It is often viewed as a given: Men hunted, women gathered. After
all, the anthropological reasoning went, men were naturally more aggressive,
whereas the slower pace of gathering was ideal for women, who were mainly
focused on caretaking.
اضافة اعلان
“It is not something I questioned,” said Sophia Chilczuk, a
recent graduate of Seattle Pacific University, where she studied applied human biology.
“And I think the majority of the public has that assumption.”
At times, the notion has proved stronger than the evidence at
hand. In 1963, archaeologists in Colorado unearthed the nearly 10,000-year-old
remains of a woman who had been buried with a projectile point. They concluded
that the tool had been used not for killing game but, unconventionally, as a
scraping knife.
But the male-centric narrative has been slowly changing. On the
first day of a college anthropology course, Chilczuk and her classmates
listened to a podcast about the landmark discovery of a female hunter during an
excavation in Peru in 2018. Among fragments of cranium, teeth, and leg bones,
archaeologists found a hunting kit with more tools — projectile points, flakes,
scrapers, choppers and burnishing stones — than they had ever seen. This
discovery led the team to review the findings from other burials in the early
Americas; in 2020, they concluded that big-game hunting between 8,000 and
14,000 years ago was gender-neutral.
but compiling and showing that it’s not an anecdote, it’s a pattern, was what we were trying to do with this paper.
Abigail Anderson, a physiology student who was also in the
class, was shocked. “Wait, is this true?” she remembered thinking. On reading
the study, Anderson was struck by the author’s references to the scholarly
reluctance to associate women with hunting materials. “Immediately, I was like,
is this bias or is this accurate?” she said.
Chilczuk and Anderson joined Cara Wall-Scheffler, a biological
anthropologist who taught their course, and two other researchers — also women
— to figure this out. Now, the team has published a literature review in PLoS
One concluding that in most modern foraging societies, women have played a
dominant role in bringing home the game. Tales of female hunters existed,
Wall-Scheffler noted, “but compiling and showing that it’s not an anecdote,
it’s a pattern, was what we were trying to do with this paper.”
To investigate, the team combed through the Database of Places,
Languages, Culture and Environment, a catalog of ethnographies about human
societies in the 19th and 20th centuries, and found 63 foraging societies with
firsthand reports on when, how and what hunting occurred. Then the team sought
out patterns: whether women were hunting at all, whether the activity was
intentional or opportunistic, and the size of the game being pursued.
Wall-Scheffler and her students found evidence of women hunting
in 50 of the 63 societies they studied; moreover, 87 percent of that behavior
was deliberate. In cultures where hunting was the most important means of
finding food, women took an active role 100 percent of the time.
The researchers also found that women were more flexible in
their approaches to hunting as they aged. Which weapons they chose, the game
they chased and who accompanied them during hunts changed with age and the
number of children or grandchildren the hunters had. “They have different
strategies, but they’re still always going out,” Wall-Scheffler said. Often,
the oldest women participated the most. (In one bow-and-arrow culture, for
example, a grandmother was prized for having the best aim.)
It’s a natural thing to have assumptions, but it’s our responsibility to challenge those assumptions, to better understand our world.
The details about female hunting patterns were not easy to
uncover, Chilczuk said; the reports often prioritized discussions of the male
hunters. But the findings, when they emerged, made a certain sense, she added:
If hunting was the chief means of survival, why would only men participate?
The researchers wondered what other stories have been overlooked
by ethnographers. “There might be so many things that we’re missing out on,”
Chilczuk said. “It’s a natural thing to have assumptions, but it’s our
responsibility to challenge those assumptions, to better understand our world.”
Tammy Buonasera, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University
of Alaska Fairbanks who identified the sex of the female hunter found in 2018,
welcomed the conclusion of the PLoS paper. “I always assumed that women did
hunt probably more often than was recognized,” she said. In general, she added,
women are viewed “as just passive actors in history.” She noted that the study
of plant-gathering and the innovative ways in which people process plants — a
vital source of food — has been neglected because these activities are
traditionally linked with women.
Randy Haas, an archaeologist at Wayne State University, in
Detroit, who led the Peruvian excavation, likewise praised the new paper. “In
light of what my study shows, their findings align with the same narrative:
We’ve had biased interpretations,” he said. “And the idea that sexual division
of labor is an inherent part of human biology is a trope that has played out in
structural inequalities today.”
The dawning appreciation for women as hunters comes as
anthropology, like many scientific fields, has begun to diversify its ranks,
leading scholars to reexamine how evidence is interpreted. “Who you are shapes
the questions you ask,” Wall-Scheffler said. “It shapes the expectations of
what you see.”
She added that, like anyone, anthropologists can be tempted by a
simple narrative. “Complexity is relegated to anecdote,” she said. “We just
have to be willing to dig a little deeper.”
For Anderson, it was like taking the blinders off. “I don’t know
when I got this ingrained in me as a child,” she said of the male-hunter myth.
“And then it spiraled, like a snowball effect: What else do I think is true
that isn’t?”
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