New research suggests prehistoric women hunted big game alongside men

In prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies, it was believed that men hunted wild game, while women foraged and prepared food.

A recently-excavated burial of a woman hunter estimated to be nearly 9,000 years old in a site called Wilamaya Patjxa in what is now Peru may undermine this commonly-held understanding. Buried with a big-game hunting kit and tools to process hunted animals, researchers from the University of California, Davis found that she is likely one of the earliest female hunters ever found in the Americas.

And in effect, said lead author and assistant professor of anthropology at UC Davis Randy Haas, she “overturns the long-held 'man-the-hunter' hypothesis.”

Why is this hunter being buried with her tools so significant? Researchers said that the items they held in life – such as projectile points and a backed knife, in this hunter's case – are the ones they take with them into death. They confirmed her sex using a skeletal and dental protein analysis. 

But she wasn’t an anomaly. The team of researchers looked at published data on burials in North and South America from around the same periods – the late Pleistocene and early Holocene eras.

Of 429 individuals from 107 sites, 27 of them used big-game hunting tools – and of those 27, 11 were female. The sample, researchers found, led to "the conclusion that female participation in early big-game hunting was likely nontrivial.” The hunter found in the Peruvian site is also likely the oldest hunter burial ever found in the Americas, regardless of gender.

Haas, the study’s lead author, said in a statement that the findings disrupt even modern ideas of “gendered labor practices” and the inequality of pay and expectations of labor between men and women.

"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,’” he said.

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

The findings were published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances.

Follow Joshua Bote on Twitter: @joshua_bote.