Prehistoric female hunter discovery upends gender role assumptions

[Judi Lynn]

2. Ancient remains in Peru reveal young, female big-game hunter

A photo provided by Randall Haas shows vicuña in the Andes Mountains of Peru, not far from the Wilamaya Patjxa archeological site. Archaeologists there have recovered roughly 20,000 artifacts, including the remains of six people, one of whom was a female hunter. Randall Haas via The New York Times.

by James Gorman

NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- The discovery of a 9,000-year-old female skeleton buried with what archaeologists call a “big-game hunting kit” in the Andes highlands of Peru has challenged one of the most widely held tenets about ancient hunter gatherers — that males hunted and females gathered.

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 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 convinced 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.

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Excavations at Wilamaya Patjxa in present-day Peru. Randall Haas