Nine thousand years ago in the Andes, women hunted big game too
Man the hunter, woman the gatherer. Many of us picked up that picture at school, and it has a formal name: the man-the-hunter hypothesis, which holds that dividing work by sex was inherited from our earliest ancestors. Among recent hunter-gatherers, big-game hunting really is overwhelmingly done by men.
Wilamaya Patjxa sits 3,925 metres up in the highlands of southern Peru. There, archaeologists uncovered a burial about 9,000 years old. On the floor of the pit lay 24 stone artefacts, twenty of them piled on a large river cobble: four projectile points, scrapers, a possible knife and a lump of red ochre. The person buried there was 17 to 19 years old. Amelogenin, a protein in tooth enamel, confirmed she was female.
Randall Haas and colleagues published the find in Science Advances in 2020 and went back over the earliest burials across the Americas. Of the 27 people buried with hunting gear whose sex could be determined, 11 were women and 16 were men. Their models put women at 30 to 50 percent of hunters. Not all the cases are equally solid: by the strictest criteria, hers is the only burial that is securely a hunter's. The others have weaker sexing, dating or links to the weapons.
She was not yet twenty. They buried her with her hunting kit.
Sources
- Haas R., Watson J., Buonasera T., Southon J., Chen J.C., Noe S., Smith K., Viviano Llave C., Eerkens J., Parker G. Female hunters of the early Americas. Science Advances, 2020; 6(45): eabd0310. doi:10.1126/sciadv.abd0310
- Early big-game hunters of the Americas were female, researchers suggest. ScienceDaily, 5 November 2020. Materials provided by University of California, Davis; original written by Karen Nikos-Rose.