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Stone Age Women Hunted Big Game, Study Finds

Steve Baragona

   In the Stone Age Americas, a woman's place was on the hunt, according
   to a new study.

   A 9,000-year-old burial site in Peru has scientists rethinking ideas
   about gender roles in prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies.

   The findings go against what researchers have seen in nearly all other
   hunter-gatherer cultures, and not all archaeologists are convinced.

   [1]In the new study, in the journal Science Advances, archaeologists
   found the remains of a teenage female buried with what appears to be a
   complete set of big-game hunting gear: spear points, blades, scrapers
   and other stone tools.

   He's a she

   They could not tell the individual's gender at the dig site, but "we
   all just assumed it was a dude," University of California Davis
   archaeologist Randy Haas said.

   Around the site, they told each other he must have been a great hunter,
   Haas said.

   "Maybe he was a big chief or a great warrior or something," he said.

   But after studying the remains back at the lab, his colleague Jim
   Watson of the University of Arizona said, "I think 'he' is a 'she,'"
   Haas said.

   "It definitely was a surprise for me," he added.

   In nearly every hunter-gatherer culture studied, big-game hunting is
   done almost exclusively by men. Anthropologists for the most part have
   assumed that that is how it has always been.

   So, was this an isolated case? Or were prehistoric women hunters more
   common than previously thought?

   These are hard questions to answer because these sites are hard to
   find.

   "You don't just stumble across a burial like this every day," Haas
   said.

References

   1. https://advances.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd0310

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