Prehistoric hunters weren't all male. Women killed big game, new discovery suggests

[littlemissmartypants]

Prehistoric hunters weren't all male. Women killed big game, new discovery suggests
By Katie Hunt, CNN
Updated 2:00 PM EST, Wed November 04, 2020

(CNN)Men hunted. Women gathered. That has long been the prevailing view of our prehistoric ancestors.

But the discovery of a woman buried 9,000 years ago in the Andes Mountains with weapons and hunting tools, and an analysis of other burial sites in the Americas challenges this widely accepted division of labor in hunter-gatherer society.

The woman, thought to be between 17 and 19 years old when she died, was buried with items that suggested she hunted big-game animals by spear throwing -- stone projectile points for felling large animals, a knife and flakes of rock for removing internal organs, and tools for scraping and tanning hides.

"Labor practices among recent hunter-gatherer societies are highly gendered, which might lead some to believe that sexist inequalities in things like pay or rank are somehow 'natural,'" said lead study author Randy Haas, an assistant professor of anthropology at University of California, Davis, in a news release.

"But it's now clear that sexual division of labor was fundamentally different -- likely more equitable -- in our species' deep hunter-gatherer past."

snip...
Much more at the link.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/04/americas/prehistoric-female-hunter-burial-scn/index.html

I cross posted this here from the Anthropology group as an example of how women's "traditional roles" have mistakenly led to wrong conclusions when defining our actual roles in history. That is until now as evidenced by this discovery.

❤ lmsp