It is often seen as a given: men hunted, women gathered. After all, the anthropological reasoning went, men were naturally more aggressive, while the slower pace of collecting was ideal for women, who concentrated primarily on caregiving.
“It’s not something I questioned,” said Sophia Chilczuk, a recent graduate of Seattle Pacific University in Washington State, where she studied applied human biology. “And I think most of the public have that assumption.”
Sometimes the notion has proven to be stronger than the available evidence. In 1963, archaeologists in Colorado unearthed the remains of a nearly 10,000-year-old woman who had been buried with a projectile point. They concluded that the tool had not been used to kill animals but, unconventionally, as a scraping knife.
This type of male-centric narrative has been slowly changing. On the first day of a college anthropology course, Chilczuk and his classmates listened to a podcast about the historic discovery of a female hunter during an excavation in Peru in 2018. Among fragments of skull, teeth, and leg bones, archaeologists found a kit with more tools—projectile points, scrapers, cutters, and grinding stones—than they had ever seen before. This find led the team to review the contents of other burials in the Americas; in 2020 they concluded that big game between 14,000 and 8,000 years ago was gender neutral.
Abigail Anderson, a physiology major who was also in the class, was shocked. “Wait, is this true?” she recalled thinking. Reading the study, Anderson was struck by the author’s references to academics’ reluctance to associate women with hunting materials. “Immediately, I thought, is this a bias or is it correct?” she said.
Chilczuk and Anderson joined Cara Wall-Scheffler, a biological anthropologist who taught their course, and two other researchers to find out. Now, the team has published a study in PLoS One that concludes that, in most modern hunting and gathering societies, women have played a dominant role in bringing home big game.
To investigate, the team combed through the Places, Languages, Culture and Environment Database, a catalog of ethnographies on human societies in the 19th and 20th centuries, and found 63 hunting and gathering societies with firsthand accounts of when , how and what hunting occurred. The team then looked for patterns: whether the women hunted, whether the activity was intentional or opportunistic, and the size of the prey sought.
Wall-Scheffler and her students found evidence of women hunting in 50 of the 63 societies they studied; furthermore, 87 percent of that behavior was deliberate. In cultures where hunting was the most important means of finding food, women played an active role 100 percent of the time.
“I always assumed that women probably hunted more often than was recognized,” said Tammy Buonasera, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who sexed the huntress found in 2018.
By: KATRINA MILLER
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6838177, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-08-07 18:30:11
#Studies #show #women #hunters