The stereotype that, in hunter-gatherer societies, men hunted and women gathered is wrong, according to research that has analyzed data from 63 communities on five continents. The results reveal that, in most hunter-gatherer societies, women actively participate in the hunting of animals of any size both before and after they are mothers.
“Women hunt with a variety of companions, including their husbands, other women, children and dogs, as well as hunting alone,” write the authors of the research, from Seattle Pacific University (USA), in Plos One, where today they present their data. “They don’t just prepare to hunt and chase the prey; In addition, they are skilled in hunting.
The research refutes the “Man the Hunter” paradigm, which has dominated anthropology and influenced other social sciences since a symposium under the title was held in Chicago in 1966.
Based on this paradigm, it has been argued (or it has been accepted without arguing) that women are in charge of most of the tasks related to childcare, that they are compatible with gathering plants and that they favor attitudes traditionally considered as feminine. Men, on the contrary, would have been in charge of hunting activities that provide protein to the community, which would have favored more aggressive characters.
But archaeological finds made in recent years have revealed unexpected cases of female hunters. In the Peruvian Andes, a 9,000-year-old tomb was discovered with the remains of a woman buried along with hunting tools. The finding was considered so rare that it was published in the journal Science Advances in 2020.
At a Viking site in Sweden, the remains of a person with weapons found were attributed to a man until a genomic analysis revealed in 2017 that it was a woman.
In a burial from 2,500 years ago of the nomadic community of the Scythians, in the south of Russia, the remains of four women were found, also with weapons.
To find out if these cases are exceptions, or if they respond to a common pattern in nomadic communities, the anthropologists from Seattle Pacific University have reviewed all the available information on hunting practices in hunter-gatherer societies. They have turned to the D-Place ethnographic database, which lists 391 hunter-gatherer communities from around the world, and found detailed information on hunting practices in 63 of them.
Oceania, with 21 communities, is the most represented continent, followed by North America (19), Africa (12), South America (6) and Asia (5).
A systematic analysis of these 63 communities shows that hunting practices vary according to the needs of each group. In societies where hunting is the main subsistence activity, women are always involved in it. Overall, women hunt regularly in 79% of the communities analyzed.
“It is logical to think that not only women could hunt, but also men could gather,” says Carles Lalueza-Fox, a researcher at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona and author of the book Inequality: a genetic history (Ed. Crítica, 2023 ).
In one third of the 45 communities where there is information on the size of animals hunted, women are mainly involved in hunting large animals. In the other two thirds, the main hunting activity of women corresponds to medium and small animals.
The researchers have carried out linguistic analyzes to verify the participation of women in hunting activities in each community. They have thus been able to verify that women go hunting, and rule out that women accompany hunters.
They have also discovered that, in half of the societies analyzed for which there is data, it is common for mothers to go hunting accompanied by their children. According to the authors of the research, led by Cara Wall-Scheffler, this data refutes “the idea that women are held back by caring for their children and therefore cannot hunt.”
The researchers recall in Plos One that the erroneous stereotype of the hunter man and the gatherer woman has conditioned the interpretations of archaeological finds for more than half a century, to the point that the human remains found together with weapons have been systematically considered as masculine . Therefore, they urge to “re-evaluate the archaeological evidence, re-examine the ethnographic evidence, question the dichotomy between hunting and gathering, and deconstruct the general narrative of the hunting man.”
