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Walking quietly in the desert of the Lord Andes, Ancient hunter-gatherers capture a Vicuania herd. The hunters easily threw stones, killed some animals and scattered the rest. The Vicuas, the wild ancestors of the Alpacas, skilled and skillful hunters – both men and women – went to test their victories.
This fictional narrative is somewhat contrary to the accepted story of such hunter-gatherers: the ancients hunted big game, while his collected herbs and plants. According to a study published in November, a recent discovery of the burial of a 9,000-year-old blood hunter and analysis of other prey carcasses shows that the first female hunters in the ancient United States hunted as much as men. According to a study published in .4 in the journal The progress of science.
Randy Haas, assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said: “These findings reflect the idea that the gender roles we accept in today’s society – or are accepted by many – may not be as natural as some. they might think. Lead author Randy Haas said. Anthropology at the University of California, Davis.
Related: In the photos: An ancient European hunter-gatherer
In 2013, Haas was working on a separate excavation in the Andes when a local in the southern Peruvian community of Niti, near Mullah Fasiri, reported that hundreds of old stone tools were scattered here. Five years later, with funding and support from locals, Haas and his team began excavating the site, known as Vilamaya Patjaksa.
In 2018, researchers found six human corpses in Vilamya Patjexa (they did more research later in 2019). Two of the six burials also had hunting tools, but one was particularly interesting.
Haas told Live Science that in the sixth morgue, some 9,000 years ago, “we started discovering this very rich artistic assemblage” that included bullet tips and a hunting tool kit with bows. The burial is believed to have belonged to a hunter-gatherer who died at the age of 17 and 19, based on a dental development test. As the digging continues, “People started speculating, wow, he must have been a great hunter, a very important person in the community,” Haas said.
The prejudices that color history
James Watson, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona and a co-author of the study, was the first to suggest he was not a man. Watson examined the hunter-gatherer bones and said that because they were smaller than others found in the area, the skeleton may have been a female. In fact, a detailed analysis of Protein The young hunter’s teeth confirmed he was a sherat.
But then Haas and his team began to wonder: Is this the only hunter-gatherer or is it part of the broader behavior among Native Americans? To find out, they added literature for additional hunter-gatherer burial reports in recent times. Pleistocene (Which ended about 11,700 years ago) and soon Holocene (Which started about 12,000 to 11,500 years ago.)
The team identified 429 skeletons from 107 ancient burial sites in the United States; Of these individuals, 27 – 11 female rats (including recently discovered rats) and 15 male rats – were buried with large game hunting tools. Analysis of other data suggested that between 30% and 50% of these populations were female predators. “What we see is that the dead distances of females and males are equally likely to be correlated with large game hunting tools,” Haas said.
Related: Photo: Human skeleton sheds light on early Americans
“The authors strongly argue that the troubled skeleton was probably a major game hunter and that such findings are not entirely unusual in the indigenous population,” said Marin Pilod, associate professor in the university’s anthropology department. , Which were not part of this study. “If the same artistic skill were attributed to the male skeleton, there would be no doubt that the man was a hunter.”
“Many cultures don’t and still don’t have gender binaries,” Piloud told Live Science. “When we move away from our gender bias, we can look at statistics in a potentially more culturally accurate way.”
It is unclear whether hunters in other parts of the world regularly participate in hunting, but such discoveries can be found everywhere, he said. He added that it would be interesting to see how this female rat’s diet compares to other feeds on the site or similar sites to determine if she ate the same food as other males or other females.
“This study will help convince people that women are involved in hunting big game,” said Kathleen Sterling, an associate professor of anthropology at Binghamton University in New York who was not part of the study. .
Indeed, the methods of hunting and the size of social groups at the time meant that we had to accept all of this, because most children and adults had to be performed on herds or in nets, or “the same”. To set fire to swarm kidnapping projects in the direction, “Sterling told LiveScience.
Age was probably more important than gender when it came to who hunted in these societies, but “our gender rules are so strong that not everyone will believe it,” he said.
However, if a person is buried with hunting tools, it doesn’t necessarily mean the person was a hunter, it means their society saw fit to bury things with them, Sterling said. . But when the means of hunting are found in the corpses of men, they are generally considered prey. So “we have to make the same assumptions about the hunting tools buried with the women until we have a good reason to say more,” he added.
Originally published in Live Science.
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