looked like in the Andes Mountains of South America 9,000 years ago. Archaeologists were surprised when analysis of a hunter burial from the time period revealed the individual was biologically female. Matthew Verdolivo
(UC Davis IET Academic Technology Services)

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Source: National Geographic

Prehistoric female hunter discovery upends gender role assumptions

Researchers have generally thought that only prehistoric males hunted—but what if evidence against that idea has been lying in plain sight for decades?

BY MAYA WEI-HAAS
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 4, 2020

Randall Haas, an archaeologist at University of California, Davis, recalls the moment in 2018 when his team of researchers gathered around the excavated burial of an individual lain to rest in the Andes Mountains of Peru some 9,000 years ago. Along with the bones of what appeared to be a human adult was an impressive—and extensive—kit of stone tools an ancient hunter would need to take down big game, from engaging the hunt to preparing the hide.

"He must have been a really great hunter, a really important person in society"—Haas says that’s what he and his team were thinking at the time.

But further analysis revealed a surprise: the remains found alongside the toolkit were from a biological female. What's more, this ancient female hunter was likely not an anomaly, according to a study published today in Science Advances. The Haas team’s find was followed by a review of previously studied burials of similar age throughout the Americas—and it revealed that between 30 and 50 percent of big game hunters could have been biologically female.

This new study is the latest twist in a decades-long debate about gender roles among early hunter-gather societies. The common assumption was that prehistoric men hunted while women gathered and reared their young. But for decades, some scholars have argued that these “traditional” roles—documented by anthropologists studying hunter-gatherer groups across the globe since the 19th century—don’t necessarily stretch into our deep past.

While the new study provides a strong argument that the individual in Peru was a female who hunted, plenty of other evidence has long been lying in plain sight, says Pamela Geller, an archaeologist at the University of Miami who is not part of the study team.

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Read more: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/11/prehistoric-female-hunter-discovery-upends-gender-role-assumptions/