The myth of the male hunter and the female gatherer: The popular perception of gender roles in early societies is wrong

Since ancient times, it was thought that men were hunters and women were gatherers; But a new study shows that in the hunter-gatherer culture, both sexes were equally skilled at hunting.

to report Live Sciencebased on an article published on Wednesday, June 28 (July 7) in the magazine plus one published, an international team of scientists came to this conclusion after examining various data. These data are collected from dozens of academic papers published in the last 100 years. The papers focused on 63 hunter-gatherer and female hunter-gatherer burial societies from around the world, including groups in North America, Africa, Australia, and Asia.

Cara Wallscheffler, professor and dean of the School of Biology at Seattle Pacific University and one of the authors of the study says: “We were studying articles written by people who had studied the lives and behavior of these groups. “They would watch people and then record what they did.”

Among the assessed foraging societies, 79% had female hunters whose hunting status did not change after motherhood. According to Wallscheffler, “women would go out with different tools (they had different toolboxes all over the world) and if they saw an animal, they would kill it. “We were surprised at how the majority of groups depicted hunting women, and there was no clear taboo against it.”

Researchers also point out that more than 70% of women’s hunting missions are classified as intentional hunting. This means that women went out deliberately to look for meat; As opposed to opportunistic killers who encountered and hunted animals while doing other things like foraging.

“Most female hunters did it consciously and just went out to hunt animals,” Wallscheffler says. “We were surprised that it wasn’t opportunistic and everyone in their community knew that they were going to hunt, and hunting was their job.”

Furthermore, female hunters did not only trap small animals such as birds and rabbits. According to a recent study, they were equal to men in the Americas when it came to big game, accounting for almost 50 percent of hunters targeting large animals such as deer and moose.

By reanalyzing North and South American large burials in which bodies were buried with tools or animal bones, the researchers showed that the ratio of female to male hunters was 50/50, according to Wallshafer.