Female hunters of the early Americas

Abstract

Sexual division of labor with females as gatherers and males as hunters is a major empirical regularity of hunter-gatherer ethnography, suggesting an ancestral behavioral pattern. We present an archeological discovery and meta-analysis that challenge the man-the-hunter hypothesis. Excavations at the Andean highland site of Wilamaya Patjxa reveal a 9000-year-old human burial (WMP6) associated with a hunting toolkit of stone projectile points and animal processing tools. Osteological, proteomic, and isotopic analyses indicate that this early hunter was a young adult female who subsisted on terrestrial plants and animals. Analysis of Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene burial practices throughout the Americas situate WMP6 as the earliest and most secure hunter burial in a sample that includes 10 other females in statistical parity with early male hunter burials. The findings are consistent with nongendered labor practices in which early hunter-gatherer females were big-game hunters.

The evolution of the human trophic level during the Pleistocene

“…However, several scholars have theorized that such division of labor would have been less pronounced or even altogether absent among Paleolithic HG (Haas et al, 2020 & Power, 2015;Haas et al, 2020;Khorasani & Lee, 2020;Noss & Hewlett, 2001;Waguespack, 2005). Especially relevant to the Paleolithic is the potential participation of females in large game hunting (Brink, 2008;Haas et al, 2020) in driving large animals to a trap where their movement can be curtailed (Churchill, 1993) or in driving them to expecting male hunters (Waguespack, 2005); methods that provide the opportunity for communal hunting (Lee, 1979, p. 234).…”

Searching for the “Roots” of Masculinity in Primates and the Human Evolutionary Past

“…or thrusting weapons, is a plausible origin of sex difference in throwing velocity and accuracy and upper body strength. However, the evidence that is available (not much) suggests that both males and females participated in hunts even through the terminal Pleistocene and into the Holocene (Estalrrich and Rosas 2015;Haas et al 2020;Kuhn and Stiner 2006), as we see in many large-bodied social carnivores today (lions, hyenas, hunting dogs, etc.). It is critical to note that Pleistocene Homo bodies (male and female) were generally more robust than contemporary humans, and thus, a late Pleistocene female Homo may have been able to throw a javelin, or thrust a spear, as effectively as many contemporary human males (the baseline used for assumptions about male-female differences in hunting ability).…”

Hunter-gatherer children in the past: an archaeological review

“…Adovasio et al 2016;Cooney Williams and Janik 2018;Fritz et al 2016). Females also likely participated regularly in big-game hunting amongst hunter-gatherers in the Americas (Haas et al 2020) suggesting that we should be cautious about interpreting art related to hunting as also relating to male artists and/or learners. At least in Upper Palaeolithic Europe and Australia, children were also part of heterogeneous groups involved in cave exploration and cave art (Garcia et al 1990;Romano et al 2019), potentially sometimes on their own (Roveland 2000).…”

“…Even if stone tool manufacture is recorded as a predominantly male activity ethnographically (see discussion in Stapert 2007), we cannot extrapolate a division of labour into the archaeological stone tool record on the basis of ethnography alone (e.g. see Haas et al 2020), and especially not in relation to children.…”