Basically: if what’s looked at is the actual evidence, not just the image inside the heads of those human researchers who had/have the preconception that this has always been the men’s job, there’s quite a lot of evidence that in many ancient and current hunter-gatherer societies women do/did a significant amount of the hunting, including hunting of large game.
This makes considerable sense to me, both because for societies that depend significantly upon such hunting it seems to make little sense to bar half the population from it, and because it seems unlikely to me that all women continuously had to be carrying young children everywhere they went – though the study seems to show that carrying children didn’t prevent hunting.
It also seems to me that the line about “Grandmas were the best hunters of the village” may throw additional light on the question of why humans live so long after menopause. I’m not sure where the article got that information from, though; I couldn’t find any reference to it in the study cited. Maybe it’s somewhere in the cites listed in the study – I haven’t time now to hunt through those.
It is worth reading The Dawn of Everything. So much of what people think about our ancestors is wrong, unlikely, disproven, condescending or of limited scope. Recent developments in anthropology and archaeology are very exciting and not that well known. This is an unusually tough and academic read, however.
I suspect it is more the early archaeologists were male.
Back in college - the 1980s - we were told that if an anthropologist saw a woman hunting, he put down that she was gathering. He saw a man gathering fruit? He was hunting.
It’s always been known that there were female hunters in many hunter gatherer societies. They were just in the minority. But any hard-scrabble society is going to put everyone to work wherever they were needed. I’m sure plenty of men also gathered and looked after the camp when circumstances required it. Women also sometimes fought in wars. You do what you have to do.
But let’s not forget that women in these societies had a LOT of children, because the infant mortality rate was very high. Neolithic women had on average 8-10 children. Every time they do, that’s months of not being able to hunt while pregnant, or for maybe the first few months after a child is born. And then they’d usually have another one soon thereafter. And if you’ve got five surviving children, that’s a lot of work to raise them.
Also, sexual dimorphism is a thing. It’s even been speculated that humans beat out Neanderthal because sexual dimosphism was much more prominent in humans, and pair couples of unique individual strengths are stronger than paired couples who share all the same characteristics. Comparative advantage, and all that.
The reason Grandma could hunt was because she was no longer bearing children and not needed to care for the camp. I wouldn’t be surprised to find the majority of elderly people involved in light hunting like trapping, fishing, etc. when food was scarce.
There are various ways of spacing births; and various ways of choosing how many to raise.
We didn’t hunt big game by being stronger than the game; we aren’t and weren’t. We hunted big game by being smarter and sneakier.
This part, however, is most likely accurate. Even for European settlers of the Americas, and not only the early settlers, women did what was considered “men’s work” and men did what was considered “women’s work”: because otherwise they would have survived far less often than they did – both when “survival” meant literally not dying, and when it meant just being able to financially keep the farm. The assumption of who was supposed to be doing what often conceals much of the actual behavior, especially in histories written by later generations.
A lot of what is “known” about American Indian hunting, farming, and everything else has been colored by archaeologists’ and European settlers’ perceptions; especially for those peoples who are no longer present and trying to correct the records. The study in the OP included a number of societies in the Americas.
They’re talking about early agricultural peoples, not hunter-gatherer peoples. They’re talking specifically about the increase in child production that’s one of the hallmarks of early agricultural populations.
Have you ever hunted? Have you ever tried hauling a big game carcass? I’m not a hunter, but I know enough hunters to know how much work it is. There are a lot of hunting tasks that require strength. Of course, you can hunt small game, fish, and trap, and women coupd and did do those forms of hunting.
Also, back before guns it was quite common to need to get up close and personal with wounded animals, or to chase down wounded animals, and that takes speed and strength as well. And if you were hunting with spears, strength was a key factor. Bows too. Men can pull mich heavier bows on average than can women, which gives them more range and power.
And yet the study which I cited says they found clear evidence that women also hunted big game.
Really large carcasses may well have been processed by multiple people. I don’t care how big and strong a man is, he’s not hauling a mammoth, or even a buffalo or elk, home on his own. Hunters who went out after large game very likely also went out in groups. ETA further: the ones I know go get the truck or the tractor with the front-end loader, even for deer. And one of them is a very strong man. In a world with no tractors, he’d still want help.
