In the ancient Americas, female big-game hunters were common

August 26, 2021 4:49 AM

"Haas then looked at hundreds of records of burials across North and South America, and pulled examples where biological sex had been determined and big-game hunting tools were present with the remains. He found an almost equal amount of females as males represented, suggesting females were more likely to be hunters than previously thought."
posted by clawsoon (29 comments total)

The link is not working for me.
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 4:57 AM on August 26, 2021

Perhaps this? (and also this for good measure).
posted by datawrangler at 5:04 AM on August 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

there's a few numbers missing off the end of the url

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/nov-14-covid-vaccine-immune-durability-wallabies-in-the-uk-ancient-female-hunters-and-more-1.5799632/in-the-ancient-americas-female-big-game-hunters-were-common-1.5799643
posted by Clowder of bats at 5:05 AM on August 26, 2021

Mod note: Updated the link, carry on.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 5:13 AM on August 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

We need to talk about her outfit.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 6:37 AM on August 26, 2021 [7 favorites]

My name is Aloy, and I approved this FPP.
posted by The Bellman at 6:56 AM on August 26, 2021 [5 favorites]

It's amazing that they make the leap to considering females might have been hunters without considering gender isn't genetic or even binary.
posted by Mitheral at 8:00 AM on August 26, 2021 [7 favorites]

It's important to know that the concept of gendered grave goods comes via Victorians digging in Greece and is now seen as problematic given its origins and how it became accepted as a standard thing. It's not without it's complications, especially for groups who don't have the standards for gender of, say, the Athenians. It turns out people can get buried with all sorts of high valued items, not just the things a certain group of people associate with their gender.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 8:25 AM on August 26, 2021 [14 favorites]

He found that between 30-50% of the burials were genetically female, which would be rather high for them to all be trans or nonbinary. It seems more likely that hunting was not a gendered activity in those societies.
posted by LouCPurr at 8:27 AM on August 26, 2021 [13 favorites]

The article is a bit sparse. I encourage people to click through to the audio interview ("Quirks and Quarks 8:28") which has more substance. (I still can't get the Science Advances link to load)

A point towards the end suggests these results may be specific to a time before work specialization became common in the Americas (relatively few humans and relatively abundant big game meant most everyone hunted big game and required little else).
posted by Press Butt.on to Check at 8:58 AM on August 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

It seems more likely that hunting was not a gendered activity in those societies.

I don't know who would have thought they were gendered activities except maybe looking at sexual dimorphism of big apes and assuming humans had the same body mass differentiation. The idea that women are primarily caretakers seem to me a rather modern, classist notion. I don't know how this idea came about. Even if early man wanted women to not work -- I don't know if any hunter-gatherer society could feasibly have 30-50% of the labor force essentially not hunting-gathering.
posted by geoff. at 9:13 AM on August 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

Until recently, the people unearthing and interpreting archeological sites were mostly white men from the upper classes of the Anglosphere, and they definitely projected their own biases onto what they found.
posted by LouCPurr at 9:57 AM on August 26, 2021 [12 favorites]

The idea that women are primarily caretakers seem to me a rather modern, classist notion. I don't know how this idea came about. Even if early man wanted women to not work -- I don't know if any hunter-gatherer society could feasibly have 30-50% of the labor force essentially not hunting-gathering.

1. Caretaking is work.

2. My understanding was that men were thought to be the hunters, and women were thought to be the gatherers.
posted by NotLost at 10:03 AM on August 26, 2021 [6 favorites]

Do we know that people were buried with only their own things?

The idea that women are primarily caretakers seem to me a rather modern, classist notion. I don't know how this idea came about. Even if early man wanted women to not work -- I don't know if any hunter-gatherer society could feasibly have 30-50% of the labor force essentially not hunting-gatherin

Yes, it's definitely never been the case that most women didn't work for economic gain. The second sentence seems like a bit of an anachronism too. If women weren't' frequently big game hunters it doesn't follow from that that "men wanted women not to work" or that 30-50% of the labour force was essentially not hunter gathering. What I was taught about hunter-gatherer societies as an undergrad was that they thought (based on modern hunter gatherer societies) that women did primarily gathering AND that even though meat is so much more calorie-dense than plant-matter, that women's gathering provided 90% of the community's calories because gathering was much more reliable/consistent. Maybe that division of labour didn't hold for these hunter-gatherers in the early americas, who knows, but there's definitely never been any implication that women didn't work for economic gain.

