![]() In fact, the methods used to hunt and the size of social groups at the time, "means that we should have been assuming this all along, since most older children and adults would have been needed to drive herds over cliffs or into traps, or to fire projectiles at herds moving in the same direction," Sterling told Live Science.Īge was probably more important than gender when it came to who hunted in these societies, but "our gender norms are so strong that not everyone will be convinced," she said. 10 extinct giants that once roamed North America 5 ways our cavemen instincts get the best of us Photos: Viking warrior is actually a woman "This study should help convince people that women participated in big-game hunts," said Kathleen Sterling, an associate professor of anthropology at Binghamton University in New York, who also was not part of the study. It would've been interesting to see how this female's diet compared with other females in the site or similar sites to determine whether she ate foods more similar to other males or to other females, she added. It's not clear whether hunter-gatherer females in other parts of the world also partook regularly in hunting, but it's absolutely possible to discover similar findings elsewhere, she said. "When we step back from our own gendered biases can we explore the data in nuanced ways that are likely more culturally accurate." Many cultures did not - and still do not - have the gender binary "that dominates our modern Western culture," Pilloud told Live Science. "The authors make a compelling argument that the female skeleton in question was likely a big-game hunter and that such a finding is not entirely unusual throughout Indigenous populations," said Marin Pilloud, an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Reno, who was not a part of the study."If the same artifacts had been associated with a male skeleton, there would be no questions that the individual was a hunter." Related: Photos: Human skeleton sheds light on first AmericansĪncient hunter-gatherers hunted Vicuña (shown here) and other big game in the Andes Mountains. "What we see is that female and male burials are just as likely to be associated with big-game hunting tools," Haas said. ![]() Further statistical analysis suggested that between 30% and 50% of hunters in these populations were female. The team identified 429 skeletons from 107 ancient burial sites across the Americas 27 of those individuals -11 female (including the newly discovered female) and 15 male - were buried with big-game hunting tools. Indeed, a detailed analysis of proteins in the young hunter-gatherer's teeth confirmed that she was a female.īut then Haas and his team began to wonder: Is this a one-off female hunter, or is she part of a larger behavioral pattern among ancient Americans? To figure this out, they combed through the literature for reports of other hunter-gatherer burials from the late Pleistocene (which ended around 11,700 years ago) and the early Holocene (which began around 12,000 to 11,500 years ago.) ![]() Watson examined the hunter-gatherers' bones and said that because they were smaller compared with others found in the region, the skeleton could be a female. ![]() James Watson, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona, and co-author of the study, was the first to suggest this was not a man at all. (Image credit: Randall Haas) The bias that colors history Researchers excavate at the Wilamaya Patjxa site in Peru. ![]()
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