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That discovery was particularly exciting. One of his collaborators kept finding bullet points, Dr. Haas said, and then a collection of points and other stone tools, with the remains of a skeleton. The excavator group was thrilled, he said, and the gist of the conversation was, “Oh, he must have been a great boss. He was a great hunter. “
As it turned out, the buried person, now called the scientific identifier WMP6, was a woman, around 17-19 years old. Her bones were lighter than expected from a male, and a study of proteins in tooth enamel, a relatively new technique for identifying sex, showed that she was definitely a woman.
Dr. Haas then examined 429 burials in the Americas from about 14,000 to 8,000 years ago and identified 27 individuals whose sex had been determined who were found with large hunting gear. Eleven were female and 16 were male. He and his authors acknowledged that the data was not conclusive for these burials and that the only individual who was undeniably female and a hunter was the person of Wilamaya Patjxa. But, Dr Haas said, the preponderance of evidence still led to the conclusion that females were about 30-50 percent of big game hunters.
This conclusion is what Dr. Kelly found unfounded. Two of the burials were of newborn babies, which Dr. Haas and his collaborators described as being buried with artifacts that suggested they would be hunters. And he warned of reading too much in the burials. “The interpretation of the grave goods, as a cultural, symbolic act, is not simple or direct.”
She also criticized the interpretation of the other skeletons and said: “If we accept WMP6 as the only female hunter in the sample, then the most likely prevalence of hunters is 10%. I wouldn’t be surprised. “
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