Oh, a couple of other interessting htings I remember learning (and again, I have no idea how well this research has held up over time) was that people worked on average 40 hours a week in hunter-gatherer societies, so way less than people work now. And also that women had much greater control over their product than men -- basically there were rules about how hunted meat was distributed, so if you hunted something you just had to give it to whomever it was owed. But gathered food would go to whomever the person who gathered chose to give it, so women decided for themselves how to distribute the food they collected (which represented 90% of the community's calories, so don't piss them off). I have no idea how they would know this (the rules business) about pre-modern societies. That part seems iffy for sure.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:03 AM on August 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

I don't know who would have thought they were gendered activities

I believe this is a widespread and generally consistent finding based on study of existing hunter-gatherer societies. According to the first sentence of the original article referenced in the post: "Sexual division of labor with females as gatherers and males as hunters is a major empirical regularity of hunter-gatherer ethnography, suggesting an ancestral behavioral pattern."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 10:23 AM on August 26, 2021 [7 favorites]

I am reminded of this piece from previously.
posted by MtDewd at 10:24 AM on August 26, 2021

If only I had a penguin...: What I was taught about hunter-gatherer societies as an undergrad was that they thought (based on modern hunter gatherer societies) that women did primarily gathering

As I understand it, one difficulty in extrapolating from modern hunter-gatherers to prehistory is that modern hunter-gatherers virtually all live on marginal land which can't support many humans or animals. You aren't going to be able to say much about hunter-gatherers living in the richly productive land of the Fertile Crescent before agriculture, or the first hunter-gatherers in the Americas surrounded by big game that had never seen humans before, based on the current habits of the desert-dwelling Khoisan.
posted by clawsoon at 10:39 AM on August 26, 2021 [10 favorites]

Logically, it doesn't make sense to split up a society in a gendered way when you're talking the practical matter of getting food. Getting enough calories in a hunter-gatherer society where you live outside and have nothing processed and eat only seasonally is a difficult enough thing to do. If I were living like that, I would want the people with the most aptitude and ability to be getting the calories regularly, regardless of who it is.

It doesn't make sense to differentiate by gender or sex unless you have a very strong taboo for some reason. What I've heard is that a lot of that comes in later, when agriculture produces a surplus and it's not all hands on deck any more. It could also have changed throughout life-- maybe the women did more gathering if they were taking care of small children, and got back to big game hunting as their children were more independent, much how it works with moms who work outside the home now. Maybe they set up a daycare in the village and went back out ASAP. Probably individual groups of people had very individual solutions. There's a lot we can't know without a time machine but it sure is fun to speculate.
posted by blnkfrnk at 10:44 AM on August 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

Another thing they talk about in the interview which is interesting: The skeleton which started this off was of a 17-19 year old.
posted by clawsoon at 10:47 AM on August 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

Very nice overview here from a real expert. Some highlights copied below, but if you've read this far in the comments, the full article is surely worth a few minutes of your time.

"the notion that men and women in ancient societies had strictly defined roles... that theory died a well-deserved death decades ago.

...subsequent research has affirmed a simple division of labour among hunter-gatherers: men mostly hunt and women mostly gather.

But it is a mistake to conflate this pattern of “most hunters are men” among hunter-gatherers with the myth of “Man the Hunter”.

...women are not bound by biology to gather, nor men to hunt. In fact, several accounts of women’s hunting in foraging societies had emerged by the mid-1980s.

One prominent explanation...is that the demands of hunting conflict with the provision of child care.

...economic considerations show that it pays to specialise: modest comparative advantages – speed and strength, and the incompatibilities posed by child care – can lead to divisions of labour that increase overall food acquisition by the group.

Hunting has great cultural significance, but women’s knowledge of plant distributions is crucial for collective decisions like moving camp. The Batek conceive of themselves as a co-operative and interdependent group in which each person makes a unique and important contribution toward a communal goal.

...the archaeological findings from Peru accord well with current knowledge about how and why men and women divide labour among hunter-gatherers."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 10:59 AM on August 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

If we've known this for decades, why do I still see so many dumb "because men evolved to hunt" evo-psych takes?
posted by clawsoon at 11:34 AM on August 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

^ I imagine this is a rhetorical question
posted by elkevelvet at 12:04 PM on August 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

Yes, historically, (white male) evolutionary biologists studying both people and other primates dismissed evidence that didn't fit their preconceptions of gender in culture. Here's a nice summary by Medin, Lee, and Bang from a Scientific American issue on the importance of diversity in science for exactly this reason. Sarah Hrdy, among others, has done a ton of work on this and in reframing our understanding of people and other primates by actually watching everyone, not just the "alpha males".
posted by hydropsyche at 1:23 PM on August 26, 2021 [6 favorites]

On top of all the other shit here, I feel like we have this weird tendency to assume that unindustrialized people have no fucking nuance.

