Did prehistoric women hunt? After decades of believing in the hypothesis of the man-hunter and women playing another type of role in society, a new study refutes this myth after the discovery of the remains of a human being from 9,000 years ago in a well located at the top of the Andes Mountains along with a 20-point toolkit of stone spears and blades stacked neatly beside it. Everything pointed to the discovery of a high-status hunter; a man. “A great boss,” noted archaeologist Randy Haas of the University of California at Davis (USA) and co-author of the work published in the journal Scientific Reports.
However, bioarchaeologist Jim Watson of the University of Arizona realized that the bones were thin and light . “I think the hunter could be a woman,” he told Haas.
Hunter women
And so it was. The woman found in the Andes with weapons and hunting tools, was between 17 and 19 years old when she died and was buried with elements that suggested that she hunted big game animals that she attacked with spears: stone spearheads to reach large animals , a knife and rock scales to remove internal organs, and tools for scraping and tanning hides. A complete hunter kit. It was a common practice in the ancient world to bury people next to the objects they used during their lifetime.
“Labor practices among recent hunter-gatherer societies are highly gendered, which could lead some to believe that sexist inequalities in variables such as salary or rank are somehow ‘natural,'” says Haas. .
“But now it is clear that the sexual division of labor was fundamentally different, probably more equitable, in the deep past of hunter-gatherers of our species.”
The burial site was discovered in 2018 during excavations at a high-altitude site called Wilamaya Patjxa in present-day Peru. The sex of the skeleton was confirmed by analyzing the bones and proteins found in the skeletal teeth. The sediment used to fill the pit once the woman was buried contained bone fragments from various large animals, such as the Andean deer and wild relatives of the alpaca known as the vicuña . Those two animals were the main targets of ancient hunters in that part of the Andes, experts suspect.
I was not alone
This find prompted experts to reexamine reports of other ancient burials in the Americas, and they found 11 more women who had been entombed with spearheads who may also have been hunters (from the late Pleistocene to early Holocene) and at least 16 men, suggesting that between 30 and 50% of the hunters in these populations were women.
This new discovery coincides with recent evidence that female warriors existed around 5,000 years ago in California and approximately 1,500 years ago in Mongolia and perhaps 1,000 years ago among the Scandinavian Vikings.
Referencia: R. Haas el al., “Female hunters of the early Americas,” Science Advances (2020). advances.sciencemag.org/lookup … .1126/sciadv.abd0310
