![]() Hunting would likely require as many able-bodied adults as possible to increase safety and efficiency-regardless of their biological sex. When researchers have found signs of this discrepancy in the past, Geller says, “usually they don’t say anything, as if ignoring the evidence will make it go away.” “And because it is commonsensical, they then have a hard time explaining why female-bodied individuals also bear the skeletal markers of hunting or have hunting tool kits as grave goods.” “With few exceptions, the researchers who study hunting and gathering groups-regardless of which continent they work on-presume that a sexual division of labor was universal and rigid,” she says. ![]() For decades, Geller says, some archaeologists have argued that the simple view of male hunters and female gatherers is in fact an oversimplification. Yet inferences from present-day hunter-gatherers have limits. “You can’t just stop in the middle of stalking a deer in order to nurse a crying baby,” Hill says via email. This assumption comes from studies of modern hunter-gatherers, where men more frequently are responsible for the hunt while women bear the most responsibility for caring for children, says Arizona State University’s Kim Hill, who specializes in human evolutionary anthropology and was not part of the study team. The 2018 discovery does pose a challenge to gender binaries commonly assumed for our early ancestors: Men acted as hunters, women acted as gatherers. In other words, they can’t say whether the individual lived their life 9,000 years ago in a way that would identify them within their society as a woman. Importantly, the team cannot know the individual’s gender identity, but rather only biological sex ( which like gender doesn’t always exist on a binary). To confirm, they analyzed a protein that forms tooth enamel and is linked to sex. “I thought yeah, that makes sense with my understanding of the world.” Back in the lab, however, close inspection of the bones suggested the physiology of a biological woman. “I’m as guilty as anyone,” says Haas, who has been working in the region since 2008. In initial discussions about the toolkit, the researchers presumed the owner was male, perhaps a prominent figure of society, or even a chief of the group. Scattered around the site were fragments of the bones of animals including ancient llama relatives and deer. Among them: projectile points for taking down a large mammal hefty rocks likely for cracking bones or stripping hides small, rounded stony bits for scraping fat from pelts tiny flakes with extra sharp edges that could have chopped the meat and nodules of red ocher that could help preserve the hides. When archaeologists excavated the burial, they found a colorful array of 24 stone tools. “It’s just a matter of how the researchers interpret it.” Whose tools? ![]() While the new study provides a strong argument that the individual in Peru was a female who hunted, plenty of other evidence has long been lying in plain sight, says Pamela Geller, an archaeologist at the University of Miami who is not part of the study team. But for decades, some scholars have argued that these “traditional” roles-documented by anthropologists studying hunter-gatherer groups across the globe since the 19th century-don’t necessarily stretch into our deep past. The common assumption was that prehistoric men hunted while women gathered and reared their young. This new study is the latest twist in a decades-long debate about gender roles among early hunter-gather societies. The Haas team’s find was followed by a review of previously studied burials of similar age throughout the Americas-and it revealed that between 30 and 50 percent of big game hunters could have been biologically female. What's more, this ancient female hunter was likely not an anomaly, according to a study published today in Science Advances. "He must have been a really great hunter, a really important person in society"-Haas says that’s what he and his team were thinking at the time.īut further analysis revealed a surprise: the remains found alongside the toolkit were from a biological female. Along with the bones of what appeared to be a human adult was an impressive-and extensive-kit of stone tools an ancient hunter would need to take down big game, from engaging the hunt to preparing the hide. ![]() Randall Haas, an archaeologist at University of California, Davis, recalls the moment in 2018 when his team of researchers gathered around the excavated burial of an individual lain to rest in the Andes Mountains of Peru some 9,000 years ago.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |