quote:Analysis of data from dozens of foraging societies around the world shows that women hunt in at least 79% of these societies, opposing the widespread belief that men exclusively hunt and women exclusively gather. Abigail Anderson of Seattle Pacific University, US, and colleagues presented these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on June 28, 2023.
A common belief holds that, among foraging populations, men have typically hunted animals while women gathered plant products for food. However, mounting archaeological evidence from across human history and prehistory is challenging this paradigm; for instance, women in many societies have been found buried alongside big-game hunting tools.
Some researchers have suggested that women's role as hunters was confined to the past, with more recent foraging societies following the paradigm of men as hunters and women as gatherers. To investigate that possibility, Anderson and colleagues analyzed data from the past 100 years on 63 foraging societies around the world, including societies in North and South America, Africa, Australia, Asia, and the Oceanic region.
They found that women hunt in 79% of the analyzed societies, regardless of their status as mothers. More than 70% of female hunting appears to be intentional—as opposed to opportunistic killing of animals encountered while performing other activities, and intentional hunting by women appears to target game of all sizes, most often large game.
The analysis also revealed that women are actively involved in teaching hunting practices and that they often employ a greater variety of weapon choice and hunting strategies than men.
These findings suggest that, in many foraging societies, women are skilled hunters and play an instrumental role in the practice, adding to the evidence opposing long-held perceptions about gender roles in foraging societies. The authors note that these stereotypes have influenced previous archaeological studies, with, for instance, some researchers reluctant to interpret objects buried with women as hunting tools. They call for reevaluation of such evidence and caution against misapplying the idea of men as hunters and women as gatherers in future research.
The authors add, "Evidence from around the world shows that women participate in subsistence hunting in the majority of cultures."
(Art at the top is by myself, BTW. I think it's totally dope that all the prehistoric huntresses I've drawn over the years have some anthropological validity now!)
Djehuti Member # 6698
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^ I'm suspicious of this study. It's a known fact that since the Late part of the Middle Stone Age with the invention of the bow-and-arrow women's participation in hunting did increase since projectile weapons equalized women's opportunity to hunt including big game, though I question how frequent this occurred. This is like saying men also participated in gathering vegetation for food. Nobody denies that the gender roles in foraging for food was weren't completely rigid or total but to assume that the majority of women participated in the same high risk activity as men or that they exhibited the same acuity i.e. spatial judgement and hand-eye coordination skills as men is something else entirely.
BrandonP Member # 3735
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One criticism I've seen of the study on Twitter is that it focused on societies for which there were written descriptions of hunting activity, which amounts to 63 out of the 391 hunter-gatherer societies in the database they used. So what the other 328 societies in that database are like is left to our imaginations since they didn't have their ethnographic accounts describing hunting activity in such detail.
Djehuti Member # 6698
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^ I know for a fact that women in hunter-gatherer societies did do some hunting in the form small game easy prey items. You see this for example among the San Bushmen of Southern Africa and Australian Aborigines. Interestingly enough this activity was widely practiced by pregnant women or those women planning to become pregnant so increasing their protein intake. I have read of particular groups of all female hunting bands in some cultures in Africa as well as Indigenous Americans who do hunt large game but their activities interestingly enough holds some ritual or religious significance. By the way, one of the examples that the article you cite gives is that of an ancient Andean woman. Though as far as women hunting together with men, I have not heard of such a thing being common.
This also reminds me on old article from 2006 suggesting Neanderthal Women Joined Men in the Hunt and that such an activity may have lead to the decline of the species. Don't ask me how, since I didn't bother to read that far.
Archeopteryx Member # 23193
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quote:Originally posted by Djehuti:
This also reminds me on old article from 2006 suggesting Neanderthal Women Joined Men in the Hunt and that such an activity may have lead to the decline of the species. Don't ask me how, since I didn't bother to read that far.
I also once heard about such hypothesis. The reasoning seems to be that women who joined in hunts especially of big game could not so easily protect their children, and also they themselves were submitted to greater danger. All this could have lead to that the number of births were lower. But there seems to be 1000 different theories about the decline of the Neanderthals, so most seem just to be speculations.
Archeopteryx Member # 23193
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Lack of own field studies can always be a problem. One often get another understanding of both archaeological material or behaviour of todays humans by participating in field work, or at least see the archaeological material with ones own eyes, or visiting a certain place or people. Then one can get insights that are hard to obtain only from literature.
But in this case it would of course have been practically impossible for the authors to visit and study all the peoples in the study.
That also leads to some source critical issues about how well were the ethnographic studies made, did the ethnographers understand all details of what they reported, could there have been misunderstandings? Many questions. Maybe one must take a look at some of the source material to gain a deeper insight.
Also they do not so much discuss in what kind of environments and ecologies it is most common with hunting women. Are there any patterns there?
It is said that todays hunters and gatherers are mostly occupying marginal areas while much land is occupied by farmers and by the majority populations. One must ask how was the situation long time ago when most of the earths population were hunter gatherers and they had access to more land and a broader variety of environments than today?
Interesting that fishing among women is reported in so few studies. But that can of course also be a result of selection of studies, but also of ecology, fishing requires some kind of bodies of water with sufficient fish fauna. It is not mentioned if the men were fishing in the societies that was a part of the study. In societies like Jarawa on the Andaman island fishing among women is not unusal, the same goes for the Huaorani in the Amazon. Also among farming communities fishing can be an important source for protein. Thus in societies like Humbukushu at Okavango river in Botswana women are fishing actively.
But fishing among women would merit a study of its own. ------- Overall gender studies have been a hot topic over several years now, and the more the debates about gender rage in society, the more studies that discuss these questions we will see.
Archeopteryx Member # 23193
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In the 1930s a skeleton was found with tools for hunting and fishing. First the skeleton was believed to have belonged to a man, but later analyzes revealed that it was a woman
quote: The woman from Barum One of the oldest known women in Sweden was buried one spring day about 9,000 years ago at Barum (Bäckaskog) in Skåne. During the ceremony she was placed in a pit with her legs drawn up and her hands in front of her breast, just as you see her now. When excavated in 1939, she was taken for a man at first, because the grave contained hunting weapons. But skeletal analyses by osteologists (bone experts) later disproved this. Modern excavations have revealed that women at that time often went hunting and fishing, as well as gathering.
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^ Don't get me wrong. I agree with the premise that women did participate in hunting activities more often than what was originally believed by academics. I just question how often and to what extent. The reason for my suspicions is due to the simple fact that academia is being corrupted by neo-marxist ideologies like critical gender-theory as much as critical race-theory.
It's the job of academia to question and inquire but when the process of inquiry gets corrupted to question reality itself like biological sex differences while at the same time making assertions without any proof it is corrupt.
That said, academia is making up for its past mistakes by questioning certain paradigms and making necessary revisions. In regards to 'sexing' burials for example. It was generally assumed that burials with weapons were males and those with cosmetics items female. This assumption is being busted.
Iron Age "Celts": Sex and Gender Iron Age Europe exposes, more clearly than perhaps any other field of archaeological inquiry, to what degree modern interpretations of ancient gender are the products of our modern-day constructs of the male and female. A simple example is the distress caused archaeologists by the inclusion of drinking vessels in apparently female burials. In 1934, Jacobsthal was horrified at the suggestion that the Kleinaspergle burial might be female, thus exposing the ancient women of Swabia as lushes the equals of their Etruscan counterparts (1934, 19). It is in the same tone of horror that young scholars and excavators react today when asked about the possibility that a burial containing weapons might be female (oral communications, Spring 1995). Since the mere presence of weapons has led to the statistical resexing of anthropologically female skeletons as male [see I.], we should not be surprised by the attitude toward gender revealed in the preliminary publications of the ongoing Glauberg excavation. The first report, in 1995, was entitled "Celtic Princess with Rich Dowry" (note 2). When further X-ray examination revealed the presence of spear points, however, the very next report simply changed the identity of the occupant of the tomb to male (Herrmann 1995, 47-48). It will be extremely interesting to see what the skeleton will reveal, once the excavation has reached that point.
