Credit...Randall Haas
The New York Times Trilobites column has a story about an ancient big game hunter... a female big game hunter. The 9,000 year old female skeleton was discovered with what archaeologists describe as a "big-game hunting kit" in the Andes highlands of Peru. This discovery is challenging the beliefs that in hunter-gatherer societies - males hunted and females gathered. The discovery is detailed in a paper in the journal Science Advances.
Randy Haas, an archaeologist at the University of California, Davis, and a group of colleagues, concluded in a paper published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday that this young woman was a big game hunter, who participated with her people in the pursuit of the vicuña and deer that made up a significant portion of their diet.
The find of a female hunter is unusual. But Dr. Haas and his colleagues make a larger claim about the division of labor at this time period in the Americas. They argue that additional research shows something close to equal participation in hunting for both sexes. In general, they conclude, “early females in the Americas were big game hunters.”
Other scientists found the claim that the remains were those of a female hunter convincing, but some said the data didn’t support the broader claim.
Robert L. Kelly, an anthropologist at the University of Wyoming who has written extensively on hunter gatherers, said that while one female skeleton may well have been a hunter, he was not persuaded by the analysis of other burials that “the prevalence of male-female hunters was near parity.” The researchers’ sample of graves was small, he said, noting that none of the other burials were clearly female hunters.
Bonnie L. Pitblado, an anthropologist at the University of Oklahoma whose specialty is the peopling of the Americas, said the findings were “well-reasoned and an important idea for future testing.” The authors could question gender roles further and what determined them, she said, calling the study “a really refreshing contribution” to studies of early settlers of the Americas.
