It Wasn't Just Men: Women Were Expert Hunters Too, Reveals 9000 Year Old Burials

Whenever we hear the word hunting the first image that comes to the minds of most people is a man, probably on a horse with a bow in his hand -- it is always a man, isn’t it? That’s how movies and our history have taught us -- men are the hunters and women are the gatherers.?

However, a new discovery has revealed that it wasn’t just men who hunted. Women belonged in the hunting clan too.

Matthew Verdolivo/UC Davis IET Academic Technology Services

This is according to a discovery made during excavations at Wilamaya Patjxa (present-day Peru) back in 2018. The excavations revealed the burial site of a 17-19-year-old woman whose body was found with artefacts like stone projectile points, knife as well as tools for gutting and scraping an animal. The woman’s bones revealed evidence that she was a meat consumer.

Anthropologist Randy Haas of the University of California, Davis, who is also one of the authors of the study explains, “Our findings have made me rethink the most basic organizational structure of ancient hunter-gatherer groups. Among historic and contemporary hunter-gatherers, it is almost always the case that males are the hunters and females are the gatherers.”

He added, “Because of this – and likely because of sexist assumptions about division of labour in western society – archaeological findings of females with hunting tools just didn't fit prevailing worldviews. It took a strong case to help us recognize that the archaeological pattern indicated actual female hunting behaviour.”

Randal Hass

With this discovery, researchers set off an investigation to find if this case was one-off or whether there were more women, hunters, in that time period. Looking at records of burials from Pleistocene and early Holocene burials that were dug up in North and South America, they found 429 individuals buried across 107 burial sites. From these 27 were buried along with hunting tools and 11 of them were in fact, women.?

According to researchers, this sample is sufficient to come to a conclusion that females actively participated in big-game hunting during that era and it isn’t trivial at all.