how many prehistoric women hunted alongside men? turns out, it was most of them

Summaries of ethnographic journals said something fundamentally different than the journals themselves.

We all know that before the dawn of civilization around 12,000 years ago, if not even earlier, men went out to hunt while women made the fire, cleaned the cave or hut, and gathered herbs and berries. Countless scientists not only insisted this is a well known and thoroughly researched fact, but spawned an entire subset of studies predicated on this axiom, studies best summarized as “damn, females sure do be shoppin’ but it’s in their nature because that’s science, you know?” Thousands of papers insisted that we can finally understand countless human behaviors by looking at everything we did through this very narrow lens despite the many problems with the results.

But while science may be led astray for a long time, it can’t stay in the dark forever. At some point, a researcher or two will ask if a foundational assumption is true and find a flaw that upends an entire field. You see where this is going. A group of researchers in the Pacific Northwest couldn’t help but notice that all the man-as-hunter and woman-as-caretaker paradigms were based on summaries of ethnographic journals going back to the 19th century. But what did the entries themselves have to say about how many women hunted? Turns out, quite a bit.

After reviewing 63 societies which lived as hunter-gatherers, they found very explicit records that in the overwhelming majority of them, women hunted. Their colleagues from Wayne State University also found that women also didn’t exactly hunt rabbits and wild birds at most, but large game alongside men. Even more interesting is that a review of prehistoric skeletons found with stone tools likely used for hunting shows that between a third and half of the bones in the Americas belonged to women. So, not every woman hunted, but it appears that many women did, and that some of the oldest women in hunter-gatherer tribes were also extremely skilled hunters.

All right, but why are we only hearing about this now if over a century and a half ago anthropologists clearly recorded that many women were hunting with men? Why did they write the opposite in their summaries? Perhaps the obvious answer is that any other report would’ve been dismissed as preposterous by the graybeards of the day who wouldn’t maintained that it’s impossible for “the fairer sex” to also bring home the mammoth, literally. In other cases, researchers would find skeletons belonging to women buried with sharp stone tools and immediately assumed they were cooking utensils because, well, the skeletons were female.

Now, obviously, some women stayed back to do the chores and raise the young, as did kids not old enough to start hunting. That would make perfect sense. But given evidence hiding in plain sight, we could venture to guess that women took turns on the chore front and may have even had help from the men. If we do away with the hardline patriarchal view of early human societies, we can look at the data and see evidence of a productive collaboration in more gender egalitarian societies where both men and women partnered on important tasks. Men seem to do slightly more hunting, women a bit more gathering and chores, but there were significant overlaps.

So, let’s pour one out for the “tradfluencers” who insist that men were ruthless and jacked providers and protectors while their admiring, doe-eyed mates dusted the cave, made dinner, and did all the childrearing, and it’s only nature we continue this arrangement. Turns out that we have concrete evidence that view is nothing more than the official narrative of 19th century ethnographers who wrote down one thing and said another. And if we want to be scientifically accurate about gender roles, we are going to have to view each other as capable partners who do our best if we work together rather than try to establish a gender pecking order.

See: Anderson, A., et al. (2023) The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts, PLOS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0287101

Hass, Randall, et al. (2020) Female hunters of the early Americas, Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd0310