For centuries, when we were taught about the ancient world, professors and researchers told us that women stayed around the village to look after children and gather nuts, berries, vegetables, and other staples while men went out and hunted for meat.
Now, experts say that perception has never been accurate.
In fact, this recent study found that women participated in hunting in at least 79% of past (and present) foraging societies.
They say this is proven by the presence of big-game hunting tools buried alongside the remains of women. At a 9,000-year-old burial site in Peru, they also found a hunting toolkit and animal processing equipment buried with women.
The team compared their findings to those from around the world – remnants left behind by 63 foraging societies in the Americas, Africa, Australia, Asia, and beyond all supported their findings.
In fact, these facts held true whether or not the women were mothers as well.
Biological anthropologist Cara Wall-Scheffler says there is evidence these hunting practices were intentional.
“I think we all expected to find the evidence that women hunted; what was surprising was how many women ‘purposefully’ hunt. We were expecting to find evidence that women hunted ‘opportunistically’ (only hunting if they happened across prey while they were out and about), but it ends up that in many places, women go out with the intention of hunting.”
In addition, the women used a greater variety of weapons and hunting strategies than men, and even taught others in their societies how to hunt as well.
This research team believes the practice of burying women with their hunting tools was even more widespread, but the preconceived notion about the separation of roles by gender might have led them to misidentify the items.
They want older archaeological evidence reevaluated based on current findings.
“People are very good at being flexible. Being locked into a specific role with no other options is probably not how we have been so successful a a species.”
This all might seem like a no-brainer to women.
But for some scientists, well…I bet it will take them a longer time to come around.
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