Discovery of Female Hunter-Gatherers Question Gender Role Hypotheses

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Until now, it was generally agreed by the scientific and historical communities that early male hunter-gatherers hunted animals and the women gathered herbs, fruits, vegetables, and reared the children.

However, in 2018, the discovery of the burial site of a 9000-year-old woman in the Andes Mountains, Peru, by Dr. Randall Haas and his team started to shed some doubt on that hypothesis. Indeed, the woman was buried with an impressive array of twenty-four stone tools that an ancient hunter would need to take down big prey.

The grave goods (items buried with the dead) were to be used by the deceased in the afterlife; therefore, their favourite foods or everyday objects were left with them. Often, social status played a role in what was left.

When looking at more recent hunter-gatherer societies, the repartition of the daily tasks was very sexualized. One could think that sexual inequalities might have been seen as natural. But this discovery provides a commencement of proof that tends to show that gender roles between men and women were more equal in our distant past.

However, this could be an isolated case.

The only way for the palaeontologists to be sure was for them to analyze the remains of 429 individuals in 107 sites linked to the same time frame as the Andes huntress. The results from the study were undeniable: 30% to 50% of hunters were probably biologically female.

In a society that presumably had a more binary gender role distribution of daily tasks, age was probably more important than gender insofar as criteria to be allowed to hunt

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