Prehistoric women also hunted large animals

A girl between 17 and 19 years old buried about 8,000 years ago with her weapons shows that hunting large animals was not only a matter of prehistoric men.

After their discovery, their authors have reviewed another hundred burials, finding that more than a third of the hunters were actually hunters.

These results challenge the dominant idea that in early human communities there was already a gender division of labor.

In 2018, American and Peruvian archaeologists excavated a series of burials at 3,925 meters high, in the Puno district, in the Peruvian Andes.

In one of the tombs, next to a poorly preserved body there were about twenty carved stones.

Four of the artifacts were sharp points, probably used in spears, small spears propelled by a kind of tube.

There were also flint knives and other sharp objects.

They also found ocher that, apart from using it as a pigment, served to heal the skins.

They were so close together that scientists believe they were inside a backpack.

A short distance away were the remains of tarucas (an Andean deer) and vicuñas.

The most striking thing came later: from the analysis of the bones, they assumed that it was a woman, a hunter.

“We first look at the bone structure of the individual.

Since women and men have slight bone differences, sex can be estimated with a few measurements.

This works when the skeletal remains are well preserved, ”says University of California Davis anthropologist and lead author of the study Randy Haas.

But at the Wilamaya Patjxa site, only part of the skull, teeth and fragments of a femur and a tibia remained.

From the collagen extracted from these bones they were able to determine the date of death: 8008 years ago, 16 years above or below.

Due to the development of the teeth, they believe that it would be between 17 and 19 years old.

But few clues about the genre.

The presence of a protein in tooth enamel makes it possible to determine the sex of people buried millennia ago

They confirmed it was a woman using a sophisticated biomolecular technique developed last year called analysis for amelogenin, a protein found in tooth enamel.

"It turns out that these proteins are linked to sex and, therefore, it is possible to estimate it from them with a high degree of precision," explains Haas, whose work has just been published in the scientific journal

.

Knowing if he was a hunter or a hunter is important.

The dominant theory among anthropologists and ethnographers is that in ancient communities that depended on hunting and gathering there was a marked gender division of labor: men hunted and women gathered.

But there are hardly any clues to this division of tasks in the archaeological sites.

The main evidence is circumstantial: In today's human groups that are still hunters and gatherers, the male is the exclusive hunter.

Starting from this single hunter, Haas and his colleagues reviewed studies of 107 other American burials with remains of 429 individuals dated between 12,700 years ago and 7,800 years ago.

27 of those buried rested next to their hunting weapons.

And 11 of them were women.

Extrapolating, this would mean that more than a third of prehistoric hunters were actually hunters, at least in America.

"The theory of man, the hunter, is not confirmed by archaeological data, only by ethnographic data", comments the archaeologist from Binghamton University (USA) Kathleen Sterling.

"Traditionally, hunting has been considered as more prestigious, demanding and dangerous than gathering and these are traits that we have stereotypically associated as men's activities," adds this researcher not related to the current study.

This expert in prehistoric lithic technology recalls that “the larger game, such as reindeer or bison, did not depend on strength or skill, but on numbers: the forms used in the Pleistocene consisted of pushing herds towards cliffs, jumps or traps, or throwing spears at herds that would not directly kill the animals, but would leave them wounded, trampled, or unable to keep up with the herd.

At that time, humans lived in small groups, so most young people and adults would be needed in the hunt in one way or another.

"In general, as the division of labor by gender has been widely verified among traditional societies, archaeologists have assumed that it was also widespread in the past," says University of Arizona anthropologist Steven L. Kuhn , who has not participated in this investigation.

"On the other hand, a lot of what we know about this division of labor is based on ideology, on what people think is the ideal."