On the point of "Celtic" gender, archaeologists are notably influenced by neither the classical sources nor parallels in the archaeological record, such as the numerous Sauro-Sarmatian "warrior-women" tomb complexes (e.g., Davis-Kimball 1997). Instead, their constructs of what a "Celtic" woman could or could not be override all other considerations. Thus, "Celtic women "couldn't possibly " be buried with weapons; ergo, even burials in which the skeleton is clearly anthropologically female are declared male [see I.]. What, then, to make of interpretations of burials with no preserved or sexed skeletons? Pauli (1972) and others have articulated the current list of excluded and included gender markers (see Arnold 1991, 368 ff.). When a burial appears to contain a female assemblage according to those criteria, and yet the very scholars who establish the categories find it impossible to declare the occupant female, how are we to account for this behavior, if not as "reluctance to accord women significant social status" (Arnold 1991, 372)? Both Pauli (1972) and Spindler (1983, 108) found their way out of the dilemma by attributing the problem assemblages to a hypothetical practice of ritual transvestism! The simple suggestion that burials containing typically female assemblages might in fact be female has refreshingly been made by Arnold (1991). How long it will take the prehistoric establishment to come to terms with this revolutionary possibility is yet to be seen.
quote:We present a critique of the methodology employed by Anderson et al (2023) in their study of women’s hunting in foraging societies. When this new article was published, my students (undergraduate Jordie Hoffman and master’s student Kyle Farquharson) and I were putting the final touches on our own cross-cultural study of women’s hunting. This paper will be posted as a pre-print shortly. Given our recent immersion in this literature, we feel well-positioned to comment on this new study. We have identified a number of issues with Anderson et al’s (2023) methodology. While we applaud their investigation of this important issue, and we thank the authors for drawing our attention to sources that we ourselves had not discovered, we believe the main conclusions of their paper are invalidated by these issues.
We argue two main points about this paper:
-The sampling methodology is likely biased toward reports of female hunters, producing an inflated estimate of the frequency of women’s hunting (80%). More realistic estimates are offered.
-The claim that women commonly participate in the hunting of large game does not hold up under closer scrutiny.
Djehuti Member # 6698
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^ No surprise here. This reminds me of claims from other studies about women's participation in warfare which were also exaggerated. Were there women that participated in war campaigns? Yes, but to what capacity and how often is the issue. Obviously women weren't expected to just run into the battlefield with the men and uphold the same capabilities.
Here are some good sources on Germanic 'shield maidens':
All sources agree that shield maidens existed but they were not as common as Hollywood makes them out and they certainly didn't act in the exact same function as men in the battlefield for obvious reasons.
So I'm pretty sure this was also the case for women's participation in hunting. We have living examples from hunter-gatherers today which show that women do indeed hunt but not to the same extent as the men nor did they hunt large game animals at least in the same degree as men.
There is obviously some critical gender-theory agenda at foot.
Archeopteryx Member # 23193
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When it comes to shield maidens, also TV series like Vikings and Vikings Valhalla have made the idea popular also among laymen.
But already in the National romantic era of the 1800s the idea became popular, and spread with operas like Wagners the Ring of the Nibelung where the Valkyrie Brunhild is one of the main characters. She was a well known figure from Norse and Germanic tales.
Kristanna Loken as Brunild in "Ring of the Nibelungs"
Djehuti Member # 6698
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^ LOL Yes, I saw that movie years ago on Scify Channel.
The point is that warrior women were real but they were exceptions to the rule of warfare. Many societies had warrior women but their participation was usually that of logistical aide and support to the men. In many elite families women would step up and take the role of head or leader if there were no other competent males of age, so these women were basically back-ups.
In cultures where war was constant even common women had to receive some basic training in self defense while their men were away. By the way, the oldest know depiction of women in combat comes from early dynastic Egyptian scene of women with spears fighting against raiders. So even though women are physically weaker than men, that doesn't mean they had to be totally helpless.
So we know the gender roles of hunting and war were not rigid that women were totally excluded from those activities but neither was it totally fluid that women participated in those acts anywhere near that as men or at the same capacity!
BrandonP Member # 3735
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Another paper on female hunters that takes an archaeological angle, focusing on Paleolithic cultures instead of modern ones:
The Paleo-fantasy of a deep history to a sexual division of labor, often described as “Man the Hunter and Woman the Gatherer,” continues to dominate the literature. We see it used as the default hypothesis in anatomical and physiological reconstructions of the past as well as studies of modern people evoking evolutionary explanations. However, the idea of a strict sexual labor division in the Paleolithic is an assumption with little supporting evidence, which reflects a failure to question how modern gender roles color our reconstructions of the past. Here we present examples to support women's roles as hunters in the past as well as challenge oft-cited interpretations of the material culture. Such evidence includes stone tool function, diet, art, anatomy and paleopathology, and burials. By pulling together the current state of the archaeological evidence along with the modern human physiology presented in the accompanying paper (Ocobock and Lacy, this issue), we argue that not only are women well-suited to endurance activities like hunting, but there is little evidence to support that they were not hunting in the Paleolithic. Going forward, paleoanthropology should embrace the idea that all sexes contributed equally to life in the past, including via hunting activities.
