Hunters and Gatherers: Prehistoric Women were Hunters Too

September 2023

By: Stacy Lagman

For the longest time, we believed that our prehistoric ancestors differed in roles when it came to their gender. It was often theorized that men were given the role of the hunter, who shoots down animals for food. And that women were assigned to be gatherers, who collected fruits and vegetables for sustenance. This hypothesis would go on to explain our psychological behaviors right now, like how women are better at multitasking thanks to this ancestral behavior.

In 1966, 75 anthropologists (70 of whom were men) held a symposium called “Man the Hunter” at the University of Chicago to address one of humanity’s grand questions: How did people live before agriculture? Scientists there presented the fact that women worked harder than men and that their plant food was significant in their survival. By the late 1970s, more research was done on hunter-gatherers with the issues of gender in mind. Thus, the myth of Man the Hunter soon declined.

Recent studies made more impactful steps in upending this year's old debate. A researcher, Wall-Scheffler, and her collaborators scoured through accounts from as far back as the 19th century through to the present day to analyze old evidence about the possibilities of women as hunters. Surprisingly, they found that 79% of the societies in which there is data found that women were hunting. And this isn’t just opportunistic hunting, they hunted purposefully with their own tools and favorite weapons. They also even hunt larger game commonly associated with the fact that only men could hunt the bigger animals.

Women back then even taught hunting practices to younger generations and often brought home animals to eat, regardless if they were mothers or not. And these practices don’t just apply to present-day groups who still practice the hunter-gatherer method. In 2020, a 9,000-year-old skeleton was discovered in the Andes mountains, buried alongside tools for hunting and dressing big game. At the time, the researchers thought that the skeleton was male due to the weapons, but morphological analysis and DNA testing proved that the remains belonged to a woman. Similarly, in 1963, archaeologists in Colorado unearthed a 10,000-year-old remains of a woman who was buried with a projectile point. A research team also concluded that big game hunting was gender-neutral between 14,000 and 8,000 years ago.

The research also claimed that 46% of the women in the studied societies hunted smaller game while 48% took down medium or larger game. The rest of the 4% reveal that they took down prey of all sizes. It was even revealed that they hunted in groups, which can consist of other women, children, or dogs. Though, evolutionary anthropologist Vivek Venkataraman advised caution with these studies as they might not apply to all foraging communities, past or present, but agreed with the sentiment that women do actually hunt and had a diversity of roles back then, and to back the claim that only men were hunters was false.

A newer study added more evidence to the fact that women were hunters too. Led by archaeologist Michelle Bebber, the atlatl, a handheld, rod-shaped device that employs leverage to launch a dart, once functioned as an “equalizer” that supports women’s role in prehistoric hunting. A theory suggests that atlatls provided inclusive participation of more people in hunting activities due to the fact that using them could achieve equal performance results among a diverse array of people. To prove this hypothesis, she made a study wherein there was a systematic assessment of 2,160 weapon launch events by 108 people, all novices, (many of which were Kent State students) who both used javelins (considered a predecessor to atlatls) and atlatls. The results remained consistent with her hypothesis. Not only does it increase the velocity of projectile weapons, but equalizes the velocity of female-launched and male-launched projectiles.

Since 2019, she conducted a test every semester wherein she made her students use the atlatl. The results? The women picked it up very easily and could launch darts as far as the males with little effort, while the men often became frustrated since the weapon did not function with their greater muscle strength. “Most importantly, there seems to be a growing consilience among different fields — archaeology, ethnography, and now modern experiments — that women were likely active and successful hunters of game, big and small,” Bebber said.

For as long as this myth has been alive, society has constantly shoved women down passive and maternal roles, often citing this claim to justify their actions. Misconceptions like these suggest the notion that women are inferior to men and only serve as natural caretakers. Furthermore, it defends the concept of toxic masculinity, wherein men are supposed to be violent and aggressive. Studies like these show that these assigned gender roles were not always the case and that women can actively participate in what is deemed to be masculine roles and can be as strong as their male counterparts. Kimberly Hamlin, a professor of history at Miami University, concludes, “It's really going to encourage us to call into question a lot of these ideas about what men and women are supposedly naturally like."

References

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Nurith Aizenman, 2023, July 1, “Men are hunters, women are gatherers. That was the assumption. A new study upends it.”, NPR, [ https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/07/01/1184749528/men-are-hunters-women-are-gatherers-that-was-the-assumption-a-new-study-upends-i ]

Mary Whitfill Roeloffs, 2023, June 8, “Women Hunt As Often As Men In Many Hunter-Gatherer Societies—Despite Age-Old Stereotypes, Study Finds”, Forbes, [ https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2023/06/28/women-hunt-as-much-as-men-in-many-hunter-gatherer-societies-despite-age-old-stereotypes-study-finds/amp/ ]

Mindy Weisberger, 2023, June 30, “Shattering the myth of men as hunters and women as gatherers”, CNN, [ https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/06/30/world/women-roles-hunter-gatherer-societies-scn/index.html ]

Katrina Miller, 2023, August 1, “Move Over, Men: Women Were Hunters, Too”, New York Times, [ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/science/anthropology-women-hunting.html ]

Vivek Venkataraman, 2021, March 11, “Women were successful big-game hunters, challenging beliefs about ancient gender roles”, University of Calgary, [ https://ucalgary.ca/news/women-were-successful-big-game-hunters-challenging-beliefs-about-ancient-gender-roles ]

Margaret Osborne, 2023, June 30, “Early Women Were Hunters, Not Just Gatherers, Study Suggests”, Smithsonian Magazine, [ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/early-women-were-hunters-not-just-gatherers-study-suggests-180982459/ ]

Kent State University, 2023, August 18, “Spear thrower weapon use by prehistoric females equalized the division of labor while hunting”, ScienceDaily, [ www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/08/230818135146.htm ]