The Americas’ first big game hunters were women, the researchers suggest

For centuries, historians and scientists have mostly agreed that when early human groups searched for food, men hunted and women congregated. However, a 9,000-year-old huntress burial in the South American Andes reveals a different story, according to new research conducted at the University of California, Davis.

“An archaeological discovery and analysis of early burial practices overturn the long-standing” man-hunter “hypothesis,” said Randy Haas, assistant professor of anthropology and lead author of the study, “Female Hunters of the Early Americas “. It was published today in Advances in science.

“We believe these findings are particularly timely in light of contemporary conversations about gender work practices and inequality,” he added. “Work practices among recent hunter-gatherer societies are highly gendered, which may lead some to believe that sexist inequalities in things like pay or rank are somewhat ‘natural.’ the sexual division of labor was fundamentally different, probably more equitable, in the deep past of hunter-gatherers of our kind. “

In 2018, during archaeological excavations at a high-altitude site called Wilamaya Patjxa in present-day Peru, researchers found an early burial that contained a hunting tool kit with bullet tips and animal crafting tools. Objects that accompany people in death tend to be those that accompanied them in life, the researchers said. It was determined that the hunter was likely a woman based on the findings of the team’s osteologist, James Watson of the University of Arizona. Watson’s gender estimate was later confirmed by dental protein analysis conducted by UC postdoctoral researcher Davis Tammy Buonasera and adjunct associate professor Glendon Parker.

Revealing a larger pattern

The surprising discovery of one of the earliest huntress burials led the team to wonder if she was part of a larger model of huntresses or simply a single huntress. Looking at published records of the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene across North and South America, the researchers identified 429 individuals from 107 sites. Of these, 27 individuals were associated with large game hunting tools: 11 were female and 15 were male. The sample was sufficient to “justify the conclusion that women’s participation in the initiation of big game hunting was probably nontrivial,” the researchers said. Furthermore, the analysis identified the huntress Wilamaya Patjxa as the first burial of hunters in the Americas.

Statistical analysis shows that somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of the hunters in these populations were women, the study says. This level of participation is in stark contrast to recent hunter-gatherers and even agricultural and capitalist societies, where hunting is a distinctly male activity with low levels of female participation, certainly less than 30 percent, Haas explained.

The study was conducted in collaboration with multiple UC Davis laboratories. Parker, a forensic expert in the Department of Environmental Toxicology, helped determine gender through a proteomics technique he recently developed. In Professor Jelmer Eerkens’ laboratory, Jenny Chen, a university researcher at the time of the study, discovered the distinct isotopic signature of meat-in-the-bone consumption, further supporting the conclusion that Wilamaya Patjxa’s female was a hunter.

While the research answers an old question about the sexual division of labor in human societies, it also raises new ones. The team now wants to understand how the sexual division of labor and its consequences at different times and places have changed among hunter-gatherer populations in the Americas.