Like, yeah, gestation and nursing introduce all sorts of needs and compromises into your life. You just can't avoid having them affect your life script in some way. (And I know, not all women, but women who don't gestate or nurse — whether cis or trans or whatever — often aspire to the same life scripts, or get pressured into them, or end up following them for a complicated mix of reasons. I'm trans, I know.)

But we see industrialized folks, even incredibly conservative ones, handling those needs and compromises in all kinds of nuanced ways. Even the most conservative modern cities have always had women factory workers and women in the underground economy and women doing all kinds of physically risky un-kid-safe things! And all this even though industrialization creates intense pressure towards total standardization! Even though our employers and laws wanted all women to be interchangeable!

And somehow, after seeing that nuance among ourselves, still we assume that all unindustrialized people, at all times and places, everywhere, would have handled the same stuff with a blunt, rigid Man Hunt Woman Gather/Man Farm Woman Spin binary? I'm sure some of them did! People love binaries! But all? Everywhere? Fuck off!
posted by nebulawindphone at 2:41 PM on August 26, 2021 [10 favorites]

"Sexual division of labor with females as gatherers and males as hunters is a major empirical regularity of hunter-gatherer ethnography, suggesting an ancestral behavioral pattern."

I think this is just a rhetorical way of showing how strongly the belief is held despite the evidence. The compatibility of hunting and mothering among the agta hunter-gatherers of the Philippines, published in 1976, lists Mbuti, Tiwi, Ojibwa, Ainu, Western Australian Desert Aborigines, and Matses societies as having women who participate in hunting activities. The authors say, "But the rule that women do not hunt is not regarded as discounted by such evidence." Given they're rejecting the hypothesis that women do not hunt, I feel they're implying that anthropologists have trouble accepting evidence that runs counter to their preconceptions. Well... certain anthropologists.
posted by Mister Cheese at 2:53 PM on August 26, 2021 [4 favorites]

I often wonder if you had a time machine how far back you'd have to go before the bullshit was completely entrenched. That's how far back I'd go. (I claim infinity-proof)
posted by bleep at 4:12 PM on August 26, 2021

He found that between 30-50% of the burials were genetically female, which would be rather high for them to all be trans or nonbinary. It seems more likely that hunting was not a gendered activity in those societies.

Sorry, didn't mean to imply otherwise. My comment was more "You just come off of one gratuitous assumption that anyone should have questioned in the first place so why are you making another gratuitous assumption that anyone whose paying attention should think is wrong?" That assumption being so called genetic female markers equating to a female gender of all people with those markers.
posted by Mitheral at 7:32 PM on August 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

I've casually read a lot of older accounts of hunter-gatherer societies, and in retrospect it's obvious that language and cultural issues meant that the authors' information was almost always obtained through one or two local sources. That is, the author was the guest of someone bilingual, and things like age, gender, and moiety meant that they couldn't talk to most other locals even if they knew the language. Since most of these researchers were male, it was probably inevitable that women's contributions often faded into the background, while the real or potential contributions of their interlocutors was emphasised.

E.g., you'll have a lengthy description of a goanna hunt, but where the rest of the locals' food was sourced is either anonymous ("grains ground and formed into a cake") or dismissed with a sentence ("while the women gathered yams"). Many of these accounts came from semi-amateurs, and I would hope they do better today, but this background probably continues to distort people's thinking.
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:24 PM on August 26, 2021 [6 favorites]

I think, tho, in thinking about what people get buried with you have to factor in what they value, as that is what you usually bury with people traditionally (if you do this at all - some societies destroy the objects as part of death ritual). It's not necessarily something of personal significance, but a way to say this person was valued enough by us that we are showing that via this means of taking something important and removing it from our use permanently. Regardless of whether the person was a hunter, then, they might get buried with bows, etc, if that was an important thing for the group.

Either way this sort of burial is a pretty good sign that whatever gender groups were doing in society as groups (or not), they were being equally honored and valued and this was important to show in death. But burials are really hard to interpret without other evidence from the group or related ones.

(This is more a caveat for some archaeologists than others, because you can get mad arguments from the decoration on things like lamps as solid evidence of the buried person's actual profession without checking to see if the body shows the effects of that profession.)
posted by lesbiassparrow at 6:52 AM on August 28, 2021 [2 favorites]