RichardJun 29, 2023

Shattering the myth of men as hunters and women as gatherers

https://phys.org/news/2023-06-shattering-myth-men-hunters-women.html

"They found that women hunt in 79% of the analyzed societies, regardless of their status as mothers. More than 70% of female hunting appears to be intentional—as opposed to opportunistic killing of animals encountered while performing other activities, and intentional hunting by women appears to target game of all sizes, most often large game."

#Archaeology

Shattering the myth of men as hunters and women as gatherers

Analysis of data from dozens of foraging societies around the world shows that women hunt in at least 79% of these societies, opposing the widespread belief that men exclusively hunt and women exclusively gather. Abigail Anderson of Seattle Pacific University, US, and colleagues presented these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on June 28, 2023.

Phys.org
Show threadViktoria Pammer-Schindler
@self many thanks, very interesting. this is the original research article btw: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0287101 (for anyone wanting to save themselves one click). enjoy!
The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s contribution to the hunt across ethnographic contexts

The sexual division of labor among human foraging populations has typically been recognized as involving males as hunters and females as gatherers. Recent archeological research has questioned this paradigm with evidence that females hunted (and went to war) throughout the Homo sapiens lineage, though many of these authors assert the pattern of women hunting may only have occurred in the past. The current project gleans data from across the ethnographic literature to investigate the prevalence of women hunting in foraging societies in more recent times. Evidence from the past one hundred years supports archaeological finds from the Holocene that women from a broad range of cultures intentionally hunt for subsistence. These results aim to shift the male-hunter female-gatherer paradigm to account for the significant role females have in hunting, thus dramatically shifting stereotypes of labor, as well as mobility.

Jun 30, 2023 at 6:31amWeb