In 1968 the book Man the hunter was published. It was the result of a symposium held two years earlier. Organized by anthropologists Richard Lee and Irven DeVore, it presented many ethnographic and archaeological works on primitive gatherer-hunter societies. The work was the support of the paradigm of the hunter: the relevance of hunting in human evolution and how it was fundamentally a man's thing. But it was just another gender bias, this time also present in science. In 2020, a work that had a huge impact, showed how prehistoric women also hunted large animals. Now, a review of dozens of traditional communities shows that females hunt as much as males.
It was not many years before, from the same science, the postulates of Man the hunter were criticized. With a feminist lens, anthropologist Frances Dahlberg brought together a series of works in the book Woman the gatherer. Based on a series of field research, it questioned the paradigm of the male hunter for relegating the role of gathering and other female tasks in human history. But this feminist critique unwittingly accepted the sexual division of labor: they hunt, they gather fruit. But what if this separation never existed or was it not so marked? The discovery of a young woman buried with her weapons in the Andes about 8,000 years ago (followed by many others) ended up dismantling the myth of the hunter man in the past. And in the present?
More informationThe hunter who rewrote prehistory
A group of anthropologists from the universities of Washington and Seattle Pacific (United States) has tracked in ethnographic databases what anthropologists and ethnographers have written about hunting in traditional societies of the present (or that existed until relatively recently, as is the case of the Iroquois, Apaches and other Native Americans). They selected nearly 400 cultures, but had to narrow down the sample to 63 because, as study co-author Cara Wall-Scheffler says, they were explicitly looking for "studies detailing hunting behavior and strategies." If there were no tables, statistics or details, they discarded them.
Of the 63 traditional societies analyzed, in 50, that is, 79%, women also hunt, according to the data of the study, published in PLoS ONE. There are signs of this in communities on every inhabited continent except Europe (where there have been no hunter-gatherer groups for a long time). As it is possible that the hunting is due to the fact that they found the animal while picking fruits, the authors of the review further narrowed down and found ethnographic works from 40 societies in which a distinction is made between intentional or occasional and unforeseen hunting. In 85% of them, women go hunting. In this group are, for example, the Aka pygmies, from central Africa, the Agta from the province of Luzon, in the Philippines, or the barely 1,000 women of the Matsé tribe, in the Peruvian Amazon.
In some cultures, women and men use the same [hunting] techniques and tools, while in others women use a greater variety of strategies."
Cara Wall-Scheffler, anthropologist at Seattle Pacific University, United States
"In some cultures, women and men use the same [hunting] techniques and tools, while in others women use a greater variety of strategies than men," Wall-Scheffler says. Their analysis was able to determine what they hunted in 45 of these hunter-gatherer communities. In almost half, females preferably hunt small animals, but in 33%, they focus on large pieces. As for how motherhood modulates this activity, Wall-Scheffler says that two patterns predominate: "Data are emerging that indicate that children stay with caregivers or take them on their hunting raids (in shoulder bags, on their backs), as well as on outings to forage looking for food."
These findings suggest that in many forager societies, women are hunters and play a critical role in hunting. This work adds to the accumulation of evidence challenging entrenched perceptions about gender roles in forager societies. The authors note that these stereotypes have influenced previous archaeological studies. They maintain that some researchers have been reluctant to interpret objects buried next to women as hunting tools and call for a reassessment of past findings, warning against misusing the idea of men as hunters and women as gatherers in future research.
"The first fieldwork was done mainly by men, who mainly or only talked to men in the societies they were studying"
Steven L. Kuhn, archaeologist, University of Arizona, United States
When the young hunter of the Andes was discovered in 2020, archaeologist Steven L. Kuhn, of the University of Arizona (United States) and an expert on hunting in antiquity, told this newspaper that "as the division of labor by gender has been widely proven among traditional societies, archaeologists have assumed that it was also widespread in the past." But the starting assumption is now also questioned. After reading Wall-Scheffler's work, Kuhn agrees on the need to reevaluate thinking on this issue. "Certainly, there are biases at all levels. Some have their roots in the original ethnographies. Early fieldwork was done primarily by men, who primarily or only spoke to men in the societies they were studying. In some cases, this resulted in an inflation of the importance of men's roles. This was one of the conclusions of the Man the Hunter conference in the 1960s," says Kuhn.
But the archaeologist goes further and points out a deeper bias: "Other biases are rooted in our own social norms. It is true that archaeologists often focus on hunting because it is more visible in the record. And, with reference to human evolution, the constant predation of large animals by hominid ancestors was a major departure from the ancestral diets of primates. However, we have to ask whether the disproportionate academic emphasis on big game hunting as an economic strategy is also a reflection of how different activities and foods are valued in academics' own societies." At present, recreational hunting, that of trophies, is the only eminently male.
Randy Haas was one of the anthropologists who found the Andean hunter identified in 2020 and several other similar burials. On the origin of the hunter bias that the data contradicts, Haas believes it has several origins: "First, Western notions of how labor should be divided between the sexes have skewed our understanding of the sexual division of labor in human societies in general. Second, hunter-gatherer ethnography was largely conducted by male scholars, which almost certainly contributed to the false sense that hunting large mammals was a strictly male activity. Third, it is also likely that colonial processes and missionization imposed Western ideas on forage communities," says the professor at Wayne State University (United States). Like the study's authors and Khun, Haas believes that the accumulation of new data makes inevitable the need to revisit past findings with fresh eyes.
You can follow MATERIA on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.