ETA: wounded animals were unlikely to have been mostly chased down with speed; that calls for persistence and tracking.
Again, I’m not at all surprised that some women hunted big game. There is lots of variance in both cultures and individual performance. But traditional roles for males and females were on average adhered to in the sense that most women took on ‘female’ roles and most men took on ‘male’ roles, and evolution adapted them for it.
It’s a big world. It has had many different groups with different traditions over many thousands of years. What people ate and did was influenced by local environments. There is no reason things were the same everywhere and at every time.
Strength is a spectrum; men certainly have more muscular strength than women on average, but if you graphed normal distributions there would be significant overlap. Not all hominids were as weak as we are. Not all weapons, techniques or hunted animals require equal strength; a simple trap requires little. There are several reasons some forms of hunting were done in groups, which multiply individual efforts.
My understanding is that pre-agricultural women had fewer children and much less infant mortality.
Also, have your ever been pregnant? There’s only a couple months per child when i waddled. I did all the same stuff physically through the first six months of pregnancy that i did when i wasn’t pregnant. The only difference was morning sickness. But i could have hunted as well through most of my pregnancies as i could have at any other time.
Post partum is harder than during pregnancy, but that’s only another month or two.
If the typical hunter-gatherer woman had 4-5 kids, that’s the equivalent of about a year or two of her life, total, when she might not be physically up to hunting large game.
My guess is that smaller societies had less rigid social rules in general. And some women who were good at hunting did a lot of hunting. And some men who liked caring for kids stayed home and cared for the babies.
Right, we hunted big game by being able to make spears and do things like throwing them. But a spear thrown with more strength is still going to be more effective than a spear thrown with less strength.
I find it not at all surprising that some women were involved in some hunting. In fact, I would be amazed if that weren’t the case. The question isn’t whether any women ever did. The question is how many, and in what proportion.
Reading the article, it makes the case that there was one, nonsexually dimorphic job of “forager.” Not that a few women sometimes took on the male role of “hunter” in limited instances.
The examples they give are pretty interesting. Women engaged in, and still engage in, intentional hunting – not just opportunistic hunting – with a variety of weapons and tools, some of which overlap with mens’ weapons, and some of which were distinct.
Women also hunted solo, with dogs, with one other person (often their spouse) or in larger groups.
In one example, men favored bows and women favored knives as their typical weapons. Women and men also both used bows, spears, and nets in the examples given in the discussion section of the article.
And an arrow loosed or spear thrown with more accuracy, and/or from a closer distance will be more effective than an arrow or spear from further away, and with less accuracy.
Of these, 21 (46%) hunt small game, 7 (15%) hunt medium game, 15 (33%) hunt large game and 2 (4%) of these societies hunt game of all sizes. In societies where women only hunted opportunistically, small game was hunted 100% of the time. In societies where women were hunting intentionally, all sizes of game were hunted, with large game pursued the most. Of the 36 foraging societies that had documentation of women purposefully hunting, 5 (13%) reported women hunting with dogs and 18 (50%) of the societies included data on women (purposefully) hunting with children.
So women are hunting lots of smaller game, though they do often participate in hunting large game.
Most importantly, on average men are going to succeed more often than women when doing a str or con check, but everybody knows that ranged weapons are a dex based attack. Men should have much less, if any, advantage there. And a roll is a roll. No point in making the women sit it out, just because their stats aren’t quite as high (on average).
Among other techniques. We also ran them off cliffs, and used traps and nets, and weakened them with poisoned darts.
The study says that in at least some cases women used different toolkits when hunting than men did, even when going after similar prey; though the tools used by women in some societies might be the ones used by men in others, so I’m not sure to what extent this was adjusting for different types of physical strength.
Yes. And the evidence in the study in the OP indicates that, in a number of places and times, women were a significant number of the hunters. I don’t think there’s a claim that women were the majority overall; in some societies women rarely hunted or took only small game. But they apparently found plenty of evidence that in many societies it was normal for women to be hunters of game of any size and for them to be bringing in a significant amount of the meat; and that does give a rather different picture of those societies than the standard theory that men hunt, women carry babies and do some gathering.
ETA: Other people also chimed in while I was typing all this, and rechecking the study to make sure I wasn’t claiming something that isn’t in there.