TWH – The myth goes: men hunted and women gathered. It is part of an anthropological and archeological paradigm based on assumptions of traditional sex roles. But there is growing evidence these modern assumptions are not the case. Research published last month in the science journal PLOS One questions the sexual division of labor and existing assumptions about hunters as males and gatherers as females.
The prescriptions about the roles of men and women in very ancient cultures emerged from an assumed set of “natural” roles in early human societies. Males were assumed to be more aggressive and did the hunting while females were presumed tamer gathering plants to prepare the animals that males provided.
These divisions continue into modern societies regardless of their technological advancement. Many Pagan and other religious and societal traditions inherit these assumptions about the role of men and women in society.
Growing evidence suggests this view is merely a myth. Women were and are active hunters. The data have been there all along, but researchers have been overlooking it.
Indeed, previous research has found historical evidence of women hunters. In Wilamaya Patjxa, Peru, archeologists found a 9,000 burial of an adult female hunter along with a “big-game hunting kit” and other equipment to process game.
The current research took a new look at over 60 hunter-gatherer cultures and the burials they performed of hunters from Asia, Africa, Australia, and North America. What they found was that women hunters were observed in 79 % of those hunter-gather communities the researchers studied.
Dr. Robert Kelly, professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming and past president of the Society for American Archaeology, said to NPR that “No one,” had performed a systematic “tally” of what the observational reports said about women hunting. Kelly was not involved in the research.
“The women would go out with many different tools—they had a very diverse tool kit all around the world—and if they saw an animal, they would kill it,” said Dr. Cara Wall-Scheffler of Seattle Pacific University one of the authors of the study.
“We decided to see what was actually out there,” she told NPR. “Our goal was to go back to the original ethnographic reports of those populations and see what had actually been written about the hunting strategies.”
What the researchers did was comb through decades of data available in a system called D-PLACE, the Database of Places, Languages, Culture and Environment. D-PLACE is an ethnographic database and atlas with detailed information on over 1,400 human societies across geographic regions.
World map of the locations of 63 different foraging societies analyzed. The map is in the public domain and can be attributed to Petr Dlouhy [via PLOS ONE]
From the database, the researchers distilled 391 foraging societies and recorded the continent, location, ecosystem, and primary subsistence activities. They then looked for scientific ethnographic reporting on each society and explored further the roles of women.
The researchers looked for evidence to determine if the women were hunting opportunistically, that is whether the act of hunting was spontaneous rather than in an organized way such as a hunting party. They also identified the type of game, the relative size of the prey, and the toolkit required for hunting. The results of the breakdown produced different subgroups based on the participation of women in hunting and other factors such as game.
The research team found that 90% of “societies had data on the size of game that women hunted” and that “in societies where women only hunted opportunistically, small game was hunted 100% of the time.” Of the 63 foraging societies identified in the study, 79% had documentation of women hunting regardless.
The evidence across societies shows women using an array of tools for hunting from nets to “spears, machetes, and cross bows.”
They also noted that women succeeded in hunting regardless of childcare responsibilities. If children were included in hunting activities, they were protected from harm by their parents and other members of that society. In some cultures, the researchers noted that the data identified specialized skills such as carrying infants while protecting them from harm.
The researchers wrote, “Women in foraging societies across the world historically participated and continue to participate in hunting regardless of child-bearing status.”
They further noted that “The prevalence of data on women hunting directly opposes the common belief that women exclusively gather while men exclusively hunt, and further, that the implicit sexual division of labor of ‘hunter/gatherer’ is misapplied.”
The research called into question not only the current bias on the roles of women but other binary assumptions about “forager” and “hunter” to develop “an inclusive framework for understanding human culture”.
When asked about how presumed sex roles affect people on the show, Marketplace, Wall-Scheffler responded “I think it’s worrisome, and I might even say damaging, to think that you are doing a task because you have evolved to do that task, and therefore trying something new is going against your evolved purpose in life. Being flexible is your evolved purpose in life. That is what humans do. They are flexible to figure out how best to manage the health of their community. And sticking to some rigid notion of what that evolved duty is, will prevent us from serving all of the members of our community.”
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