Did you know that women in prehistoric societies were not just gatherers, but also skilled hunters who took down big game? That’s what a new study suggests, based on the discovery of a female body buried with hunting tools in the Andes some 9,000 years ago.
The study, published in Science Advances, challenges the long-held assumption that hunting was primarily a male activity in ancient hunter-gatherer groups. The researchers found that the woman, dubbed Wilamaya Patjxa individual 6, or “WPI6”, was buried with 24 stone tools, including projectile points that were likely used to tip spears thrown with a spear thrower, a device that may have reduced the importance of body size and strength in hunting.
“The hunting was purposeful. Women had their own tool kit. They had favorite weapons. Grandmas were the best hunters of the village,” said Cara Wall-Scheffler, study co-author and professor and co-chair of biology at Seattle Pacific University, in a statement.
The researchers also reviewed evidence of other skeletons buried with similar tools in the Americas, and found that 41% of them were likely female. This suggests that women participated in big-game hunting in prehistoric societies more often than previously thought.
“We’ve had scattered reports here and there about women’s hunting. But [the new research] pulls a lot of these things together,” said Vivek Venkataraman, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Calgary in Canada who was not involved with the research.
The study is based on data from 63 foraging societies across the world, from the 1800s to present day, and uses modern foraging societies as a window into past human behavior. The study also found that women used a wider variety of weapons and hunting strategies than men did, and played an active role in teaching hunting.
The findings challenge the Man-The-Hunter model, which is based on a few ethnographic cases and some problematic assumptions about sexual dimorphism in body size and strength.
Relevant articles:
– Did prehistoric women hunt? New research suggests so, Phys.org, November 5, 2020
– Early Women Were Hunters, Not Just Gatherers, Study Suggests, Smithsonian Magazine, June 30, 2023
– Hunting was women’s work too, study finds, The Times, June 30, 2023
– Did Prehistoric Men Hunt and Women Gather?, Archaeology Magazine, June 30, 2023