A woman’s place? Hunting with spears, study the finds

WASHINGTON – A new study says a woman’s home may never have been her home.

Scientists said Wednesday they discovered the 9,000-year-old remains of a young woman in the Peruvian Andes along with a well-stocked large hunting tool kit.

Based on a further analysis of 27 people in burial sites with similar tools, a team led by Randall Haas at the University of California, Davis concluded that between 30 and 50 percent of hunters in the Americas during this period they could be women.

The article, published in the journal Science Advances, contradicts the prevailing idea that in hunter-gatherer societies, hunters were mainly men and the gatherers were mainly women.

“I think it tells us that for at least part of human prehistory, that assumption was inaccurate,” Haas told AFP.

He added that the findings “highlight the disparities in today’s working practices, in terms of things like gender pay gaps, titles and positions. The results really underscore that there may be nothing” natural “about these disparities.”

The skeletal remains of six people, including two hunters, were discovered in 2018 by Haas and members of the local Mulla Fasiri community at Wilamaya Patjxa, an important archaeological site in the Peruvian plateau.

Analyzes of the hunters’ bone structure and biological molecules called peptides in tooth enamel allowed scientists to identify one as a 17-19 year old woman and the second as a 25-30 year old male.

Excavating the teen’s burial site was particularly “interesting and exciting” for the team, Haas said.

While digging, they discovered a number of tools for hunting and processing animals that provided clear evidence of her status as a hunter.

These included stone bullet points for taking down large animals, a knife and rock flakes to remove internal organs, and tools for scraping and tanning hides.

The artifacts were likely put together in a perishable container such as a leather bag.

According to the newspaper, the teenager, nicknamed “WMP6” by scientists, used a weapon called “atlatl”, a lever to throw spears that allowed our ancient ancestors to throw spears much farther.

Its main prey at the time would have been species such as the vicuna, a wild ancestor of the alpaca and the Andean deer.

– Not an anomaly –

To find out if the huntress was an anomaly or one of many of her time, the researchers conducted a review of 429 individuals buried at 107 sites in the Americas some 17,000 to 4,000 years ago.

Of these, they found 27 individuals whose sex had been reliably determined and who had been buried along with large game hunting tools, and found that 16 were male and 11 female.

‘The sample is sufficient to justify the conclusion that women’s participation in the initiation of big game hunting was likely nontrivial,’ the team wrote, using a statistical model to estimate that between 30-50% of hunters in these society were women.

The new study adds to a body of literature that supports “the contention that modern gender constructs often do not reflect those of the past,” the team wrote.

This includes 2017 confirmation of a Viking warrior woman through a genetic study.

A few questions remain, such as why many modern hunter-gatherer societies exhibit sexual bias in hunting activities.

Theories include that they may have been influenced by strangers.

Or perhaps the atlatl tool used by WMP6 and her contemporaries had a less steep learning curve than the technologies that followed it, making it possible to achieve competence in childhood before girls reached sexual maturity and had to devote their time to learning. childcare and education.

Conversely, mastering the bow and arrow requires continuous practice until adolescence.

Haas said he hoped his article could spur further research to find out if there were hunters in other parts of the world at the time.