I have not been able to access the text of the paper, but the authors wrote an article summarizing their research in The Conversation.
quote:A common argument is that a sexual division of labor and unequal division of power exists today; therefore, it must have existed in our evolutionary past as well. But this is a just-so story without sufficient evidentiary support, despite its pervasiveness in disciplines like evolutionary psychology.
There is a growing body of physiological, anatomical, ethnographic and archaeological evidence to suggest that not only did women hunt in our evolutionary past, but they may well have been better suited for such an endurance-dependent activity.
We are both biological anthropologists. Cara specializes in the physiology of humans living in extreme conditions, using her research to reconstruct how our ancestors may have adapted to different climates. Sarah studies Neanderthal and early modern human health, and excavates at their archaeological sites.
It’s not uncommon for scientists like us – who attempt to include the contributions of all individuals, regardless of sex and gender, in reconstructions of our evolutionary past – to be accused of rewriting the past to fulfill a politically correct, woke agenda. The actual evidence speaks for itself, though: Gendered labor roles did not exist in the Paleolithic era, which lasted from 3.3 million years ago until 12,000 years ago. The story is written in human bodies, now and in the past.
Djehuti Member # 6698
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^ That study is idiotic. Yes overall women have more endurance than men in that their muscles can work longer i.e. moving farther without rest than men especially since women have lower basal metabolisms and burn less fat than men. But there is more to hunting than just endurance. They prey has to be taken down quickly (men are faster), it has to be taken down accurately (men have better spatial awareness and can throw projectiles or fire them at far more accurate rates), and of course men are stronger (so they have an easier time carrying the prey especially large game.)
Archeopteryx Member # 23193
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There are of course some hunting methods that both men and women can perform equally effectively and that is hunting with different kinds of traps and snares. Such hunting does not require any direct speed or endurance, because the trap does the job. Traps are available in all kinds of designs and sizes, from snares for small game, via log traps for middle sized animals to catch pits for big game. In the northern parts of Scandinavia one can for example find whole systems of such pits where they mainly caught moose, and in some places reindeer. From Paleolithic cave paintings on the European continent, there are images that have been interpreted as mammoths caught in catch pits. At least as far as snares and log traps are concerned, women may have participated in the setting and emptying of such. The trap pits were certainly harder work to make, but women should have been able to help empty them.
Djehuti Member # 6698
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^ What you write is true, but the study was referring specifically to Paleolithic methods of hunting large game. That type of hunting is dangerous using the technology of its time and requires range of other skills besides overall endurance that women may have. While bow-and-arrow technology definitely made hunting easier especially for women that does not change the basic physiological advantages men still had.
Archeopteryx Member # 23193
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The catch pits for mammoths (if the paintings are correctly interpreted) could have involved women taking part in its construction and also in the killing of the trapped game. Also catching smaller, or middle sized animals in nets is thought to have occurred already during the Paleolithic. But some hunting methods would have been easier for men.
Interestingly enough it seems that the skeletons of Neanderthal women often show similar injuries and traces of wear and tear damage as men which has been interpreted as if women could also have participated in similar physical activities, including big game hunting.
Among today's hunter gatherers we see only a smaller part of the full range of hunting methods that can have been practiced in different environments. That is partly due to that hunter gatherers are often relegated to more marginal areas where they do not have access to all the environments or prey they once had. Environmental changes and extinctions of fauna also mean that hunters and gatherers of recent times did not have access to the same kind of prey as their ancestors.
Another source of error is also that parts of the Paleolithic landscape today are under water, which means that we cannot study all aspects of the resource utilization of that time. For example, we do not know so much about the use of coasts and seas during the Paleolithic in, for example, Europe.
An interesting example of traces of hunting that were previously hidden comes from ancient Norway. There, signs of advanced forms of reindeer hunting have emerged due to the increased melting of glaciers. So now various forms of hunting equipment are thawing out, including well-preserved arrows and scare sticks that were set up to lead the reindeer in a certain direction (usually towards deployed shooters). These types of finds provide a broader picture of ancient hunting.
Also how different materials were used in the making of hunting gear can be seen, as for example arrow heads made of mussel shells.
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